Have Boiserie Will Travel, Before, After, and After

The drawing room of a friend’s apartment in the Pulitzer mansion, as decorated for him by Natalie Davenport of McMillen, Inc. in the 1960′s

 I continue to rummage through my old clip files, revisiting favorite sites, remembering old friends.  Yesterday, I found one about a singular apartment in New York’s Pulitzer mansion, created by a kind friend many years ago.

While at Yale, he had considered studying architecture, but felt he lacked the math— he was passionate about houses and decoration—as well as music, but that is outside the scope of this post.   Throughout his lifetime, he made many contractors, real estate brokers, architects and decorators very happy.  I believe that there were over 30 houses and apartments over the years, usually two at a time.  The decorating firm of McMillen alone handled 17 commissions for him.  There were at least five by the brilliant modernist master Ben Baldwin.

 

Main Hall of the Hoyt cottage in Southampton

He had been brought up in grand surroundings.  In summer, his parents occupied the palatially scaled former  Hoyt estate in Southampton,  Winters vacations were spent in Palm Beach.  His father, to make work for the unemployed during the depression, had bought the Tiffany Mansion on Madison Avenue, and demolished it in favor of an elegant apartment building, the first built in New York since the crash of ’29, and and also considered the last great  pre-war building.  The architects were Rosario Candela and Mott Schmidt, and the family occupied a 21 room duplex on the top floors.  It was during this process that his passion for his surroundings were formed.

After his parents died, he inherited a large collection of fine English portraits and Georgian furniture typical of the rich Anglophiliiac taste of the day.  The collection, even after division with two siblings, amply furnished his apartments in New York, including a handsome duplex on Fifth Avenue just downstairs from a young couple named Von Bulow.

His parent’s Romney portrait, as seen in the dining room of his former wife’s apartment on Park Avenue, also by McMillen

After a divorce, his parent’s Gainsboroughs, Romneys and Raeburns went to his former wife’s apartment on Park Avenue, and our friend, giving outlet  to his taste for something French, bought an apartment  formed from the former soundproofed bedroom suite of Joseph Pulitzer, on the second floor of the publisher’s former mansion by McKim, Mead, & White on East 73rd St.  Measuring 26 x 36, the beautifully proportioned main room was what particularly caught our friend’s eye, large enough for his Boesendorfer grand, and for entertaining for the various good causes he supported.

 The mezzanine bedroom in the Pulitzer house apartment, as done for our friend by McMillen (top), and for the next owner by Denning & Fourcade (bottom)

Finding the McKim, Mead and White interior not to his taste, he commissioned his decorator, Natalie Davenport of McMillen, to find an 18th century boiserie in France.  Once located, it was brought to this country, along with French craftsman to install it.  Then the fun of furnishing began.  These rooms were as far from the age of Aquarius, then dawning,  as the best upholsterers and painters in New York could make them. When finished, it was the ne plus ultra of the rich taste of the era, recalling the apartment, also by McMillen, for the Henry Fords, and the Wrightsman rooms at the Metropolitan Museum, which were then being decorated by Jansen of Paris, who also supplied many of the modern furnishing pieces used in this commission.

The lacquer bed (from McMillen Website)

 The octagon room, as decorated for our friend by McMillen, above,

and Denning and Fourcade’s version for the new owner, below

The octagonal room was hung with silk of an indescribable shade of pale peach, and was centered on the most extraordinary lacquered bed imaginable, supposedly made for the Brighton Pavilion, an attribution shared with almost all Chinoiserie furniture of the early 19th century.

His parent’s Romney, as seen two or three moves later in our friend’s new apartment by Benjamin Baldwin

Needless to say, our friend grew architecturally restless, leaving the Pulitzer apartment for awhile, trying out two modern apartments on 5th Avenue, a summer house in Connecticut, another in Maine, a small chateau in France, then moved back to the Pulitzer House apartment which he’d kept through it all.  He then resolutely switched to modern, eventually winding up in a sublimely reductionist apartment nearby, with interiors not by McMillen, but by modernist master Benjamin Baldwin.  Here, after his former wife’s death, his parent’s English portraits also came to roost.

The library of the new apartment.  Two more moves later, the Cleve Gray was taken to a new summer house in Maine.

