When spring arrives in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, morning light rakes across a time-tumbled stone wall to find Mary Adam sipping coffee at the breakfast table. Here, she plans projects that she and her husband, Dale, will tackle as guardians of a farmhouse that dates to the early 1800s.
Mary, along with daughter Julia and son Joe, moved into the house that Dale had purchased in 1993 after the pair married in 2001. Mary's career is in pharmaceuticals and Dale works for MillerKnoll, a Pennsylvania-based modern furnishings mecca. Although Dale's job revolves around contemporary design, he and Mary made the preservation of the house's original features a priority. To start, Mary and Dale removed aluminum siding and horsehair plaster to reveal original fieldstone walls. Then they dismantled drop ceilings, exposed floor joists, ripped up carpeting and restored wood floors. The couple welcomed a third child, Annabelle, in 2005, the same year they razed a cinderblock addition and built a historic-minded design that features a cathedral ceiling and rugged beams and notably spotlights a
