George Gotcsik

In the living room, Fran and George Gotcsik of Lima decorate with furniture on a more massive scale to fill the large, open spaces of their home.
...
(April 8, 2006) - Fran Gotcsik needed only to see the grand stairway of her Greek Revival home before agreeing to buy it with her husband, George.
...
Gotcsik, the past president of the Landmark Society of Western New York, knows she's living in the right place, then.
...
In her own 2,400-square-foot, white-clapboard home, Gotcsik notes some of the hallmarks of Greek Revival style: the 12-foot-high ceilings, the plaster ceiling medallion, the gracious side hall entry with its grand staircase, the front door's transom and sidelight windows, and the elongated "six over six" windows with inset panels beneath.

"Six over six," Gotcsik explains, means there are six window panes in the upper sash over six panes in the bottom sash.

Gotcsik, who put up a high wallpaper border mimicking Greek entablature, believes her home lacks stylized designs and heavy moldings typical of Greek Revival homes because that would have competed with another rich detail: doors hand-grained to look like crotch mahogany and bird's eye or tiger maple."At that time, someone could've afforded a mahogany door, but what was popular was to have it grained," says Gotcsik, likening that preference to today's faux-finished walls.

Gotcsik, program and policy director for Parks and Trails New York, also notes the frieze windows.Each of these horizontal rectangles, which form a band of windows near the roofline of the house, is covered with a grate in stylized classical motifs like scrolls and acanthus leaves."This is really a form of air conditioning," says Gotcsik, "because in the summer, the window lifts up into the wall."

She and George, director of the Small Business Development Center at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, have worked to keep the home true to period.In addition to stripping paint off the doors and having them hand-grained again, they've covered the floors in wall-to-wall carpet, put up lace curtains, hung wallpaper mimicking marble blocks and bought the thick, massively scaled Empire-style furniture of that day (although, as in that day, some of it mingles with Gothic Revival and Italianate pieces).

Gotcsik isn't sure who designed her home, but she appreciates its timeless, enduring architecture.

"It just speaks to me," she says.