The story of the Louis XVI drawing room doesn’t end here, however, nor does that of the bed.  The Pulitzer house apartment changed hands, and the new owner, also a philanthropist and arts patron, desiring something cosier, brought in Denning and Fourcade, who brought in  their signature mix of densely patterned rich fabrics, and, while keeping the McMillen curtains, refashioned it as an interior in Le Style Rothschild, redolent of the fin de siecle.  The former bedroom, now a dining room, was a particular horror.

The Drawing Room, McMillen version

New owner, same old curtains–the Pulitzer House drawing room in its Denning & Fourcade drag.

After a few years, the new owner wearied of this heavy opulence (I myself would last about 3.2 seconds in a Denning & Fourcade interior before I’d have to be taken, screaming,  to a monastic retreat to sooth my shattered nerves).  In 1986, Patrick Naggar was called in, degilded the boisierie, hung new  curtains, and gave the room a luxe French Moderne touch.

 

 

The drawing room, in its post Denning and Fourcade mode. The chandelier remains the same

As for the Prince Regent’s lacquer bed, it followed our friend, sans canopy due to lower ceilings, to  a country house in Connecticut, and another apartment on Fifth Avenue, before being sold to another royal, Mario Buatta, the Prince of Chintz, who I believe sleeps in it to this day.

 Mario Buatta, at work in the lacquer bed, de-accessioned by our friend.

Illustrations:  
All McMillen photos, from ‘The Finest Rooms by America’s Great Decorators’
Denning & Fourcade and Patrick Naggar Drawing room photos, Edgar De Eviva & Lizzie Himmel, New York Times Magazine, January 31st, 1988
Denning & Fourcade Bedroom and Dining Room, New York Magazine, n.d.
Mario Buatta Bed Sketch, Konstantin Kakanias for the New York Times.
Baldwin decorated apartment, Architectural Digest by Peter Vitale, September 1979.
Hoyt Villa Hall, Architectural Review

Italian Villas on the Maine Coast: Partying with Atwater Kent

The Main Gate

In the late 19th century, some of the major monuments of the Shingle Style were erected in Bar Harbor.  By the turn of the century,  the Italian villa, creamy stucco with a red tile roof and arched loggia or courtyard–inappropriate though it may seem for the Maine climate and landscape–had displaced the turreted and shingled as a favorite for fashionable cottages in that resort   At least a dozen sprang over the first ten years of the new century on the hills and shores of Bar Harbor, including the neighboring trio of Eegonos, Buonriposo, and the present subject, Sonogee, built for Fifth Avenue Hotel heir and honorary Princeton researcher Henry Lane Eno in 1903. A New York Times article mentions a pagoda adjoining the drawing room as a unique feature, but no evidence of this has surfaced in old photographs.

 Ocean Front, 1920′s View

Unlike its matching neighbors to the north on Eden Street, Sonogee did not enjoy long ownership by its original builder.  Temporary financial reverses forced Eno to sell the house in 1911 to prominent stockbroker Lyman Kendall and his wife Ellen, the daughter of Governor Ballantine of Idaho. (Feel sorry not for Eno— a few years later, his fortune revived, he moved to England and lived out his days at lovely Montacute House in Somerset).  In 1916, The New York Times reported that the Kendalls had expensively altered the interiors from the ‘modern’ to Italian renaissance.  These improvements included a marble staircase and hall. 

Two views of the stair hall

During World War I, Mrs. Kendall opened Sonogee as a hospital for recovering soldiers . One of these soldiers was Major Matthew Roberts, an American serving with the British Royal Flying Corps, and by 1918, the New York Times was reporting the Kendall’s divorce, with Mr. Kendall marrying singer/actress Betty Lee, and Mrs. Kendall marrying the Major.  In the divorce settlement, which the Times called one of the largest ever at the time, Mrs. Kendall received the couple’s Park Avenue apartment, an annuity of $100,000 (a lavish income in an era when a servant’s wages were $5-$10 a week), $1,000,000 in cash, and Sonogee, valued by the Times at $2,000,000, including furnishings (unlikely).

