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True Blue Country

A 1954 Chevy pickup carrying a load of old doors and antique lumber pulls into the driveway of an 18th-century fieldstone house. As the driver opens the door, two golden retrievers bound out of the cab. Cabinetmaker Bryce Ritter, and Lucy and Maggie, are home.

Bryce Ritter likes to comb the history-laden Pennsylvania countryside looking for antique building materials that he will turn into cabinets, tables, and shelves. His work, fold art reproductions of early American furniture, fills the 206-year-old Downingtown, Pennsylvania, home he shares with his wife, Linda.

Once a project engineer who collected antique furniture, Bryce's cabinetry started as a hobby. He began repairing antiques, and then, in the late 1960's, he started making reproductions using antique hand tools. Eventually he quit his engineering job and now devotes 12 hours a day to making and selling tables, benches, cabinets, and cupboards.

True to the 1800's, most of Bryce's reproductions are painted in earthy red, robin's-egg blue, and warm gold. He stirs up his own milk paint, concocted from milk, calcium, vinegar, salt, a base color, and other ingredients. Making furniture from antique woods gives it an old look, says Bryce, who enhances that timeworn appearance with layers of paint and other aging techniques.

The house, its furnishings, and the Ritters' way of life are links with the past, but it is still a family home that welcomes sons returning from college. "We live in it and use it and spill things in it, just like anybody else," Bryce says. On winter evenings, he and Linda like to cook in the fireplace, "just like the old farmer did."

The old farmer, a Quaker named Brownback, built the original four rooms of the house in about 1790. Some 200 years later, the Ritters, who were living in a condominium, yearned for an early stone house with period furniture. When they found one that had not been remodeled for nearly 150 years, they were astounded. "I went crazy," says Bryce. "I told Linda, 'Do you see those moldings, those floors?' Everything went way back." They discovered the most recent renovation was a four-room addition built in 1840.

The Ritters' house looks and feels as it would have between 1790 and 1940. "Linda and I like the same kinds of things," says Bryce: redware, and salt-glaze pottery, quilts, blankets, and chairs. Many of the chairs are antiques, but most of the other furnishings are reproductions made by Bryce and other master craftspeople.

Seven years ago, Bryce added a new wing to the house, building it with logs and stone as the old farmer might have done. The new addition, like Bryce's furniture and the Ritters themselves, merges comfortably with the past.