Click here to view the newest Art Thou multimedia pieces: Art Thou: The House of Esherick

From Cezanne, to The Philadelphia Magic Gardens, every week I am in awe of the variety and scale of the art in the Greater Philadelphia Region.

I have to admit after finishing a multimedia piece or a print article; I do worry about how I will top that week’s art adventure. But somehow, each week, I feel that I have found another piece that lives up to the previous week.

This week, I found Wharton Esherick’s house. This painter, gone wood carver and sculptor decided one day to turn the architecture of his home into a work of art.

His garage made of wood surrounds a metallic chimney that twists as it rises. Pulling up to the home and garage, which have been turned into museums, a Dr. Seuss story crosses the mind.

A piece of structure that the Brothers Grimm would find inspirational, the roof of Esherick’s garage dips inward, allowing the rest of the structure to avoid a design with straight lines.

Both the garage and Esherick’s house have been converted into a museum, which was marked as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior. A tour of Esherick’s home is worth the sunny afternoon drive through Valley Forge to Paoli.

Entering his home, on a wall by the door, Esherick has hospitably carved coat hooks on a wall in the shape of those who have helped him build the house. Only a small detail of the entirely wooden house compared to the wooden spiral staircase highway in the entranceway.

An important thing to remember about Esherick is that he was simply a creative person who decided to be creative with the home how his house would look and attend to his practical lifestyle.

His bedroom, found at the top of one of the spiral staircases, holds a bed raised high enough to let the artist look out the window while in bed.

But to prove Esherick’s practicality, he built long, shallow shelves, finding that the design not only saves space in the room, but also, the shelves are shallow so that he does not have to search for what he is looking for. The all of the shelves contents are visible upon first glance.

In the family room, where there was once no underground floor, Esherick has built a sculpture well. In order to fight a termite infestation, he dug into a large area of the bottom floor. He kept the hole in order to have a place for his tallest wooden sculptures, which reaches over 10 feet tall.

Beyond the carvings on his furniture, Esherick is known as an innovative furniture designer. His designs are both comfortable and strong. He loved the idea of refrigerator lights. So he built drawers on the upper half of one of his desks that, when pulled open, illuminate the table top with electric light. This desk was built as a placeholder for Esherick’s papers while his actual desk was to be featured in a museum. The museum actually took this desk instead.