As summer approaches, the Körner’s Folly team is thrilled to announce that our inaugural interior restoration projects, the Rose and Blue Bedrooms, are nearing completion and may once again be viewed during public tours! The Rose Room’s walls are back to the color Jule painted them for his daughter Dore in 1905, and furniture has been returned to the room. We are still finishing some of the finer details, but visitors may walk into the room during tours to experience all of our restoration team’s hard work. We learned a great deal about the process of historic restoration during work on the Rose Room and were able to build relationships with several skilled craftsmen in the area to help us achieve our ultimate goal of restoring the entire Folly to its original luster.
The Blue Room–Jule’s son Gilmer’s bedroom–is next on our list of interior restorations to be completed this year; we hope to have it finished in late June. Painting was recently completed, allowing us to reopen the room for public viewing. Extensive work is continuing on the room’s textiles, specifically the wall panels and drapery. Once these final, details are complete, we will return furniture to the Blue Room and visitors will be able to see the completed room as it looked to Gilmer in the early 1900s.
Observing historic restoration work first-hand is a unique opportunity, one we are excited to share with our visitors. Historic restoration is frequently hidden behind a curtain or closed door, but at Körner’s Folly, we strive to share as many unique experiences as possible with the public and embrace the Folly’s past along with our dreams for its future. We hope you will join us during the coming months to experience Operation Restoration and view Körner’s Folly during this exciting process.
In a recent article published in Volume 37, Number 2 of The Public Historian, Körner’s Folly received accolades for encouraging visitors to experience this lengthy process firsthand. The article’s author, Franklin Vagnone, noted that “the in-between states of preservation and natural decay allow for a very rare quality of preservation voyeurism” (Vagnone, Ryan, & Cothren, 2015). For a PDF of Vagnone’s entire article in The Public Historian, click here.