The Garden House

Sunday’s post about Hamilton House (click HERE), would have been too long had I done justice there to the delightful Garden House, so herewith pictures from last summer, and from 1926, of the cottage that inspired Henry Davis Sleeper to decorate Beauport as an American house.  The cottage was built in 1902 from parts salvaged from a house in Newmarket, NH, and subsquently enlarged by two more rooms to the form it has today.

It is interesting to compare a modern aerial view with a map of the grounds drawn in 1932 for Great Georgian Houses of America  published by the Architect’s Emergency Committee to provide work for draftsmen and architects during the great Depression.  Amusingly, the river is labeled as the Piscataqua, which divides New Hampshire and Southern Maine.  In fact, Hamilton House is on the Salmon Falls river, a tributary.

A small garden room makes the transition from the large formal garden to the more intimate old fashioned garden in front of the cottage.

 The cottage was built as one room garden retreat, with careful attention paid to scale and texture in materials. Although much seen since, this sort of careful attention paid to the appearance of age had rarely been applied to an American design before this—although of course European inspired examples were rampant.  This is concurrent with a rise in pride in traditional American design and craft.

 The semi-octagonal entry to the later wing is charm itself, carefully composed as a painting to evoke an earlier New England.  The panes in the transom are bull’s eye glass.

The garden house as seen from the river side in 1926, with antique painted chairs casually placed on the terrace.

And here as it appears today, with the later wing.  Although it appears casual, it is in fact a deliberately composed picturesque composition, to appear as a shed addition to an earlier building.  Would that everyone still added so sensitively to early buildings, and threw away the window catalog

 The Pergola  arch attached to the corner is a charming touch, framing views in all directions

The main room, with its salvaged 18th century paneling.  Great attention was paid to the furnishings as to texture, patina, and scale.  The room has a romanticized 18th century appearance, on a modern scale, with its high ceilings and balconies.  The window is masterful—designed to echo the arched stair windows of the main house, it is much larger, but the small pane size retains the scale of the building.  Notice the ship’s models hanging in front of the window, a favorite motif of the Colonial revival.

If the Dilettante were to make a criticism of Hamilton House’s otherwise excellent management by Historic New England, it would be in the secondary rooms of the garden house, of great architectural interest themselves.  Maintenance is clearly deferred.  The tiny vestibule is shabby, with random storage (there are both a carriage house and a barn on the property, one presumes with some storage space.  The other small room is used as the very necessary gift shop, but so poorly arranged as to completely obliterate the room–and yes, I understand very well, as president of an historic house museum myself, the problems involved with volunteers and good intentions and necessary functions.  That said, it should still be better arranged.  The main room fireplace wall could use some clean-up of arrangement also.  And the opposite wall, with an ice cream cooler?  The less said the better.  End of rant.  Back to our program.  The room sees service today as a beautiful setting for events, concerts, or just as the Tysons intended–a cool retreat from the garden.

 The cottage sits at the far corner of the gardens of Hamilton House, at the edge of the large meadow, flanked on one side by a charming dooryard garden, the other by the river view.

 The irony of the model of a hardscrabble one room New England cottage being adapted as the playhouse of two wealthy women, with its echoes of the Hameau at Versailles does not go unnoticed, but the results of the Tyson’s romanticized vision of Olde New England are charm itself.

 In 1926, this area was called the ‘Coffee Garden’ by the Vaughans.

Hamilton House is located on Vaughan’s Lane in South Berwick Maine, and is owned by Historic New England.  The grounds, and the adjoining 250 Vaughan’s Woods, given by Elise Tyson Vaughan to the state of Maine, are open year round dawn to dusk.  The House is open during the summer months.  Also in South Berwick is the Sarah Orne Jewett Homestead, also an 18th century Georgian colonial, preserved as it was in the writer’s day, with family furnishings and William Morris wallpapers selected by Jewett and her sister, and also owned by Historic New England.  Much more information about both can be found at the Historic New England website by clicking HERE:

For the faithful reader who wanted a closer look at the valances, click HERE for Reggie Darling’s post at EEE about the Hamilton House dining room.

