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HOUSE TOUR | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA
Behind the unassuming façade of a Victorian house in Buffalo, NY, lies an extraordinary world where architecture, art and memory converge. Artist Dennis Maher has transformed The Fargo House into a continually evolving living installation, revealing how forgotten buildings and discarded objects can become vessels for imagination, beauty and renewal. He talks to Daniel Scheffler.
BY DANIEL SCHEFFLER | ROOMS & GARDENS | 18 JULY 2026
Dennis Maher's Fargo House in Buffalo, NY @ Chris Mottalini.
From the street, The Fargo House blends in with its neighbors in a quiet late-19th-century corner of Buffalo. Step inside, and everything shifts. “The Fargo House is an 1890s Victorian that I’ve transformed into a living art installation, architectural experiment and residence,” says Dennis Maher, an artist and designer. “It’s an ever-evolving curiosity cabinet and archaeological dig.”
The Fargo House is Maher’s “dreamworld for living,” part of a broader creative ecosystem, and The Assembly House, an 1860s church he is transforming, is a “dreamworld for building arts,” where visitors engage with tools, materials, and craft.
While The Fargo House remains his most personal canvas, Maher’s wider work, including The Assembly House, has earned statewide recognition, most recently with a Pillar Award from the Preservation League of New York State. Together, these projects explore memory, materiality, and imagination through “the things that touch us”.
Dennis Maher's Fargo House in Buffalo, NY @ Chris Mottalini.
When he first crossed The Fargo House threshold in 2009, it was boarded up. There was no water, gas, or electricity. The gas lines had been cut at the street in preparation for demolition. Doors and woodwork had been stripped; holes punched through walls. Objects lay scattered by former occupants. “And yet it was solid,” he says. “Twelve-inch hemlock joists spanning the entire house.” What caught him wasn’t the ruin but the stairway wallpaper: a pattern of tiny houses. “Immediately, I felt an affinity for them. They were calling me.”
A House Saved
At the time, many properties on Buffalo’s west side were empty. Maher had been working with housing activists addressing dereliction when he learned this property was slated to become a parking lot. Two buildings sit on the lot — the 1890s Victorian and an 1860s cottage — a rare double-lot arrangement that appealed to him.
“The former owner had invited people to strip out anything valuable. Because the interior was no longer precious, I felt free to operate with few limitations. One room was showing six layers of wallpaper.” His first offer of $10,000 was refused. Months later, amid community pressure to preserve the neighborhood’s character, the owner agreed. “I am grateful to those who advocated for it to remain,” he says. The only object that survived intact was a farmhouse-style cast-iron sink — spared, perhaps, because of its weight. It is now his kitchen sink.
Unbuilding
The Fargo House began as a classic Buffalo double: three bedrooms on each floor. Maher has since cut through it, literally. Four vertical openings now stitch the two storeys together. A Bridge Room leads toward a bay window. In the Library Globe Room, circular cuts through floor and ceiling echo the globes gathered there. A large opening in the Music Room allows light from six south-facing windows to penetrate deep into the interior.
“I’m fascinated by ruination and reconstruction,” he says. “Buildings are fluid assemblages of material. Unbuilding and rebuilding is about inserting myself into those flows — being a conduit for movements in time.”
The interventions create long views and sudden drops, yet the original rooms retain their scale. “In the eyes of some, the experiments may compromise monetary value. There is only one bedroom now instead of six.” He smiles. “These value shifts are interesting to me.” Layering goes beyond the cuts. Maher excavates into walls, floors, and ceilings, revealing historic residues: old wallpaper, subfloors, hidden panels, linoleum.
Saturation
Maher favors what others discard: residual linoleum, plywood subfloor, peeling wallpaper, the window shades he found when he moved in. Ordinary materials are allowed to remain visible, even honored. Throughout The Fargo House, antique and primitive dollhouses are embedded in walls and perched in niches. Toy cranes appear in unlikely places: small emblems of construction.
“I’ve wanted to create a sense of wonder and delight,” he says. “The defining feature is the saturation — a dreamlike quality from the collage of parts. It’s like walking into a Joseph Cornell box that folds forwards and backwards in time.”
One summer, while he was in Europe, architecture students house-sat. They gathered tiles stored in the basement and re-tiled the bathroom floor. “When I got back, they said, ‘The house made us do it.’ I was touched.”
In the dining room, five found tables have been spliced into a serpentine form passing between two rooms. The entire construction folds accordion-style into the wall. Elsewhere, a mid-century modern desk with hinged side panels closes in on itself like a secret. It once belonged to an avid treasure hunter; Maher bought it with the man’s notes and photographs from the American southwest.
“It was made to hide things,” he says. “Perfect for someone obsessed with buried treasure.” Books and other objects arrive through careful curation and chance. Maher collects books made by obsessive collectors: matchbooks, polaroid collections, textile drawings, baseball clippings from the 1950s. Each is displayed with furniture and miniatures designed to highlight them.
Living with Things
For the first three months, Maher lived without electricity. At night he carried a camping lantern, watching shadows climb the walls. Using objects left behind — a broom, hangers, picture frames — he arranged compositions across floors and ceilings and photographed them. “I thought of those as the house’s foundation drawings.”
Today, the Library Globe Room is where he sits with coffee and a sketchbook. The Music Room — double height, centred on a baby grand piano — is the heart. Sound resonates against exposed layers of wall. The house encourages ritual. Maher wanders, perches, shifts a chaise lounge from room to room. “It helps to collect the dreams,” he says.
Dennis Maher's Fargo House in Buffalo, NY @ Chris Mottalini.
Dinner parties unfold as processions: ten rooms, twelve minutes per course. Guests metaphorically eat the house. Drawing workshops treat the interior as a giant still life. Yet daily life settles it too. “Like any living space, it becomes intrinsic to you.”
A House Within a House
Many objects are symbolic of shelter — protective exteriors, jewel-like interiors. There is a recurring theme of house within house within house. “Perhaps it’s an analogue to my psyche,” he says lightly. Buffalo’s industrial relics echo here. For years, he mapped daily routes to thrift stores, salvage yards, and estate sales. Many of the dollhouses appeared this way, reminders of abandoned homes that once surrounded him.
Step inside The Fargo House and there is a re-orientation. From the pavement it looks ordinary; beyond the door, familiar objects surface in unfamiliar ways. An old toy might trigger a childhood memory. “Suddenly the experience becomes very personal,” Maher says. “You’re re-living part of yourself in a strange new place.”
Dennis Maher's Fargo House in Buffalo, NY @ Chris Mottalini.
Preservation is dynamic. “The house touches back,” he says. Contact with the building initiates a constant dialogue. Materials circulate, time layers, memories accumulate.
Still Assembling
The Fargo House is not finished. Two adjacent houses are now in progress, each exploring a distinct idea about time. Smaller connecting structures and a garden landscape will eventually bind them into a single ensemble. “My hope is that the project is still quite young,” he says. “The memories it holds now are only a base layer, to be built and unbuilt into the future.”
Light moves across surfaces, touching dollhouses and wallpaper fragments. The Fargo House remains alive, in motion, and full of stories.
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