Details, Details...

While cleaning some old boxes I came across the following documents from a project in the late 90s. By 2008 the room and trim described & illustrated below had been dismantled and the house demolished and a new home built in its place.

There is no doubt that the trims are different. Given that we were using materials from the 18th Century and creating additional material as needed to fill in the gaps I wonder if we really had other meaningful options. My question is: Can this difference be experienced?

The owner of the house looked at this letter and the drawings, walked into his room looked up and decided nothing needed to be done. He could not imagine, I suppose, a different experience for himself or his family of the space. Had he been as outraged as his architect he would have had to insist on and then endure several weeks of additional construction and painting. Eventually the project was prominently featured in a nationally distributed magazine in 2002 - Antiques.

These documents remind me of how much the construction industry and the profession of architecture has changed in the last 10-15 years.