by Billy Salter ·
Friday, September 20, 2024
Almost exactly 12 years ago I had the privilege and pleasure of being a volunteer docent in Kitty and Phil Finkelpearl’s house during the Historical Society’s Shaker House tour. My wife and I had been there often as guests and had long admired the “beautiful house filled with books and art,” as the family put it in Kitty’s obituary.
During this visit, I spent four solid hours standing in a perfectly proportioned 200-year-old room, asking visitors not to touch and answering questions, looking closely at things I had seen many times before. I marveled at the rich juxtapositions of a few fabulous Shaker pieces with masterpieces of modernism that Kitty and Phil had assembled.
Through the curved spindles of a delicate but solid maple Shaker bench, 8 feet long with a shaped seat, one could see two Eames chairs—not the well-known big leather ones with matching ottomans but small and austere, made of molded plywood. Both the bench and chairs cleanly united form and function.
In a corner stood a magnificent Shaker workbench, with drawers of various sizes, a couple of built-in vises, and stops and miter slots to facilitate precise handsaw work. A low coffee table was flanked by two classic Marcel Breuer Wassily chairs and a stylized Adirondack chair, painted in bright blue and red and yellow, handmade by Robert Venturi, Phil’s Princeton roommate (class of ’42) and their lifelong friend. As the day moved on, light and shadows shifted across the sophisticated simplicity of Shakers, modernists, and Finkelpearls.
Many visitors were curious about a brown rug with a geometric design, between the Shaker bench and the Eames chairs. When I asked Kitty about it at the end of the day, she giggled and said, “Oh, that, yes. I got it at Building 19½ a few years ago. It is pretty nice.”
Billy Salter
Elm Street
Editor’s note: Kitty Finkelpearl died in August at the age of 99. The Press published her obituary in its Sept. 6 edition.