Excavating and Re-Creating Color and Texture at Stenton

A 1752 probate inventory described Stenton’s best bed chamber as the Yellow Lodging Room, referencing the yellow wool damask textiles that furnished the space. Brownish ochre paint applied in the 1980s indicated yellow paint for the wood-paneled wall components as well.

Historic Preservation faculty members Laura Keim and Cassie Myers collaborated on the restoration and re-creation of the Yellow Lodging Room, identifying the “right” yellows according to current historic interiors research and methods of finishes and dye analysis.

Please join Myers and Keim as they explore the physical, object, and documentary evidence they uncovered and the interpretive decisions they made to restore historically accurate yellow pigments and dyes, as well as the historic textures of the textiles and paint.

Catherine Myers (Cassie) is a paintings and architectural conservator in private practice in Philadelphia, PA. For more than 30 years, her firm, Myers Conservation, addresses complex conservation problems involving mural paintings, decorative architectural paintings, ornamental historic plasters, and architectural finishes throughout the country on conservation planning, testing, analysis, and treatment projects.

Previously Myers worked in the conservation departments of North Carolina Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. More recently she served as a Fine Arts Specialist in the Office of the Chief Architect of US General Services Administration, Fine Arts Program in Washington, DC and as a Senior Project Manager at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Myers teaches a graduate seminar on Architectural Finishes and advises thesis students in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Professional Associate member of the American Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and a member of the Conservation Committee of the International Council on Museums.

Laura Keim teaches the History of the American Domestic Interior (HSPV-531). She has also co-taught a history and planning seminar centered on the Germantown neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia, where she has worked for the Historic Germantown consortium of sixteen sites. She has advised theses on diverse topics, from nineteenth-century furniture to twentieth-century plastic laminate.

Laura has served as the Curator for Stenton, a historic site in northwest Philadelphia since 1999. She also worked as Curator for Wyck and the Historic Germantown consortium. She has published articles in The Magazine ANTIQUES, Ceramics in America, and recently completed Stenton: A Visitor’s Guide to the Site History and Collections. Her primary interests include architecture, the decorative arts and material culture of the Atlantic world as well as the history of collecting and understanding the past in England and America. She currently serves on the Board of the American Friends of Attingham.

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