The Fairest of Them All: Hamilton House, Then & Now

 Hamilton House as it appeared when purchased by the Tysons in the late 1890s  Unusually for an early New England house, there are three facades, of which these are the back (land) and kitchen fronts.  The door on the river facade would have been the main entrance in the 18th century.

Hamilton House, in South Berwick, Maine, is one of the loveliest–and most romantic– properties imaginable.  Set on a bluff at the head of the Salmon Falls River and backed by rolling meadows and woodlands, it is an Arcadian ideal brought to life. A large, simple Georgian inspired house built in 1785 by Jonathan Hamilton a West Indies trader, and in his day part of a bustling settlement overlooking his busy wharves,  it had fallen on hard times by the late 19th century.  Enter the Tysons, persuaded by their friend Sarah Orne Jewett, who had based her novel The Tory Lover at Hamilton House, to buy it and restore it.  Emily Tyson was the widow of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and she and her stepdaughter Elise set about ‘restoring’ Hamilton House to a glory that far exceeded its earlier life.

The approach to Hamilton house is beautifully orchestrated to heighten the sense of remoteness and traveling back in time.  One leaves the highway for a country road, and in turn leaves that road for a narrow country lane, which ends at the simple gate to the driveway, merely two cart tracks, at which one gets first glimpse of the house.

The Tyson’s domestic needs were greater than those of Jonathan Hamilton.’s day.  Their renovation architect, Bostonian Herbert Browne, an early proponent of the Colonial revival, also practiced in a grand baroque style that bordered on lunacy (more about that in an upcoming post).  He exercised restraint here, adding two low wings (since removed) , one for services, one a porch and first floor bedroom, fronting both with neo-classical treillage covered in vines to make them appear to be open porches.  Even as many of their peers were erecting large houses in the fashionable seaside resorts a dozen miles to the south on the coast, the ladies Tyson were part of another movement, one that eschewed fashion in favor of romantic simplicity.

As one approaches the house, the drive is paved with flagstones, leading to a flagged circle in the grass near the house, a firm rebuke to all those McMansion forecourts with fountain in the center

Jonathan Hamilton’s barn was moved, and a lovely sunken garden was built in its foundations, with a shady pergola, now lost, bordering the river bluff and framing the views.  In the house, with its large and well proportioned rooms, few architectural changes were made.  Taking their cues from the relative simplicity of the interiors, decoration was light and airy—white ruffled or chintz curtains, painted furniture, straw matting, cheerful old fashioned wallpapers—the principles of Elsie deWolfe applied to a colonial inspired design. 

  In the hall, scraps of the original English ‘pillar and arch’ pattern wallpaper were found, and the Tysons had it reproduced, probably the earliest instance of in America of an historic wallpaper being reproduced in situ.

 Hamilton House as enlarged for the Tysons by architect Herbert Browne (Tyson family photographs, SPNEA)

Loggia added by the Tysons

A garden house was built soon after, using elements salvaged from the early 18th century Sally Hart house in Newmarket, NH.   This building combined the materials and sensibility of an early American house with the picturesque quality of a 16th century English cottage.

The garden house

Their creation complete, the Tysons sat back and enjoyed the acclaim as visitors arrived. And what visitors: One day Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Davis Sleeper, her summer neighbor on Eastern Point in Gloucester, MA, who had recently built an English arts and crafts style cottage there, motored up from the North Shore.  And what they saw at Hamilton House was to have a profound effect on the story of interior design for the next 75 years.

 A corner in the garden house.  This mix of early architectural salvage and carefully and romantically arranged antiques was something very new and fresh in the early 1900s. (Max Weber photograph, originally published in House Beautiful, 1926)

Sleeper was riveted by the Tyson’s collections of hooked rugs, colored glass cued to the decorative schemes of each room, old fashioned furniture, and old prints and objects, all composed in lovely arrangements..  Most of all, he was riveted by the garden house.  On the drive up to South Berwick, the party had noticed an ancient house being demolished in Essex, Upon return, Sleeper bought that house, and began incorporating the salvage into his own house, decorating it brilliantly with furnishings like those he had seen at Hamilton House that summer afternoon.   Sleeper’s work at Beauport caught the eye of Henry Francis Dupont, who hired him to do up a huge house at Southampton, which in turn begat Dupont’s Winterthur, which house, along with the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, did so much to begat the much more correct and dull version of 18th century American Georgian that dominated a certain sort of WASP taste through the 1970′s.  But, I am wandering from my subject.  Back we go.

