![When Roth bought the home, it served more as a blank slate than as a point of architectural pride. The one distinguishing feature? The layered shingles at the house's eaves, which Roth has painted several shades of purple. "To me, it's kind of surprising that there is [even] that much decoration on the house," he says. "It really was the only interesting thing about the house when I bought it."](/uploads/original/20250408-104743-8ec-IMG_0003.JPG)
When John Roth bought his Milanville home some 30 years ago, it came to him as something of a blank slate.
“There was nothing architecturally interesting about it,” Roth says of the home, which started life as a farmhouse in the 1890s. “It was good for me, because then I could do anything I want and not feel like I’m violating some sacred style.”
Three decades on, he’s taken that freedom and turned the house into a kalidoscope of colors and textures and styles.
Roth is a carpenter by trade, and also a visual artist who works with found objects—items liberated from their original contexts and repurposed into new forms.
What originally inspired him to use found objects was the album cover for the Talking Heads album “Little Creatures,” Roth said. When he got the album, he looked at the credits, and saw the cover art credited to a Reverend Howard Finster of Summerville, GA.
Reverend Finster, a religious artist born in 1916, created as part of his artwork an environmental sculpture—Paradise Garden—in the 1960s, according to information from the Smithsonian.
Roth had the opportunity to go down to Georgia and visit Paradise Garden, he says, describing it as a great structure constructed of bicycle frames, lawnmowers and the like. “It just really opened my eyes to [the fact that] anything can be art, if you really stop and look at something and use it in a way other than what it’s utilitarian-ly used for. It can be really beautiful.”
That appreciation for the beauty of cast-off objects permeates Roth’s Milanville home.
The yard teems with strange, stuck-together structures. Two ladders joined at an acute angle form a tall, pointed arch. A small figure stands atop a pillar of rain-melted books.
The inside of the home has just as many intricate, out-of-place details.
Some involve ordinary objects used for something other than their original purpose. A pool ball serves as a drawer handle; a whisk cradles a light bulb within its spindly wires; cheese graters hang on the wall as decorations of quiet metal.
Other elements of the home look less obviously out of place, but have their own, intricate stories to tell. Even the wood used for the home’s walls and its kitchen cabinets has a range of origins, from the small, rectangular lathes used to tile an extension to the home—he’d always been interested in the material, from days of pulling it out of old houses being torn out in Boston, and he brought garbage cans full of it to the Upper Delaware—to the sleek amber material of the kitchen cabinets, which was originally intended for a client’s bookshelves before he decided he couldn’t give it up.
The home is always a work in progress—like life, Roth says—but after thirty years of renovations, it has found a sort of equilibrium.
“By and large it’s done,” says Roth. “33 years, two wives, two children of my own, a stepchild, three dogs, five cats, two guinea pigs and a snake later, this is where I am now—and just in time to welcome my first grandchild in June.”
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