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| Feature |
From Hearth To Heritage
Patricia Eakins
10/01/2005
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The house had been built in the 1980s for a New Hampshire state senator,
Alice Tirrell Knight. The residence was not the work of a famous architect, but
it was nestled in a spectacular forest on 101¼2 acres in Goffstown, a village
just outside Manchester. Sam envisaged chamber music concerts in the living
room; with its cathedral ceiling and second-story balcony, the venue was ideal
for fund-raisers for the Manchester Community Music School and a youth orchestra
school the Grubers founded.
To adapt the house to serve both as a family
abode and a public space, the couple hired architect Carl Goedecke, who grew up
in Manchester. Goedecke says he was impressed with the location of the house and
took his design cues from the grandeur of the setting. His plan relied on
multiple sets of interconnected French doors set between rooms. To host
concerts, May set aside the comfortable furnishings of the living room, family
room, dining room and library and had rows of folding auditorium chairs
(borrowed from a local undertaker) set up for guests.
Over the years, the
concerts at the home have attracted a wide audience: friends, musicians and
participants in Sam’s summer camps for amateur musicians. By holding the
performances in their home rather than in a local concert hall, the Grubers
hoped to make concertgoing fashionable while exposing the audiences to their
museum-quality art collection.
In recent years, May has begun thinking about
creating a lasting musical legacy with her Goffstown property, which includes
two more houses the couple had acquired along the same road. She offered to
donate all three houses, plus three others she was willing to build on her
acreage, to Yale for a summer music school that would draw tourists, similar to
the visitors that Peterborough, N.H., has for its MacDowell Colony for
artists.
Yale turned down the Gruber gift, however, because the university
could not afford the maintenance on the property, and the endowment that would
have been required to keep up the home and land was beyond May’s ability to
provide. The New England Conservatory and the Longy School of Music also
rejected the offer for similar reasons.
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