Just beyond northern Durham’s city limits, only a few miles from the constant flow of traffic on Highway 501, there is a different world. Crowded strip malls and clusters of residential developments give way to a countryside of rolling farmland with flat board fences, horse barns and riding rings. This is the last preserve of the rural agrarian culture that is as much a part of Durham County’s heritage as the tobacco factories and mill villages which once marked an industrially based economy. From a country road flanked by fields and farms and grazing cows, a small sign announces White Oak Farm. The wooden farm gate swings wide, welcoming friends up a winding gravel road to a setting, a home, a barn and a carefully chosen lifestyle.
The road continues through woods and a meadow before arriving to the house at White Oak Farm. It is a stately home, a suitable subject for the centerpiece of a carefully wrought Pennsylvania Dutch sampler. The residence is complex, but it appears deceptively simple with straightforward lines softened by a multi-leveled roofline and the satisfying textures of stone and wood. Dormered wings of freshly painted clapboard flank a two-and-one-half story central block, sheathed in a warm-toned brownstone. The roof is shingled in silvering cedar shakes and punctuated by three elegant rounded chimney stacks.
A walled garden forms a semi-circle around a shed roof porch and the single story that connects to the main residence. With a front-facing gable capped by yet another rounded chimney, this delightful element, reminiscent of an attached summer kitchen, gives the house an “added on to” feel. The curving garden wall, accentuated by squared standards, arrives at a courtyard situated between the main house and the tall clapboard garage-guest house. And beyond the courtyard, a handsome barn with a cupola holds pride of place on a grassy knoll.
From somewhere in this peaceful Andrew Wyeth scene comes an explosion of dogs. Amid this confusion of joyful barks and friendly nosings, Jane Dimmig, the owner of White Oak Farm, arrives, greeting her guests and gathering them into her world. It’s a world reflective of the architecture and landscape of where she grew up—Montgomery County in the southeastern Pennsylvania farm country.
Dimmig admits that when in 1993, she and husband, Tom, an orthopedic surgeon and fellow Montgomery Countian, decided to build a Pennsylvania farm house on a 62-acre former tobacco farm in Northern Durham County, there were no precedents to follow except their own memories. “Tom and I grew up where most of the families we knew lived on farms and many of the farmhouses dated from the 18th or early 19th century,” she said. “We wanted the special feel that those houses had, and we wanted our two children (Avery and Walker) to have that family-oriented lifestyle that a special home place gave us.”
The Dimmigs were also interested in providing daughter Avery, a talented rider, the opportunity to care for her own horses. “She was very involved in junior riding competitions. Now a freshman at Vanderbilt University, last November she won the prestigious McClay Championship at Madison Square Garden in New York. I think her years at White Oak Farm gave her the opportunity to become thoroughly familiar with her animals and that added to the training she received. For all of us, White Oak Farm meant bringing our house, our horses, and our family’s way of living together in a place we love.”
WORKING WITH THE LAND
With the land purchased, and the vision of what she wanted firmly in mind, Dimmig began marshaling her resources. To ensure that the house and accompanying structures would take maximum advantage of the views the land offered, she turned to landscape designer Jacque Wick of Butterfly Ridge Design and Works Inc., with whom she had worked before. “Jacque is a true artist,” says Dimmig. “He completely understood how the barn and garage-guest house had to relate to the main house. In siting them, he also allowed for future additions like a library wing on the east side of the house and a swimming pool at the back.”
For the house and barn design, Dimmig relied on a family friend, architect Phil Lederach of Lederach Associates in Lederach, Pennsylvania. Lederach’s father had worked with Dimmig’s parents when they converted an 1814 schoolhouse to a residence and added to it over the years. Lederach, whose lineage, like Dimmig’s, dates back to William Penn’s time, recalls those early conversations. “She knew what she wanted. It was a phased project and that gave us time to figure out the details of how to achieve it.”
“We had to start with the barn,” says Dimmig. “It was imperative that we get the horses on the farm and try to carry on our life while the house building went on.” Lederach worked with Tom Dimmig on the barn design, a traditional clapboard pole barn with wide graceful arches beneath the deep eaves which shade the interior of the barn, creating a space to curry the horses and bathe them in pleasant weather.
“When Tom and Phil were satisfied with the design, Tom sent it to King Construction Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” said Dimmig. “They build horse barns all over the Northeast. They sent a crew of four young Amish men, ages 18–23, who constructed the entire barn in six weeks!”
