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click photos for larger imagePhotographed by Erik Kvalsvik
“You never really own a house,” says Weeder Obrecht. “You’re just a guest in it for a time.”
Weeder, her husband, Andy, their two daughters and their two dogs are the current guests at the charming beachfront cottage on the border of Rehoboth and Dewey beaches known as “the Red House.” According to Weeder, the exterior of the house has never been any color but red since the 1890s, when it’s believed to have been constructed.
The continuity of the exterior paint color is just one of the quirks that fascinates Weeder, a Baltimore interior designer. There’s the fact that sometime between 1914 and 1938 the home’s entire interior— walls, ceilings, furniture— was painted a shade of turquoise known as “beach blue,” which was popular in the beach homes of the day, says Allison Bateman, a longtime Rehoboth Beach realtor and the agent who sold the Obrechts the Red House. Hints of that paint remain embedded in the wood paneling long after the paint was handstripped in the 1950s. “People ask me who did my faux painting,” says Weeder. “I say, ‘No one.’”
Then there are the louvered shutters, installed by the French wife of the banking executive who owned the home from 1954 to 1965, that serve as doors for the bedrooms, allowing air to flow above, below and through the slats. There are towel racks from the now-vanished Henlopen Hotel, big iron doorstops featuring men dressed in suits, flowers and parrots, and marble sinks and floor-to-ceiling gilt mirrors that hearken back to the Victorian era. And in the dining room, there are the ornate, decidedly un-beachy, sideboard and chandelier that are likely original to the home. “I had to get used to the dining room furniture,” says Weeder. “It can look doomand- gloom Victorian. But then you throw open the windows and double doors, and it’s totally different.”
The Obrechts were so taken with the organ left in the dining room when they bought the home that they had it restored. Now its doom-and-gloom sounds fill the home each October, when the family treks from Baltimore to celebrate Halloween at the Red House.
It was a chilly October afternoon eight years ago when Weeder and her husband first unlatched the back gate and stepped into the home’s rear courtyard. “I thought, ‘This is it,’” she says. “Andy saw the same thing and said, ‘Oh, no.’ We’ve always lived in old houses and restored them. Andy wanted a big, modern house at the beach where he didn’t have to do any work.”
When she and Andy made their way around front, climbed the steps to take in the view from the wraparound porch then entered the double doors to find a fire roaring in the massive fireplace, Weeder knew she’d never wanted anything so badly. Two days later, Andy “came around”— in fact, he soon got really excited— and the Obrechts sealed the deal with the sellers, who included a clause in the contract that the house could not be torn down in their lifetime.
“This house was a prime candidate for tearing down and building one of those megahouses that are all over Rehoboth now,” says Weeder. “You’ve never seen a house in as bad a shape. Every day our phone rang in Baltimore with news of a new piece of rotted wood.”
The Obrechts had no intention of tearing down the Red House, especially after they began gathering bits and pieces of its colorful history from longtime residents of the surrounding neighborhood, Rehoboth-by-the-Sea. They learned that an English countess owned the house sometime before 1914, at which time it was sold for the princely sum of $3,500. They learned that from 1938 to 1954 the house belonged to Jim Thompson, the entrepreneur credited with introducing the Western world to the glories of hand-woven Thai silk, then largely unknown outside Thailand.
Thanks to Thompson, an American expatriate dubbed the “Thai Silk King,” Thai silk was used in the costumes for the Broadway production of “The King and I” and the movie “Ben Hur,” and found its way to fashion and interior designers throughout the world. To intensify Thompson’s legend, one day in 1967 he disappeared while on vacation in Malaysia. The only trace of him that remains is his home in Bangkok, which is now a museum. “One day I walked out of the Red House and saw that the whole left side of the front yard had collapsed in on itself,” says Weeder. “We laughed and said, maybe there was a bunker from World War II under there. Or maybe it’s where Jim Thompson hid his will!”
From 1968 to 1978, Mary Russell, a White Russian who fled St. Petersburg in 1917 with her mother and brother, occupied the home (her husband, Ned, a White House reporter for the Associated Press, died in an infamous auto accident involving a Studebaker, the damages from which allowed Mary to purchase the Red House). According to Carol Robinson, whose family owned a home nearby and often attended elegant Sunday lunches on the porch, Mary Russell’s mother was a former lady-in-waiting to the doomed Czarina Alexandra. “The mother had a beautiful diamond brooch given to her when Alexandra married Nicholas,” remembers Robinson. “She used to smoke like a chimney and tell wonderful stories about Rasputin.”
Robinson recalls the Victorian chandelier and sideboard in the dining room, as well as the wicker furniture that filled the porch and living room during the Russell era. Just as Weeder hadn’t been crazy about the color turquoise before buying the Red House, she hadn’t owned a piece of wicker. But in the spirit of continuity, she’s bought enough wicker furniture to create three seating areas on the porch, from which the view is ocean and sky— no people or beach umbrellas. Because the house sits high on a rise separated from the beach by a front garden that features grasses, a smattering of cleome, cosmos, dahlias, nicotiana and a variety of herbs, it feels private, even in July when there’s nary an unoccupied inch on the sand.
Since that first October, the Obrechts have restored the original windows, painted ceilings and trim, repaired the chimney, updated the plumbing and electrical systems and installed heat and air-conditioning— but they didn’t “rip out and fill the house with fancy stuff,” says Weeder. They didn’t expand or modernize the galley kitchen, and Weeder furnished the home’s seven bedrooms with family pieces whose eclecticism fits with her daughters’ surfboards and riding awards. Throughout the house, cheery floral-print fabrics echo the fresh flowers arranged in vases. During the past eight years, Weeder has bought several porcelain cockatoos and parrots to display in the Red House. At the time, she wasn’t sure why she bought them; they just caught her eye. Recently, she learned that Jim Thompson loved cockatoos and often featured them in his advertisements for Thai silk. “This house,” Weeder concludes, “definitely has a life of its own.”
RESOURCES
Landscaping: Christie Besche, Growing Up Gardening, Lewes, Del., 302-644-8312
Wicker Furniture: Early Attic Antiques, 10 Sixth St., Rehoboth Beach, Del., 302-227-0598
Garage Sale Antiques, 1416 Highway One, 302-645-1205
Painted Furniture: Patricia Freedman Wright, 1903 Swedes St., Dewey Beach, Del.,