Drawing Room, 1970′s View, showing faux limestone walls and replacement mantel

Mrs. Kendall did not linger at Sonogee after marrying her Major, and in 1919 sold the house to the Frederick Vanderbilts of Hyde Park, who in 1915 had forsaken their Newport cottage, later owned by Doris Duke, for the simpler social pace of Bar Harbor.  Mr. Vanderbilt had a long history with Bar Harbor, having first visited with his parents, the William Henry Vanderbilts in the 1870s.  His late brother George, of Biltmore fame, owned Pointe d’Acadie, one of the largest estates in the resort, with grounds by Olmstead, and their niece, Mrs. Shepard Fabbri, owned Buonriposo just north of Sonogee.  The Vanderbilts made few changes to the property, arriving each summer on their steam yacht Vedette, until Mrs. Vanderbilt’s death in 1927, when Mr. Vanderbilt sold Sonogee to inventor and radio tycoon, A. Atwater Kent.

Green Guest Room

 The Master Bedroom, 1940′s.  Note the Venetian blinds drawn against the spectacular ocean, island, and mountain views.  And how about those curtains?

The new owner, who had recently closed his giant companies,was about to embark on a new life as socialite and party-giver.   On the eve of the depression, Sonogee became Party Central for the new set in Bar Harbor.  Kent had fashionable architect Frederick Rhinelander King freshen up the old Renaissance pile, shearing off the porte cochere in favor of a copper hood in the Regency style, heavy renaissance mantels were replaced with Georgian and 18th century French models, and the solarium received a tented ceiling.  

Reception Room, old newspaper photograph

Kent famously did not like to drive the same car two days in a row, and a local architect was brought in to rebuild the carriage house with space for a dozen cars, a car wash and machine room,and a motorized turntable in the center to aim cars to the right location in the vast room.  Above were 16 bedrooms for  staff, and a caretaker’s apartment in the lower level. 

The Garage

Kent then bought the adjoining Robert Abbe estate, Brookend, across Duck Brook and joined it to Sonogee.  The original Abbe cottage was a large shingle style cottage by William Ralph Emerson, that had been added to in typical haphazard fashion ever since.

Brookend, Kent’s adjoining estate, 1930′s view

Kent modernized Brook End, and joined its grounds to Sonogee’s by converting the former mill pond at Duck Brook, which separated the two properties, to form a large naturalistic  swimming pool.  At the head of the pool, facing the ocean, he built a stylish cabana, also by King, with changing rooms, kitchen, and a near ballroom size entertaining space.  The roof and walls of the cabana were covered in red and cream striped canvas, echoing the colors of the houses, and giving the whole a jaunty Riviera air.  With the stage set, Kent was ready to party, and party he did, on through the depression, even as many of his fellow resorters were cutting staff and boarding up their cottages.

 One of the formal gardens

A perusal of the society columns of the day tells the story—almost daily—Mr. & Mrs. Atwater Kent entertain 20 at Dinner”, “Atwater Kent gives Luncheon in his cabana at Sonogee” ” Mr & Mrs. Atwater Kent entertain Archduke Franz Josef and wife with dinner dance at Sonogee”  “Two orchestras, one on yacht, one in house, at Kent party in Bar Harbor”, and on it went, until the eve of World War II.

 Garden Gate, from The Social Spectator, September, 1937

By World War II, Kent had left Mrs. Kent and the children behind, and decamped for Bel Air, California, where he partied on until his death, known as ‘Mr. Host’.  Sonogee was sold to industrialist Richard Wetzel, and Mrs. Kent and son stayed on at Brookend, which was torn down at her death.

The Ocean Front, 1970′s

After Mrs. Wetzel’s death, Sonogee was sold to a local family, the Colliers, who operated it for a couple of seasons as a tourist attraction.  The results were disappointing, and the Colliers sold the furnishings at auction, and converted Sonogee to a nursing home, adding large wings, and shearing off the upper two floors.  The marble staircase survives, leading nowhere.

 Ocean Front, present day view

 Drawing Room, present day view

NOTE: Despite its size and luxury, Sonogee was admittedly less than an architectural masterpiece.  This fact was underscored for me this morning as I logged onto Old Long Island , where is posted the far more masterful H.H. Rogers cottage at Southampton, a house of similar size and composition which was one of the most admired of its day.

Gropius Down East

In 1947, Swiss political scientist Arnold Wolfers, who had come to the U.S. a few years earlier to take the post of Master of Pierson College at Yale and would later become director of the Center for International Relations, built a summer house on a wild and lovely stretch of ocean front at the end of Naskeag Point in Brooklin, Maine.

