The inspiration for the Bishop house was actually a house one of my grandfathers built in western Massachusetts in the eighteenth century. It’s still standing: a big white house on Harkness Road in Pelham called the Harkness House! A similar house, inside and out, is on Shutesbury Road, in Pelham, Massachusetts. I also spent a few happy years in upstate New York when I was teaching at Colgate in Hamilton and the Bishop house is partly modeled on my house there, too. It didn’t grow rooms, but it did creak and sigh.