 The dining room, with murals by George Porter Fernald.  The use of humble painted chairs with fine mahogany furniture was also new and fresh, and demonstrates the Tyson’s talent at the game of high and low.

A few years after completion of their initial decorative schemes, the Tysons had the inspired genius to ask George Porter Fernald, an artist from nearby Portsmouth who had already created charming painted valances for the windows, and had painted some furniture for them,  to paint over their leafy floral wallpapers in the drawing and dining rooms.

 The Drawing Room Murals, with idealized views of the Pisquataqua region.  The leaves and trees survive from the wallpaper over which the murals were painted

 In the drawing room, he painted scenes of famous buildings of the area  Charmingly, the murals incorporated leaves and trees from the existing wallpaper.  In the dining room, a classical landscape, reminiscent of scenic wallpapers, made for one of the loveliest rooms of its time.  Porter ran the horizon of the mural to echo that outside, and captured exactly the colors of the outside landscape on a summer day.  The distinctions between outside and inside thus blurred, a visual poetry was achieved.  Of the many beautiful rooms in every style that I’ve been in, this is one of the loveliest of all. 

The dining room as it appears today.  The painted valance boards are a little slice of heaven.

After Mrs. Tyson’s death her stepdaughter, by now Mrs. Henry Vaughan, continued to occupy Hamilton House in the summer. In 1946 she left the estate to the  Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), now unfortunately renamed  “Historic New England.  Hamilton House was part of a larger movement in American culture and aesthetics, and is one of the best surviving examples of Colonial Revival decoration, its interiors now carefully restored to the early 1900s scheme.  Most of the pictures below are from a late afternoon, late summer visit that I made this year, interspersed with a few photographs originally published in House Beautiful in 1926,    The garden house will be featured in an upcoming post.

The door on the riverfront, inspired by English Builder’s books, with stone terrace and grindstone added by the Tysons

 And the view from that door

The side door originally opened to a hall, now an extension to the dining room, with views to the sunken garden

The back door, now the main entrance, with sidelights added to the original central motif by Herbert Browne

 The view from that door. Old fashioned Loveliness abounds in every direction

The arched doors of the carriage shed, with wonderful classical detail over, applied simply to the board siding (sadly, this arch was covered with square doors)

 The cross axis of the garden from the carriage shed in 1926, and now

 Main Garden axis toward house, 1926 and now (photo from Virtual Tourist Berwick)

The Pratt Who Got Away

Standard Oil tycoon Charles Pratt had eight children and a strong dynastic streak.  He famously bought 1100 acres of land in Glen Cove, New York to create a compound for his family, giving each child a share of the property.  Ever the efficient businessman, he consolidated estate operations for the various family houses into one compound, called the Pratt Oval, with a central administration building and stable and service facilities for each property.  

 The Pratt Oval, the administrative and service buildings for the Pratt family compound at Glen Cove

Although Pratt died soon after creating the estate, his children embarked on major building sprees, building five famous mansions at Glen Cove, among the most admired houses of their time, using architectural firms such as James Brite, Delano and Aldrich, Walker & Gillette, and Charles Adams Platt.  In turn their children built more houses on the family property, until Depression and World War II took their tolls.  Most of the Pratt houses are today public or semi-public facilities, and the Pratt Oval is just a memory.

But wait—that accounts for the six Pratt sons and one sister, but there was a sixth Pratt child unaccounted for in Glen Cove.  What happened to her?  Where did she live?

