Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102210586
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MAG POFF BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's a small detail, but significant to Phil Cowley, who directed the renovation. He found the European-made figures for the table in a Texas antique dealer's shop.
Cowley and his carpenter faced the table above the caryatids with hand-carved rails from an old French bed. Then they topped it with lumber carved originally for old caskets.
The mirror above the table is framed with molding from old-fashioned wardrobes that Cowley found in a Baltimore mansion. On the floor beneath, Cowley placed brass pots with plants because "they look cheerful."
Cowley has worked previously with the Patrick Henry's new owners, Affirmative Equities of New York, on restoration of a 19th Century mill in Little Falls, N.J. He also operates an antique restoration business, The Bashful Barn in Boyertown, Pa. And he refurnished three other hotels: The Inn at Lambertsville Station in Lambertsville, N.J., the La Fayette Inn at Easton, Pa., and the Twin Turrets Inn at Boyertown.
Cowley stuffed the Patrick Henry's lobby with antiques that range from the hotel's original tables, which he found stored in the basement, to a century-old carved cabinet once owned by a Catholic priest in Philadelphia.
He even brought to the hotel two chairs that once graced the faculty lounge at Pennsylvania's West Chester State University. The chairs have been in Cowley's own home since he saved them from destruction a decade ago.
He copied lines of the draperies from photographs of the original Patrick Henry lobby. Where details fail in the old pictures, Cowley made his own interpretation by hanging cornices in a coordinating material.
Focal point of the lobby bar is a 50-year-old piano that the hotel owners found through a Roanoke dealer.
Cowley wanted the lobby to seem old, as if the owners had replaced furniture piece by piece and somehow liked the eclectic look.
To Cowley, who abandoned a 16-year teaching career in order to find and restore antiques, the lobby has "a lived-in-over-a-period-of-time look. I did not try to be matchy-matchy."
The furniture styles are Jacobean and Tudor and Elizabethan. Cowley said all are in the same furniture style and all were commonly mixed in the Victorian period.
The hotel's main entrance off South Jefferson Street is through a lower lobby where there are benches Cowley made from the legs of 100-year-old chairs. The chairs were destroyed in the collapse of a storage building during a snowstorm, he said. A 50-year old rug lies between the benches.
At the top of the entrance stairs, Cowley made a roundelle, an upholstered round seat of the sort that used to be common in hotels and train stations. Nearby is a 130-year old bookcase from Lancaster, Pa., still with its original glass. The upper level entrance area also has an Empire secretary and a corner cupboard from the late 1920s displaying decorative porcelain and china.
The lobby's bar area has a large wall-mounted coat rack that Cowley found in an Eastern Shore hunting lodge, a Welsh dresser he discovered in Texas and a German sideboard from which tea can be served.
One visitor to the hotel last week said she thought the vista looked crowded.
But that's the idea, Cowley said. The lobby bar is modeled after the one in New York's Algonquin Hotel, a famous gathering spot for writers in the 1920s. Clusters of seats are intended to invite hotel guests and local residents alike to sit a while, enjoying morning coffee, afternoon tea with scones and jam or evening cocktails with canapes.
He expects the lobby to become downtown's gathering point for visitors, shoppers and business people, who will order coffee and a light snack more often than they do cocktails. And they won't mind paying extra money for the atmosphere in which they will sip the coffee, he said.
"It's not a nickel cup - that now costs 75 cents - but it's worth it."
by CNB