Dear friends,
If you have driven by Victoria Mansion recently, you know there are big things afoot. In fact, the scaffolding rising on the front lawn only hints at the scale of the work going on. Inside and outside, we are gearing up for a series of transformational restoration projects aimed at preserving this National Historic Landmark property and bringing it ever closer to its nineteenth-century appearance.
Over the next six months, an expert team will completely disassemble a major section of the Mansion’s front façade, including the front bay window and its adjoining walls, while carefully protecting the precious interiors within. Using perfectly matching stone, the project team will cut and carve replacement units in a workshop in Vermont and then assemble them on site in the late fall. Once complete, the work will turn back the clock 160 years, restoring important passages of carving and detailing to the Mansion’s most photographed façade.
Work is simultaneously underway to recreate a missing series of balustrades that once graced the rooftops of the front porch, portico, and bay. Skilled preservation woodworkers Bob and Sebastian Cariddi have been hard at work milling and assembling hundreds of individual elements in their workshop in Buxton, Maine. Once installed, the balustrades will make the Mansion’s front façade complete for the first time since the 1950s.
Inside, the most ambitious paint conservation project in the museum’s history is underway. Our longtime partners at Gianfranco Pocobene Studio are cleaning and restoring the decoratively painted walls and ceilings in the grand Stair Hall, a soaring space rising 40 feet to the central skylight. The Stair Hall and its surrounding rooms represent the last intact commission by artist Giuseppe Guidicini, decorator of some of America’s grandest theaters and opera houses. In caring for his work at Victoria Mansion, we help uncover a nearly lost tradition of decorative painting.
I am writing both to share this good news and to thank you for your support for this great institution. Victoria Mansion is entering one of the most exciting periods in its history, all thanks to a community of friends stretching from Portland, Maine out across the country and world. I hope you will visit soon and see some of the progress firsthand.
Yours sincerely,
Tim Brosnihan, Executive Director
Read more about our Front Bay restoration in the September 2024 Newsletter and June 2024 Newsletter, and paint conservation in our August 2024 newsletters!