In New England of course, almost in the Dilettante’s back yard.   Helen Pratt married Ernest Blaney Dane, a wealthy investor and president of the Brookline Savings & Trust Company, and unlike her siblings who had their beachheads on Long Island and Park Avenue, she lived in Brookline, with a summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine, where also lived the son of her father’s old business partner, John D. Rockefeller.  The E.B. Danes houses were perhaps not as architecturally distinguished as those of her brothers, but they were, nevertheless, impressive by most standards.

‘Roughwood’, as originally built 1889-91 for William Cox

Soon after their marriage, the Danes bought the Cox estate, Roughwood, on Heath St. in Brookline.  It was a very large chateauesque shingle and stone house designed a few years earlier by Andrews, Jacques, & Rantoul.  One of the assistants on the project was a young MIT graduate named Charles Sumner Greene, who would soon move to California with his brother, where they became famous as the firm of Green & Greene.  

 ‘Roughwood’ as it appeared after enlargement by the Danes in the early 1900′s

 The music room wing added by the Danes

After purchasing the estate, the Danes made many improvements, adding an Elizabethan Music Room wing, and an enormous crystal palace style palm house at the other end of the mansion.  

 The garage at ‘Roughwood’.  The true scale of the building is not apparent in this photo.

Early devotees of motoring, they built a large garage, capable of holding nine cars, with a lower level carwash and machine shop, and chauffeurs quarters above.  This garage was published often in its day as a model of modern efficiency.

 The Dane yacht ‘Vanda’ at its launch at Bath Ironworks

E.B. Dane was a devoted yachtsman, and in the summers they went to Seal Harbor on Mt. Desert Island in Maine.  In 1909, they purchased Glengariff on Dodge’s point, a roomy shingled cottage designed by Long Island architect Isaac Green only a dozen years earlier, and demolished it.   

 ‘Glengariff’, Ernest and Helen Pratt Dane’s summer home at Seal Harbor

 In 1911 work was completed on a new and much larger stone and shingled cottage designed by F.L. Whitcomb of Boston, also called Glengariff.  V-shaped, the house dominated the end of the point. The new Glengariff was 40 feet deep and stretched 244 feet from end to end.  Offshore were anchored Mr. Dane’s successively larger yachts, culminating in the 240 foot Vanda, commissioned from Bath Iron Works in 1928.

 Two vintage views of the gardens at Glengariff

A dedicated plantswoman, Helen Dane first had I. Howland Jones of Andrews Jacques & Rantoul lay out terraced formal and informal gardens among the ledges on the rocky steep property—nature tamed by money.  Later, Beatrix Farrand, who maintained an office on her estate at Bar Harbor, was brought in to make changes and improvements, and by 1933, when the Garden Club of America visited Mt. Desert Island, the Dane garden was one of the highlights of their tour.  

 The Dane’s home farm at Seal Harbor

Lacking the Pratt Oval, the Danes purchased land half a mile from the main house for a small gentleman’s farm whose barns, gardens and greenhouses supplied the estate with food and flowers and necessary services. 

 ‘Roughwood’ as it appears today, as the main building of Pine Manor College.  The parking lot to the right is the approximate site of the palm house wing

The Dane estates weathered the great Depression, but by WWII, things were drawing to a close.  The Vanda was requistioned for duty in the war.  The Brookline estate was left in favor of a gentleman’s farm in New Hampshire, where Mr. Dane died in 1942.  The Brookline estate became a private school, and later Pine Manor college.  John D. Rockefeller Jr., in whose view shed Glengariff stood, bought the house for a song in 1946 and had it demolished (His son David later built a house on the property).  The Seal Harbor farm was later used as a riding stable connected to Acadia National Park.

The Pratt estates on Long Island are extensively documented on the blog ‘Old Long Island’, and those posts can be accessed by clicking HERE.

For a fascinating 1919 Country Life article about the Pratt estates at Glen Cove, click HERE

For a New York Times ‘Streetscapes’ article about the Pratt town houses, click HERE

And as always, click on any picture in this blog to enlarge for more detail.

"The Riviera, Where Every Golden Coat of Sun Tan

...has cost the gold of more than one man…”

The calendar says late fall, but a  look out my windows says winter.  With darkness arriving by 4:00 PM, one is very glad for Netflix—where I can dig deep into the archives of forgotten films and sometimes come up with gold, streamed to my laptop even as I check email.  Amongst the movies I’ve viewed lately, a theme has emerged (and one knows how the Dilettante loves a theme–bring on the coincidence!)