View from the West

For their architects, the Wolfers went to Harvard, choosing The Architect’s Collaborative (TAC), the socially idealistic partnership formed by Walter Gropius and seven other young architects, including Benjamin Thompson, who was simultaneously remodeling a large summer house for his mother and her partner in nearby Blue Hill (we’ll follow the Thompson thread, an interesting story, in a future post).

The entry breezeway, looking out to the bay

Dr. Wolfers and his wife Doris were a cosmopolitan couple, and this house, with its gull wing roof and glass window walls, was radical for the time and place.  Locals and summer residents alike compared the house unfavorably to a factory or a school.  Walls and ceilings of clapboards, painted the gray of a foggy day, further blurred the distinctions between outside and inside.  The house was furnished with examples by the modern masters, creating a seamless aesthetic.

The Living Room

After retirement, the Wolfers moved full time to their Maine house.  The open breezeway was enclosed, the house was doubled in length, adding a new sitting room and bedroom suites.  The Wolfers brought their elegant traditional furnishings and art collection from their Washington house.  Mrs. Wolfers, a fabric collage artist of talent, made the modern house her largest canvas, with wonderful objects from many centuries and cultures–french chairs, Italian brocades, Chinese porcelains, Greek bronzes, tribal rugs, modern paintings, all  playing richly against the modernist framework of the house.  I’m sorry I don’t have pictures of the house in that era.  The look recalled the deMenils in Dallas, and spoke wonderfully of a cultivated mind and discerning eye.

 

The height of modernity, 1948.  It was a simpler age.  The floor was red marmoleum.

Embarrassing Personal Anecdote:  Long ago, at a dinner party at this house, we were taking our places at table.  Graceful 18th century candelabra on the Bruno Mathsson table lit the summer evening.  Everything gleamed. The soup had been laid, ready for us to begin.  Across from me was the uber-elegant wife of an ambassador—don’t be impressed, he was a Reagan era ambassador to a minor country, one far smaller than his ego—and after helping the lady next to me with her chair, I sat down.   As I did, my tie, an elegant number of whisper light silk from Barney’s, took flight and defying gravity for a  moment, gently, gracefully, landed in  the cream  of avocado and pea soup, slid across and landed ,with its soggy green load, in my lap.  I am still haunted by the look of suppressed mirth on the face of Mme. Republican Ambassadress.  I continued to be invited back. however….and always, to this day, hold my tie to my chest as I sit at a table…..

I buy less expensive ties nowadays, too.

All Photographs from House & Garden, May 1948

Money Used to Go Further: # 2

The White Pine Bureau,  a joint effort of the Northern Pine Manufacturer’s Association of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan and the Associated White Pine Manufacturers Association used to sponosor architectural competitions to promote the use of white pine in building.  The entries for some of these competitions were then published in Architectural Review.    Held in 1917, this particular competition was “Design for a White Pine House to Cost $12,500″.   Judging was held at the Greenbrier in its pre-Dorothy Draper days.  Such competitions were a good way for a young architect to get his work before he public—although I seriously doubt that many of the entries could have been built for the money even then.   Adjusting by an inflationary factor of 20, for today’s cost it would still be difficult.

Herewith a few of the designs, and some observations about the sources used by the young competitors:

 

The White Pine Bureau, through their White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs, a promotional series which documented important early American wooden buildings, played a large role in spreading the popularity of traditional American styles in the first half of the 20th century.  Therefore, the Prairie style house above, by Russell Barr Williamson who had spent a few years working in Frank Lloyd Wright’s office, is something of an anamoly.  In regards to another Williamson entry in a 1918 White Pine competition, the judges, who included William Adams Delano, had this to say: “This type of house, though somewhat outré to Eastern eyes, has distinct merits, both from the point of view of practicality and picturesqueness.” 

\

$12, 500, Huh?  I don’t think so, not even 90 years ago.  That’s a lot of expensive millwork indicated for the very conventional house above, which won First Prize in the competition — the White Pine Bureau clearly had a preference for traditional designs.   But what an improvement over the ‘Colonial’ builder spec McMansions  that have populated new suburbs in recent years.  The architects, Winston Risley and James Perry Wilson, were Columbia trained The partnership apparently did not continue.  Risley went on to design houses for the Rancho Santa Fe development in New Mexico during the depression, and James Wilson became a painter of note.

