Ipswich holds more First Period houses — those built before roughly 1720 — than any other town in America. Several dozen survive, concentrated on High Street, East Street, and the streets around the South Green, and they sit alongside Federal and Victorian housing, the Crane Estate properties out on Argilla Road, and beach housing at Great Neck and Little Neck.
Working in a First Period or early Georgian house is a category of its own. These frames are three hundred years old. They have settled, been altered, been restored, and settled again. Bathrooms in them occupy whatever space could be found — under stairs, beneath a gable, in the corner of a chamber — and the surfaces that surround a shower are almost never parallel to each other. Summer beams and posts intrude. Ceilings fall away steeply and sometimes in two planes at once.
There is no catalog product for that. What there is, is measurement and fabrication: we take the opening in your home once the tile is finished, to 1/16", and the glass is cut to that geometry — angled at the top where the roof comes down, notched around a post or a chase, tapered where a wall leans. Done properly, the result is an enclosure that looks like it belongs in a house that predates the country.
Restraint is usually right in these rooms as well. Where a bathroom carries any original fabric, minimal hardware and clear glass let the room stay the subject. Polished nickel, unlacquered brass, and oil-rubbed bronze sit comfortably with period fixtures.
The Argilla Road estates and the newer construction elsewhere in town support a different scale entirely — wide walk-ins, fixed returns, benches, sometimes steam. Those spans call for 1/2" glass, and low-iron ultra-clear glass is close to standard where the stone is pale.
Great Neck and the beach properties add salt exposure to the equation, which affects which hardware line will hold up. Worth raising while we are measuring.
Our Peabody showroom at 47 Newbury St is about 14 miles from Ipswich, roughly a 20-minute drive down Route 1A or Route 128. If your house is antique and you are trying to picture how glass will sit against period detail, seeing full enclosures in person tends to answer it faster than photographs.
We handle Ipswich projects end to end with our own staff: in-home measurement, fabrication at our own facility, and installation, all for a quote that is final.