It started with ‘Encore’, a collection based on short stories by Somerset Maugham, the writer whose reputation in the design world is eclipsed by having been the ex-husband of decorator Syrie.  Each story is introduced by Maugham himself, and one of the treats is that these narrations are filmed in the garden of his home, Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat, almost overshadowing Glynis Johns’ performance as a high diver who loses her nerve while performing at Monte Carlo.  The decadent Maugham bought La Mauresque in 1928, and like so many houses of the socially ambitious before him, it became his calling card into Society, with invitations coveted even by those who disdained him. Crime writer E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote, ‘Everyone on the Riviera accepts an invitation from Maugham at any time they are lucky enough to receive it’

 Screen caps of Somerset Maugham and his garden at La Mauresque from ‘Encore’

Two movies later, I found myself back on the Riviera with “Love is a Ball”, starring Glenn Ford, Hope Lange, and Charles Boyer.  A plodding romantic comedy, the movie was filmed on location, and although Boyer does his best as a sophisticated matchmaker for money, the real star of this movie is its location—Ogden Codman’s villa La Leopolda at Villefranche-Sur-Mer.

Charles Boyer, as Mr. Pimm, arrives with entourage and realtor at ‘La Leopolda’ in “Love is a Ball”

Everyone interested in design history knows the story of Codman, I’ll try to do the briefest of recaps—a highly refined soul, he grew up in an aristocratic Boston family.  When his father suffered financial reverses, the family removed themselves to Europe, where Codman’s aesthetics took shape.  He became a designer/architect, and collaborated with Edith Wharton, on the groundbreaking The Decoration of Houses, the book that blew the knick knacks of Victorian America right off the what-not shelves, and ushered in an era of delicate French style that was to define rich taste for the next half century.   From Wharton came Codman’s big break, the decoration of the private quarters of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ‘The Breakers’ at Newport.   From there, he went on to collaborate with Elsie de Wolfe, and became one of Society’s favorite architect/decorators, creating delicately detailed houses for the haute monde from New York to Newport.

They inspect the terrace and the view, where the realtor warns them that the rent is “very expensive—7,500,000 francs a month”

In middle age, to everyone’s surprise, ‘confirmed bachelor’ Codman married the wealthy widow Leila Griwold Webb, six years his senior.  After her death a few years later, he found himself rich, and getting richer by the day on the inflated stock market of the 1920′s.  He decided he could retire, and casting aside the vulgarity of America, so unpleasant to his delicate sensibilities, he removed himself to France, where he bought the spectacular property of King Leopold of the Belgians, and began construction on his dream house, ‘La Leopolda’, the distillation of all his design theories, and intended to be the finest house on the Riviera.

  Boyer & Company inspect the kitchen, and walk through the empty main floor

 After hubris comes a fall, and the Depression hobbled Codman’s finances.  Forced to rent out ‘La Leopolda’, Codman retired to his small chateau at Évry-Grégy-sur-Yerre.  After their marriage, the skinny broad from Baltimore, and her ex-king husband, whose names do not get uttered in this blog (there is a limit to my shallowness, dammit, and those two are it), attempted to rent La Leopolda.  Famous freeloaders both, they tried to get a better deal and concessions from Codman, who finally declined to rent to them, grandly saying “I regret that the House of Codman is unable to do business with the House of Windsor”.

 Keeping an eye on the heiress across the bay, from the terrace at ‘La Leopolda’

Codman spent WWII at Gregy, in bed with his books and chocolates, even as the chateau was occupied by the Nazis.  Codman died in 1951, the year La Leopolda was sold to Izaak Killam.  It was later owned by Gianni Agnelli, and currently by Lily Safra, who almost, but not quite, sold it to Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokharov or Russian billionaire Roman Abramovitch, depending on which account you read, for half a billion dollars.  Repeat:  Half A Billion.  The buyer backed out, and Mrs. Safra, who really didn’t need the money, got to keep the 50,000,000 deposit.  One hopes she donated it to charity.