I thought this interesting design was channeling Albro & Lindeberg, and sure enough, the architect, Herman Brookman, had worked in their office before becoming one of the most prominent architects of the Pacific Northwest. (My father used to tell me that someday I’d break my arm patting myself on the back congratulating myself.)

 

I could find little about Messrs. Scarf & Yewell, but they clearly borrowed from Edwin Lutyens here, and applied his famous facades to a more conventional floor plan. (Help, my Lutyens books are not at hand, and I forgot the name of the house that inspired this design.

 

 

 This Hollywood Regency design was submitted by Milton Rogers Williams of Highland Park, Michigan, about whom I could find nothing.   I’m interested to see that he has used Montebello, a famous and now lost Federal era country house near Baltimore as his inspiration, but given the formal design a casual rusticity with his use of batten board siding contrasted with elegant details.  Below, Montebello, the house that inspired the design.

Coming up in the Down East Dilettante, more posts about houses in New England & Maine:  Gropius Down East, The Third Mrs. Astor,  Atwater Kent’s Party House,  A Favorite House,  Progress on the Dilettante’s New Store,  A Friend’s Boiseries, and more.

Intermission

Working on several posts about nifty houses, nifty objects and not-so-nifty oil tanks to post over the next few days, but until then,

 How much fun is this stacking china, featured in today’s New York Times Home Section?  Just call me a sucker for a gimmick, especially if it’s black white, and graphic all over.

Rooms in Maine: The Wyeths

 Here is a room from my clip files—a stark early 19th century keeping room, a romanticized version of a past that never was, glorifying the humble, beautiful nonetheless. I don’t remember where this was published, but for some reason, I think it was Vogue, about 20 or 25 years ago.  It is in the summer of home of the late Andrew Wyeth in Cushing, Maine.  I’m not a huge fan of Wyeth’s art, cultish, faux mysterious, sentimental, manipulative, but I do like the clarity of vision here—country without the cute—weathered surfaces catching the  sea light outside, uncompromising palette.  I  admire the aesthetic rigor that it takes to produce a room like this,  be it modernist, minimalist or colonialist, but myself, I’m afraid that I’m forever being seduced by a continental mirror, a pretty lamp, or my friends’ demands for comfortable seating when they visit….no Shaker-like purity for me.

Oh, Look!  Shiny object!

Love

I treasure this tattered photograph of a young woman in summer dress, leaning against the rocks on the shore, her Kodak Brownie at the ready, gazing into the future. The location was her future mother-in-law’s cottage.  The day was her 20th birthday, a warm day in late May 1921.  The young man who took the photograph would become her husband two years later.  They were my grandparents.  Sixty-seven years later, he still carried this photograph in his wallet, and as my grandmother was pleased to point out, never forgot Valentine’s day.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Time Machine: Stereo Views

Ostrich ‘Oliver W’ pulling a cart in Jacksonville Florida.  He held the world’s record for trotting ostriches, a 2.05 minute mile

Long ago, in a more innocent age, back even before the Dilettante was born, the stereo viewer, a device through which two side by side photographs mounted on a card could be viewed with three dimensional effect, was a popular household entertainment.  With this device, one could view a story told by multiple cards, travel the world through photographs, view the latest disaster, or simply enjoy pictures of one’s friends and relatives.  

By my childhood in the 1950′s, a device called the View Master, with a round disc of tiny transparencies, had replaced the stereoptican as the device of choice for the armchair traveller or curious child.  And now, we achieve the experience at the click of a computer mouse.

Despite the up to date technology of my View Master and my View Master projector, I remember well what a thrill it was to be allowed to play with the Stereopticans in my great-grandmother’s parlor, a room where time had stopped around 1890. There were two:  A hand held device, like the one above, in which the cards were placed at a distance in a holder, and then viewed through two lenses in a face fitting frame, and the other, a large rosewood box with gilded corner mounts, and two viewing lenses, through which one would view the cards laid inside.  Needless to say, the latter was only used with supervision.  

I had intended to write today about 18th century garden houses in New England or the moving of The Lindens , or maybe the scenic wallpaper at the Jeremiah Lee Mansion. However, about 48 hours ago, I came across a large box full of stereo views that my mother had squirreled away years before, and even without a viewer at hand, I’ve been complete diverted ever since, time traveling through these amazing 19th century scenes, transported to other times and places.

