Those three words can lead to a mystery nailed to an enigma, glued with an anomaly

House Calls | Michael Good

“Is that … original?”

That question can come as a compliment (when directed at your new, period-inspired kitchen cabinets) or a curse (when referring to something you’d like to tear out). But most of the time, those three words are just the opening lines in an old-fashioned detective story starring your old house.

Back in the mid-1980s a British actor named Jeremy Brett set for himself the Titanic task of portraying the quintessential detective Sherlock Holmes in all his mysteries, both big and small. Brett was the son of a military officer. His father, a colonel, never quite got over the fact that his son had chosen such a disreputable trade. Brett started out playing “juvenile” roles in the theater, but even though he seemed to have it all — talent, looks, stature and that ineffable quality that made you want to watch him — he never quite transitioned into the leading roles many expected him to play in the movies.

He played Freddy in “My Fair Lady,” then eked out a living doing Shakespeare and the classics on stage, with a boatload of TV roles to pay the bills (including a guest spot on “The Love Boat”). The stress and strain of the itinerant theatrical life (as well as the death of his wife, which lead to a nervous breakdown) left its mark on him. By the time he was in his early fifties, Brett looked like a guy who’d lived a hundred hard lives, which in a way he had. Then he agreed to play Sherlock Holmes in a 13 episode series on British TV. The role took on a life of its own, and eventually consumed him. Forty-two episodes later, his heart gave out and he died, at age 61.

Actors go through a complicated and curious process to “become” the characters they have signed on to play. They write character bios. They study the period, learn a profession, acquire some lingo, put on an accent, go on a “ride along,” scrub-in for a gall bladder surgery, dissect a mummy.

That’s the complicated part. Then there’s the curious side — rituals in the dressing room, recited mantras and burned sage, staying “in character” for weeks, gaining weight, losing weight. Brett did all this and more. When I talked to him at the end of his decade-long run as Holmes, he’d gone way beyond curious and skipped right past quirky. To put it bluntly, he believed that Sherlock Holmes was real. A living entity. As spooky as Macbeth, whom Brett had played, but real. Really real. And Brett was in contact with him. In fact, at times, he was him.

He described how, months before on camera, just as Holmes was having one of his insights, something had come over him, a jolt of energy, a strange desire, so he suddenly, in mid-sentence, leapt over a sofa. At this stage in his life Brett was smoking three packs a day; he was no more prepared to leap over a sofa than you or I are prepared to leap over a tall building with a single bound.

The act of playing the world’s greatest detective had turned Jeremy Brett into the world’s greatest detective. The mystery he was solving was the mystery of how to leave himself and his demons behind and become Sherlock Holmes, and he had used Sherlock Holmes’s methods to get there. It had made him a bit mad, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Every generation gets the Sherlock Holmes it deserves. In the ’40s, it was Sherlock Holmes Nazi hunter. At the turn of the millennium, it was a doctor named House — Sherlock in scrubs. Today, he’s a twitchy, nerved-up martial arts practitioner, Sherlock Holmes on speed. While Jeremy Brett had one little incident of couch-jumping, Robert Downey Jr. has jumped it all — the chair, the table, the shark, the whale.

But getting back to you. And your house. When it comes to detecting its mysteries, you could learn a thing from Sherlock Holmes — the Classic Holmes, not the MMA version. Unfortunately, in this age of anxiety and the fast talk of a million YouTube Robert Downey Juniors, many historic homeowners have come to expect the instantaneous analysis, the 26-second diagnosis. While the solution to your house’s mysteries might come as a jolt of insight, to get there you might first have to read a book, drink a glass of wine, take a nice warm shower. If you want to detect what is genuine and what is not among your house’s woodwork, tile, hardware, paint and plaster, you need to mount a proper investigation. Three studies from the “case-book” of yours truly:

Listen to the ghosts: The impulse to paint is often accompanied by the impulse to tear stuff out. Therefore the area where your picture rail molding once clung to the top of your door casings has fewer layers of paint than the area below it. This leaves a “shadow,” visible as a raking light passes over the differing thicknesses of paint. An even clearer shadow, more like a ghost, remains where ultraviolet light has passed through various obstacles of various thicknesses (paint and wood, for example). In the case of the house of Mary and Aaron Robinson, who you read about last month, the ghost of their former plate rail was so clearly burned into the wood that Shawn Woolery of San Diego Sash was able to trace it and mill an exact replica of what had once been. It was as if he’d seen a ghost — and copied it.

It’s original, but that doesn’t mean it belongs: Three blocks away, in a large 1911 Craftsman, another a mystery unfolded recently. In the dining room were two bookcases. They looked original, but they were in the dining room. As I stripped the paint from the paneling, the bookcases beckoned to me. I ruminated. I poked around. I pried and pulled. I listened to music and the evidence slowly piled up: The bookcases had been toenailed to the floor. Some of the nails weren’t even finish nails.

Under the paint were more “ghosts” that didn’t match the present sun exposure. One bookcase nearly covered a light switch, and both were uncomfortably close to the plate rail. The master builder who built the place could not have committed this crime. The final clue was found in a book about South Park that included this information: During the Great Depression the homeowner had rented out rooms. That explained the closet in the den. I removed the bookcases and found they fit on either side of the den fireplace, where doorways had been cut in the ’30s for the closet and the bathroom. The solution to this mystery? Read the bookcases.

Right wood, wrong style: In the dining room of a 1929 Spanish hacienda on the other

side of town a husband and wife asked me the familiar question: Is our woodwork original? The wainscoting and the box beams were of the same wood as the rest of the room, but stylistically, they seemed to belong to a different era. It was as if Zorro had hired Gustav Stickley for his decorator. The homeowners had lived with the conflicting styles for three years and were ready to tear something out. But what? I had no idea. A few days later, after a little cautious deconstruction, the ah-ha moment arrived: Not only were the paneling and box beams held on with finish nails from a pneumatic nailer, they were screwed in with a drill as well. And glued with construction adhesive. The mystery of the misplaced woodwork was closed. In this case, the final nail in the perpetrator’s coffin was a Liquid Nail.