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Front Hall - Parlour Kitchen - Dining Room Bedroom - Activities |
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The Den
The telephone table and its chair are high Renaissance Revival style.
Would you have been able to figure out what the telephone table was if I hadn't told you? Do you think you could have figured it out if you had been able to ask me a few questions first? That reminds me of a game called Twenty Questions. To find out more about it, check out the activity below!
The den, or backroom, was a room I didn't get to see much of when the Roedde family lived here. It was Gustav's private room, where he came to listen to German operas on his gramophone. A 
gramophone was a wind-up record player that amplified the music with a big horn instead of an electric speaker. Between the gramophone and the piano in the parlour, the house was always full of music!
The restoration of the den isn't complete yet, so it doesn't look quite like it would have a hundred years ago. There's treasure in here, though, like Gustav's velvet-wrapped egg, and his marbled secretary box. There's memorabilia of World War I in the den as well, including a soldier's helmet and a mapcase. Bill Roedde's album of war photographs is also kept here. We don't know if these are his own photographs or whether he just assembled the collection from the work of war correspondents, but they're impressive nonetheless.
It might seem funny today to have a special decorative piece of furniture for a telephone, but we forget how novel an invention the telephone was. This telephone table was covered with gesso, a plaster base, then painted. The result imitates old leather-work, and reflects the Spanish influence of the 1920s and the Rudolf Valentino craze. Similar decoration can also be seen on the folding screens in the dining room. This telephone table was originally owned by a member of the Roedde family.
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