Part of the marvel of the stereo view is that the pictures are not prints of the photographs, but direct from glass negative, giving extraordinary detail.  I was looking at a view of an old house here in the village, and suddenly, in the elegant fan doorway I realized I was looking face to face with the long ago owner, standing in his doorway in top hat, gazing straight at me, a tantalizing glimpse of wallpaper barely visible in the dark hall behind him.

 

 

In another, a long vanished summer hotel, built on the ramparts of a revolutionary fort 30 miles from here, stands high above the bay, with people crowding its porches and balconies for some celebration long forgotten, and a buckboard waiting on the drive below.  The picture is so immediate that one can almost here the shouts of this crowd, smell the salt air, hear the crunch of gravel under the wheels, yet it is so unmistakably not of our time.  One has entered a time machine

A view of Ford’s Theatre in Washington, clearly taken shortly after Lincoln was assassinated there, shows tattered black crepe fluttering from the buildings, and two soldiers shouldering rifles guarding the entrance, people in the hot street watching the then unusual event of a photography in process as they are captured themselves for the ages.

A view of the devastation of the Johnstown flood, long before the newsreel, shows what appears to be a body under wreckage in the foreground.  Startled, I started to push this one aside, thinking how little the debate about whether to photograph bodies in war or tragedy is not a new one, but instead, looked more closely, and realized that this one was staged, and the man has posed amidst the wreckage for the photographer, face down, under a board.

The Blue room of the White House, ghostly still, long before the tasteful redecorations of either Theodore Roosevelt of Jacqueline Kennedy, firmly centered by a circular sofa, whose proper nomenclature suddenly escapes my antique dealer brain.

Exchange Street in the lumber boom town of Bangor, Maine, one of the flourishing cities of the East Coast in the mid 19th century, now a backwater of shopping malls and sprawl and grand old mansions cut up into tenement apartments.  Most of the buildings in this picture were lost to urban renewal in the 1960′s and were replaced with parking lots and blocky bank buildings with no life at street level.  Notice the optician’s sign in the foreground.

Children of the 1880s, sitting on a porch, toys and games at hand.  Tennis anyone?  Baseball?  Croquet?

My own street, in the 1870′s.  The houses are shuttered against the summer sun.  Fences keep the animals out of yards, the street is dirt and still follows the contour of the hill.  Every house in this picture still stands, in good repair, yet the scene is so different.  The young elm trees had grown up by my youth to form an arching green tunnel in summer, only to mostly succumb to Dutch Elm disease in the 1970′s.  Yet, a couple still survive, their crowns rising seventy feet above the street.

A train of the Portland & Ogdensburg Rail road, being dug out of the drifts of a long ago snowstorm—Amtrak travelers stranded by the latest storms in the mid-Atlantic, take note.

And last, long before Las Vegas gave us the international experience at the Bellagio, there was Playland at Coney Island, where one could board the smallest locomotive train that carried passengers, and travel past a pasteboard version of the Doge’s palace in Venice.

Faux Venices, trotting Ostriches….what funny people we Americans are….and how easily entertained.

Iris Apfel and the China Trade

Friend Ellen and I, weary of Maine Winter, went south last weekend—

 Gratuitous Key West poolside picture

—to Salem Massachusetts.  Okay, so it’s not poolside in Key West, but it was the best we could do for the moment.  Our destination was the exhibition of Iris Apfel’s amazing clothes at the unlikely venue of the Peabody Essex Museum.

East India Marine Hall at Peabody Essex Museum, 19th c. view

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the Peabody Essex.  I think it’s one of the best small museums in the East, and its romantic and sometimes mysterious collections dealing with the China Trade, brought back to Salem in ships by enterprising sea captains over 200 years, have been awing me since childhood.  Hence the surprise of the Apfel exhibit.

 

Watering Tea, 18th c. gouache on pith paper, collection of Peabody-Essex Museum

 

In recent years, their special exhibits, like one about Salem carver/architect Samuel McIntire, have been standouts, and their permanent collections are well arranged for visual interest, never static. Lin Yu-Tang, the 18th century Chinese house on exhibit, is staggering.  It is definitely on my do-not-miss list.

