Cherry Grove's Mod House of Orange
Volume 49, Issue 8
by Tim Steffen

Some homes are famous for the people who live in them, others for their landscaping and there are those that have gained notoriety for design.  Out of all the homes into which I’ve been in the Grove, the House of Orange is perhaps one of the most intriguingly and boldly designed residences I’ve seen.  It is clean, pristine, expansive, with nothing out of place and not a grain of sand on the spotless white-tiled floors.  Oh, and yes, the house is amazingly orange inside.
Grove resident Paul Jablonsky remarked, “If you would have told me that you were going to paint the inside walls bright orange, I would have thought how
horrible, but it really works.” Friend and artist Susan Ann Thornton invited me to tag along for a tour of the house.  Upon entry, you are in a sprawling, high-ceilinged living room that takes up most of the first floor.  Every wall is orange.  Accents and architectural details are done with white molding, while white latticework covers the ceiling to hide the rafters.  The sixties-style white and orange furniture mixed with other antiques creates something that Thornton describes as a very cool mod pad right out of The Avengers.  I expected posh uber-agents John Steed and Emma Peel to walk out any second. Built in the late fifties by John Eberhardt, the house was actually the first Belvedere in the Grove.  Hess and Andy Anderson, his partner of almost 50 years, had been coming to the Grove for five years before they bought the single story house in 1966.  “It was a long box kind of thing,” recalled Hess as we walked through the rooms.  “It didn’t look like this when we moved in.  It was a mess.” An interior designer by trade and self-taught architect and carpenter, Hess began immediately on improving the property with Anderson. “Every summer we each put in three thousand dollars for a project to change it the way we wanted,” he said.  “We always found plenty to do.” Long windows and tall doors grace each wall and entryway giving the place an airy, light feeling, almost like a southern plantation.  Hess said that in the 50s and 60s, whenever  a house was being torn down on the North Shore, John Eberhardt would go over with a truck and buy things from them that he liked, such as doors, statues, architectural pieces and bric-a-brac.  Hess remembers that all the doors he used were lined up in a row two feet off the floor when he first came to the house.  “You had to step over them to get in.” Hess’ favorite room is the dining room that juts out from the front of the house and can be seen from Maryland Walk. It is sublimely appointed with floor to ceiling windows.  The roof is covered in clear plastic so that light floods the room, but is refracted by the intricate lattice work designs on the ceiling. Hess escorted us up the orange-carpeted staircase to the second floor. “The second floor was a major project,” he said.  “The original house was about a floor and a half, so we gutted that and made a complete second level.”  The upstairs has three perfectly appointed guest bedrooms designed with every facet of colorful harmony.  Hess calls the warm colors he used in these
rooms “ice cream colors”.  One bedroom is a soft red, the other orange, the last a light violet.  The colors all work in tandem, even down to the matching upholstered furniture, bedspreads and sheets. As we came back downstairs I asked Hess, “Why orange?” “That’s a long story,” he replied.  Before buying the house, Hess and Anderson rented another Eberhardt house.  “John had a great fetish about doing his faux painting on the walls and so we were not allowed to change it.” Hess didn’t particularly like the aesthetic so he went out and bought long sheets of orange and red paper. “I covered the walls with the paper and we liked it so much that when we bought this house we decided that we were going to keep the orange,” he said. We finished our tour on the sunken back deck.  When asked why he originally came to the Grove, Hess replied, “It’s the only place in the world where gay people can live like this.” Andy Anderson sadly passed away last Spring.  The large house has been difficult to maintain solely by Hess.  He recently put the house on the market and hopes someone with the same aesthetic will buy his home.  He has high hopes for the right buyer. “I want someone to buy it who walks in and says ‘I love it and have to have it,’” he said.