Built of durable cedar, the barn is a T-shaped structure with a total of 10 stalls: six horse stalls, a wash stall, feed room, and tack room. The interior of the barn, stained dark for coolness and with a hand-laid brick floor, has a decidedly English look. Dimmig has enhanced it by her choice of decorative touches such as hand-wrought ironwork for the tack including blanket bars, saddle racks and antique English iron nameplates. “Most of our ironwork was done locally by a Hillsborough blacksmith,” Dimmig added. “The other pieces were just accumulated as I traveled and looked for the right things.”
WHERE THE HEART IS
With the barn in place, Dimmig asked Hillsborough developer and contractor George Horton of Telesis Construction Company to build the residence. “George had worked for years with Charles Woods, a fine craftsman-contractor,” Dimmig explained. “George brought Charlie into the project and together they were able to make happen what I envisioned, including using Pennsylvania argilite as the sheathing material for the central portion of the house and for the stone walls that are such important elements of the house and setting.”
There are approximately 18 tons of stone in the White Oak Farm residence, all purchased from a company called Rolling Rock Building Stone in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, and shipped by truck to Durham. “The stone is hard to work,” said architect Lederach. “It is a shale-like rock and you have to read the veins to shape it. I sent an expert stone mason down to lay up the walls and corners of the well house as a model for the local stone mason, whom Horton and Woods found.”
Another key element of the house, that evolved as the project progressed, is the use of beautiful heritage wood for the home’s interiors. Dimmig had already determined that the floors throughout the house would be of wide-board eastern white pine from Pennsylvania. But she gained a new source of wood when Hurricane Fran hit the old farmhouse on the property. “Though we had originally intended to restore the old house as a guest house, I realized that wouldn’t happen after Fran. Still I was determined to salvage the beams and heart pine floors and reuse them.”
To accomplish this, Dimmig, with help from her family, wire-brushed each beam and floorboard before working with Horton and Woods to decide where each would be used. “We wound up placing the beams across the ceiling of the family room to see how they would look, taking them down, then reinstalling them permanently,” she said. “Other beams went into the ceilings of the mud room and the garden room, where I do my flower arranging. We even salvaged poplar poles from the old tobacco barn and placed them like ceiling trusses in Avery’s room.” Y & J Furniture of Durham refinished some of the heart pine boards for use as bookshelves and a media center in the family room. One large pine floorboard rests on brackets designed by Dimmig and serves as the fireplace shelf in the family room.
Though the unique design of the family room evolved with the availability of the salvaged wood, Dimmig had clippings from interior design magazines to guide her construction team in creating the look she wanted for the living room, dining room, and the home’s dramatic central hall which runs from the front entry and opens to a covered porch off the rear elevation. The living room features a prized antique mantel purchased from a favorite antique shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania. “The mantel is from the Hudson Valley and dates from between 1800–1820,” says Dimmig. “Its richness of detail makes it the focal point of the living room.” In contrast, the dining room’s fireplace is a simple arched firebox that allows an exceptionally fine Montgomery County cupboard, with decorative inlay and a swan’s neck crest designed to dominate the room.
Of special importance to Dimmig is the design for the main staircase that rises from the dramatic center hall to a landing leading to the home’s three second-floor bedrooms. “The staircase is modeled after the one in my parent’s home and has the same decorative scrollwork and raised panels,” explained Dimmig. “The Garland Woodcraft Company in Durham was able to make the balustrade from the heart pine found in the old house.”
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
In reviewing the success of this phase of building at White Oak Farm, Telesis’s George Horton credits Dimmig with being willing to pay attention to the details, whether it was selecting stone on site in Pennsylvania or finding the right source for the antique and reproduction locks used for each door and cabinet in the house. “Someone told me there are 90,000 decisions that have to be made when one builds a house,” says Horton. “Someimes these decisions are made by the contractor, sometimes by the workmen, and sometimes by default. We wanted to work with Jane because she was a hands-on owner, and we knew she would be involved in making all those decisions.”
As Dimmig extends her farewells amid the same friendly canine chaos, it is clear that she has accomplished her goal of bringing the elements of her family’s life together in a special place.
White Oak Farm, with its Amish-raised barn and thoughtfully designed and executed Pennsylvania farm house, is admirable for its architecture, its craftsmanship and for a lifestyle which reflects the importance of a treasured heritage and enduring family values.