 Apfel herself, on a sofa covered with fabrics from her Old World Weavers

I also loved the Iris Apfel exhibit.  Wonderfully set up to evoke souks and casbahs, ski resorts and glamorous fashion week openings, it was a total attention getter, and definitely hot.  The amazing architecture of her clothes, her eclectic eye, her imagination and enthusiasm, the swirling colors and craftsmanship, all were a wonderful antidote to the gray and cold outside.  It was also a good thing that I went along, for otherwise Ellen, a usually upstanding citizen, might have nicked some of the astonishing jewelry.  As it was, the look in her eyes as she scanned the cases was worrying me.

The people watching was almost as good as the show.  Even though the exhibit was near the end of its run, it was packed. Contrasting the audience, mostly in very ordinary, even dull, clothes to the brilliant ensembles on display was entertaining.  I particularly enjoyed watching one tightly wrapped Wasp matron, in Geiger loden jacket, with her post-deb hairstyle from the 50′s, and sensible flats, holding forth on the exhibit to a friend entirely in gray–the un-Iris Apfels.  Men in the audience?  Let’s see, there was myself, the largest person in the room by at least 2 inches, towering over the crowd (makes it much easier to see, however).  A fashion forward gay couple.  A couple of husbands who were clearly gathering super-bowl points for the next weekend, though one kept looking at his watch.  A couple of young guys stoically, bravely, along for the ride with their rapt girlfriends, showing that they were caring guys.  It was cute to watch them, in love, being good sports, but wishing they were anywhere else. That brings the count to five men—and a couple hundred awe-struck women, all of whom I bet will be buying a little less gray and a little less polar fleece next season.  As for Ellen, she was wearing a shawl cut oversize hounds tooth black & red jacket in a wool/silk blend with black jeans, biiig jewelry, and a richly colored silk paisley scarf (impressed that I can describe this?  I am).  Going to see Iris Apfel?  Dress for the occasion.

  

Thanks to a lunch of a fig torta and pear sandwich with greens in perfect bread from Rosemont Market in Portland on the way down to Salem;  a dinner of cold martinis with warm fried (to perfection) oysters and grilled romaine salad at the nifty Green Monkey in Portsmouth–where we were extraordinarily well cared for despite no reservation on a busy Saturday night–and the chill of Maine winter was eased. Even so, Ellen can still be caught at her desk playing with the online Iris Apfel paper dolls, which have replaced computer solitaire as her five minute stress reduction therapy. 

Mystery House and a Wonderful Photo

I found these renderings of an elegant French style manoir in a 1911 issue of Architectural Record.  The caption reads ‘Cottage at Bar Harbor, John Russell Pope, Architect’. There is no evidence that this house was ever been built, and I’m curious to know more.  

My best guess is that it was designed by Pope for his frequent Washington clients the Edward B. McLeans, she the Hope Diamond wearing mining heiress Evalyn Walsh.  They had bought Briarcliffe, a large old fashioned shingle style cottage at Bar Harbor in 1910, and the following year, the New York Times reported that they were remodeling.  Perhaps they had first contemplated tearing down Briarcliffe and changed their minds? 

In the end, they wound up adding a bowling alley wing, a ballroom with murals of the Bay of Naples, a third floor nursery suite above, and a wing for Mrs. McLean’s mother, Mrs. Thomas Walsh.  The resulting hodgepodge of turreted and shingled wings was held together by a new classical courtyard.   

Here is the courtyard, after the residence was abandoned by the McLeans, with dancers posing amongst the statuary.  The photograph comes from a 1948 issue of Life magazine, featuring dancers among the ruined estates left by the Bar Harbor fire of 1947.

As an aside, Briarcliffe was originally designed by William Ralph Emerson for J. Montgomery Sears, owner of America’s Cup challenger Puritan. Between the Sears occupancy and the McLean purchase, the cottage was rented by the John D. Rockefellers, Jr., and was the birthplace of their son Nelson.  And with that, I’ve wandered far from the original question of the identity of the mystery house.

(Please note the poor quality of the second scan from Architectural Record via Google Books.  This poor quality is something we can expect more of as libraries continue to purge books, and the people who scan can’t even be bothered to de-screen when they scan halftones.  Are you with me, Blue?  I think that a lot of important visual information will be lost.  We are soooo screwed.)