Feature: cast of character

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Imagine, if you will, Charleston’s fine homes as movie stars. Given the national press they attract, their flocks of adoring fans (a.k.a. tourists), the plein-air painters and paparazzi (well, picture-takers) who hover at their gates, and the periodic face lifts and reconstructive surgery they receive, the analogy is, perhaps, not too much of a stretch. Like Hollywood, we have our classics: the Kate Hepburn Heyward-Washington House; the Gregory Peck Miles Brewton House; the Clark Gable Nathaniel Russell House. They front Charleston’s red-carpet thoroughfares, always presenting a polished façade.

In Hollywood, of course, there are also the not-so famous and flamboyant. The I-can’t-quite-remember-their-name character actors who give a film life and fill the screen with human scale and emotion. They are the ones content with a “best supporting” nod, who do their job without hoopla, an entourage, or Scientology. In our Charleston architectural actors’ guild, the analogous buildings are the entourage—the ubiquitous carriage and kitchen houses that flank the superstars. They stay backstage while the grander dames with their double-piazza dazzle take their bows. Charleston’s humble outbuildings may lack celebrity status, but they are no less integral to the star’s performance and the city’s architectural picture. And just as many a movie-goer may buy a ticket to watch George Clooney, only to end up smitten by what’s-his-name, so too, many Charleston tourists coming to see big-name buildings find themselves equally charmed by their quaint carriage house B & B.

The Urban Plantation

The Charleston peninsula boasts a higher concentration of 18th- and 19th-century dependency buildings than any other place that survives, according to architectural historians. Most of these today get lumped under the B-list marquee of “carriage house.” And while many outbuildings did in fact function as carriage houses, these dependencies also comprised kitchens, washhouses, or stables. Kitchen houses are far more common in Charleston than carriage houses, as only the more well-to-do households had carriages, while separate kitchens were standard—sort of the architectural equivalent of a celebrity’s personal chef.

In fact, the common notion of Charleston’s famed single house is also a bit lacking. When real estate agents or tour guides today describe a single house, they speak of a multi-story dwelling that is one room wide with a central stair, usually with a piazza and a narrow side end facing the street. Period. The modern definition glosses over the accessory buildings—a term which is itself a misnomer, since the single house’s outbuildings were more essential than “accessory.” According to Jonathan Poston, author of the seminal The Buildings of Charleston, “the key to interpreting the single house is to look at the house, its outbuildings, and lot organization as an integrated domestic unit…. Simply put, the Charleston single house is defined as much by its dependencies and lot organization as it is by its structure.” Going further, one could even make the case that Charleston’s signature architectural element is as much the lowly kitchen or carriage house as it is the single house, though don’t expect tour guides to change their script anytime soon.

Dependencies may never get top billing on the Charleston stage, but they will remain shadowy reminders of the harsh economic reality that supported our fair city. The unadorned structures are architecturally subordinate buildings, once inhabited by slaves. Famed Charleston architects Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham waxed poetic while implying feudal undertones to this domestic arrangement: “Behind the privacy of a high garden wall of lichen-covered brick, the house, with its additions and dependencies of kitchen, washroom, servants’ quarters, and stables, recedes in a rambling perspective, losing itself in an overgrown garden where fig trees and pomegranates, magnolias and oleanders, clothe the faded stucco in a tissue of light and shade. Seen from the garden, these accretions of buildings have a frankness of functional expression that belongs to medieval times.” (The Early Architecture of Charleston, 1927).

Far from the coveted, cozy “carriage houses” we think of today, these buildings were bare bones, typically featuring interiors of whitewashed raw brick walls, exposed ceiling joists, unfinished board partitions, unglazed, shuttered windows, and floors of dirt or hard slate, littered with fish bones and debris. “Kitchen houses were dark and smoky and smelly, incredibly hot in the summer and equally cold in the winter,” says Bernard L. Herman, an art history professor at the University of Delaware, whose recent book, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830, considers urban dwellings in the context of lived experience. Perhaps the best example of this stark and haunting juxtaposition is the elegant Aiken-Rhett House, with its ballroom, fashionable gas light fixtures, and fancy carpets, and its intact rear ensemble of dank outbuildings, closed off to the street with no light or fresh air for the rear servants’ rooms, once home to 19 slaves.

Herman further describes the “architecture of service” and the “architecture of dominance,” noting that service buildings were oriented to be under the masters’ watchful gazes, and vice versa. “The view from the servants’ quarter was intended by masters as a defining one. Standing at the door of the Miles Brewton kitchen, the enslaved servant’s eye was drawn up to the house…,” he writes of the buildings at 27 King Street. Yet at the same time, the configuration of outbuildings and their second-floor living quarters also afforded domestic slaves a degree of privacy, as demonstrated by Denmark Vesey’s ability to surreptitiously plot a slave revolt in 1822. The plot was discovered at the ninth hour and the insurrection failed, nonetheless, nervous landowners began replacing post-and-rail fences with brick walls to visually enclose their properties and built slave quarters over kitchen houses and stables without windows overlooking neighboring residences or the street.

Into the Limelight

Over the last 150 years, as Charleston has evolved from urban plantation to modern city, the function of these remnant kitchen and carriage houses has also evolved. Just as character actors earn their keep by being versatile, outbuildings have proven their adaptability to any number of uses. After the war, freedmen, tradesmen, and domestic workers often continued to live in back buildings, and it’s not uncommon to meet Charlestonians whose family maid lived “in the back” up until the 1960s. The unusually ornate Gothic Revival carriage house behind the Isaac Motte Dart House on Montagu Street, for example, once served as a nursing dormitory. College students, in-laws, visitors, and artists, such as Alfred Hutty, who in the 1920s used the separate kitchen dependency of his Tradd Street residence as his studio, are among the many different players who have given outbuildings new roles.

And of course, like the actor who is always typecast as a cop or the actress eternally cast as the tormented wife, many kitchen houses have in fact continued to function as kitchens. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, as household functions began to be consolidated under one roof, freestanding kitchens frequently were joined to the main house by a “hyphen.” At the Caspar Christian Schutt House, only a thick firewall separated the main dwelling from the kitchen house, so today one moves seamlessly from the grand elegance of the formal spaces into the more rustic charm of the kitchen, complete with its two original cooking fireplaces and brick beehive oven. In addition to its now connected kitchen house, the Schutt House boasts one of Charleston’s most complete outbuilding ensembles, including a carriage house with original sallyport-style doors which now usher in bright sunlight to a lap pool, servants’ quarters—which once housed medical students—and stables, now converted into a small townhouse.

In much the same way as households relied on those who inhabited the outbuildings and servants’ quarters in the old economy, today Charleston’s tourism industry depends on these structures. One needs only to Google “Charleston accommodations” to find dozens of small inns and B & Bs unobtrusively tucked into former outbuildings. Ansonborough alone could sleep a small tourist army, and yet this hospitality battalion goes unnoticed to the casual passerby. The 1843 Battery Carriage House Inn at 20 South Battery is one of the more visible and better known, its stately quarters taking front and center at the waterfront’s busy tourist district.
The prevalence and preservation of outbuildings is one of Charleston’s distinct characteristics, but not until one sneaks backstage can this be fully appreciated.

Behind the scenes, where the work and craftsmanship that kept the city together took place, where the delicious flavors that give Charleston its unique flair were stirred together, is also where the action continues. There undoubtedly will be more changes of costume as future buyers, renters, and business owners find new roles for old buildings in this still-young old town. New curtains will be hung as carriage houses become condos and who-knows-what, but the curtain has yet to fall on the final act for these stalwart supporting actors. The encores keep echoing off these “old lichen-covered walls.”