Lifestyles

A contemporary loft is far from being considered a conventional setting for American antiques, but collectors Robert and Ada Brandegee are anything but conventional.

Even when they purchased their first home in 1963, a stately 12-room house on Bartlett Street in Squirrel Hill, they found that their tastes in Danish Modern furniture didn't quite gel with the home's Colonial Revival, Georgian style.

That changed in 1972 when they took their first vacation to Cape Cod and got hooked on American antiques. Never ones to think small, Robert Brandegee says, "We went a little overboard. We had to hire a truck to get everything back."

Faced with more than they had room for, the Brandegees decided to open an antique shop on Highland Avenue in Shadyside to store and sell their collection. Brandegee Antiques was open almost two years.

But even before the Brandegees had opened the shop, they had founded Brandegee Inc. in 1967. A successful strategic communications and consulting firm, it grew to employ more than 20 people specializing in integrated approaches to management consulting, organizational development and communications.

The couple sold that business in 2000, not to mention their Georgian style manse shortly thereafter, and have since taken up quarters in a 3,300-square-foot loft on the South Side, in a building that was once the bottling plant for the Duquesne Brewery.

Along with a friend, Robert Brandegee first toured the building, now known as The Southside Lofts, six years ago, when it was nothing but a shell.

"A lot of windows were missing and the roof was leaking," he says. "It was really a mess."

A year later, he went back to see the progress. By then, 50 units were completed, and a few had occupants. Robert Brandegee said he could see the potential, so he asked his wife to come look at it with the thought that, now that the couple were empty nesters, they could possibly scale down a bit and move there.

"I brought Ada over. She looked at it and said, 'You're out of your mind.' And that was the nicest thing she said," Robert Brandegee recalls.

A month later, on a crystal-clear day, he took her back. In hopes of changing her mind, he showed her where a penthouse could be constructed with a view stretching from PPG Place past the Cathedral of Learning. She wavered, and in June 2001, they purchased three units side by side, plus penthouse space, with the idea of combining it all.

At that time, developers promised that the units would be ready by Labor Day of that year, but in reality it took much longer to get the place together.

One major reason was the floorboards, which actually are antique barn-board siding obtained from an old barn that the Brandegees purchased from a neighboring farmer near their log cabin in Bedford County. The neighbor didn't want to sell the barn until spring because he was storing more than 2,500 bales of hay for the winter, so they had to wait out the season.

The shutters on all five windows also are made of barn-board siding, but their original whitewash hints that they are not from the same building. In fact, they came from a barn in Ohio. Heart-shaped snow eagles, the kind that keep snow from sliding off barn roofs, double as handles; they came from a barn in Bedford County.

"The interesting thing is that the barn boards have so many holes in them that when we were sleeping down here the sun would come in and it would bounce all through the place. It was absolutely magical," Ada Brandegee says. "There are so many holes in them that you'd think they wouldn't help, but they do insulate the windows by five or 10 degrees."

Such little details might not be noticeable in the loft that is crammed with antiques and art, ranging from American folk art that includes weathervanes, quilts, carvings, whirligigs and pottery to 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century American furniture.

The pieces span from the time of William and Mary to the 20th century and include examples from New England, Pennsylvania, New York and the South. "Most of the antique furniture is 18th century, some 17th century," Robert Brandegee says.

Pointing to one of his favorite pieces, an unusual side table with legs splayed outward, both lengthwise and sidewise, and terminating in what are called "Spanish" or "paintbrush feet," he says, "This was high style in its day."

"It was made probably in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, around 1730, probably by a member of the Gaines family, who produced generations of outstanding 18th-century furniture makers in New Hampshire," Robert Brandegee says.

Rob Brandegee surmises that there are no more than a dozen such tables in existence today. And of those, most are in museum collections.

Behind the table is another rare find, a barrel-back corner cupboard that was constructed as a built-in on Long Island, N.Y., around 1730. It still sports its original green paint and a tri-color rosette of terracotta, rose and ivory in the interior. "It has probably the best shaped shelves I've ever seen," Rob says, as he picks up a piece of Chinese export porcelain from one of the shelves, part of a set he inherited from his mother.

Like the porcelain, not all of the art and antiques were purchases. In the stairwell that leads to the penthouse loft that houses the master bedroom, there are a good number of portraits and still-life paintings by Rob Brandegee's grandfather, American painter Robert Bolling Brandegee (1848-1922). "In his lifetime, he was compared to Thomas Eakins," Rob says.

Not void of talent himself, these days Rob Brandegee spends much of his time designing furniture that, not without coincidence, is made from hand-hewn barn timbers. A piece he designed for the master bedroom divides the space with drawers facing the bed and a bookcase facing a sitting area.

Above the bed, which Rob Brandegee also designed, are two large seascapes from Maine. Ada Brandegee's personal favorites, they were purchased from an antiques dealer who found them in an old sailor's cottage. "He was walking on them. They were his floor cloths. They were nailed to the floor," she says. Lovingly restored, they are two of a three-part set with the third in the collection of the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Del.

The quilt on the bed is one of nearly 75 African-American quilts the couple have in their collection. "We never intended to collect them. We would find ones that we'd love, and all of a sudden we realized we had a collection," Ada Brandegee says.

Although the list of their collecting interests is long, it makes for ever-changing possibilities in terms of decorating, such as in the entryway where a child's pull-toy from 1850 sits atop a massive 400 pound burl table that once graced the Vanderbilt Camp in Saranac Lake, N.Y. In the sitting area off the kitchen, more than a dozen walking sticks are gathered behind a couch below an early-American mirror that dates back to the 1760s.

"As you can see, we have no discipline whatsoever," Ada Brandegee says. "We go in all kinds of directions."

"The thing that lights our fire is mixing things," Rob Brandegee says. "Putting things together in ways that maybe they haven't been placed before. And we like to reshuffle them, too. That way you see things afresh and don't get bored.

"When we have friends or family visit, they'll see things they may not have seen before. They may be new additions, or they may just be in a different place."

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