Glenn Ford on his way to see what everyone else has been watching through the telescope

The Rivera theme thus established, I moved on to the wonderful movie version of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge—the version with Tyrone Power, Clifton Webb and Gene Tierney of course, not the embarrassing Bill Murray remake.  And how do I intend to tie all this together?  Be patient.  We’re almost finished.

The Riviera of ‘The Razor’s Edge is mostly a sound stage version, albeit a gorgeous one.  The sets include a paneled Paris salon, which was built from  boiserie rescued by MGM from the Fifth Avenue mansion of Codman’s first patron, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, when it was demolished in 1927.  And in one of the movie’s best scenes, Codman’s famous remark to the Windsors is echoed by the dying snob Elliot Templeton when an invitation is procured to a party from which he had been snubbed “Mr. Elliott Templeton regrets that he must decline Her Highness’s kind invitation due to a previous engagement with his maker…”

Soundstage Riviera:  Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power fall in love on a terrace on the ‘Riviera’

and years later, re-unite unsuccessfully in ‘Paris’, actually a salon from the demolished Vanderbilt house

I think that ties up all our lose ends for today, although I probably should now rent ‘The Red Shoes’, with its famous scene of Moira Shearer running down the endless garden staircase at La Leopolda..  Or ‘To Catch a Thief’, where Cary Grant introduces Grace Kelly to quiche in his villa high above the Riviera… 

Class dismissed.  We’ll go out with this clip of Mabel Mercer singing Cy Coleman’s  The Riviera.  I could tie this all into Down East Maine by mentioning the great actress Maxine Eliot, who was born just south of here in Rockland, Maine, and who knew both Maugham and Codman on the Riveria, and whose villa at Cannes was was later owned by Aly Kahn and Rita Hayworth, who no doubt knew Tyrone Power, but I have to go shovel the car out of the snow….

I Surrender. Split Blogging Personality Disorder

Dear Faithful Readers:

I came to WordPress, where you are reading this,  with my blog because I was having some problems with features on Blogger, the original home of The Down East Dilettante,  for a few days.  Tech support is non-existent at Blogger, and WordPress has several features I like very much.   However, just as I was getting set up here, the Blogger problems resolved and I continued to write on blogger and import here, maintaining two sites, having accidentally split my readership.  Now the importer here is not working properly, and I cannot get posts from blogger to import , and their tech support has been no help, so those of you following me here have missed the three latest posts (assuming you care, of course).

So, my experiment in having two blog homes is officially over, and I am remaining on Blogger only from now on, and hope that those of you following me here will forgive the inconvenience, and re-sign up at http://thedowneastdilettante.blogspot.com/ , where I promise to stay and not wander again, as I start the second year of The Down East Dilettante.

Thanks,

Dilettante

PS, Some eye candy from upcoming posts in a shameless attempt to lure you back to my other home

A Night at the Opera, or, Portraits of Some Ladies

Sometimes free association leads the Dilettante astray.

Yesterday my friend Janet posted a wonderful found photograph on her blog, JCB, of a snappily dressed woman and a friend out shopping (Click HERE to see that photo).  Although different in subject,  it reminded me of the famous Weegee photo, ‘The Critic’, published in 1943.  I pulled up a copy of the ‘The Critic’, and found myself curious to know more.   Everyone knows this photograph—two supremely silly looking Society women being photographed at the 1943 opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, while a homeless woman looks on with contempt.  I wondered, okay, who were these two women in ermine, who looked ready to be extras in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera?  Although well known to many, much of it was new to me, and here is what I found.

First was the revelation by Weegee’s assistant that the picture was actually staged.   Weegee’s assistant was sent out to find the woman on the right, who was seriously drunk, at Sammy’s Bar in the Bowery, and then was charged with propping her up as the two ladies stopped for their close up.  The rest is photographic history.

 Ready for their closeup:  Mrs. Kavanaugh & Lady Decies in front of the cameras

Second was the identity of the two ladies. They are Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and her good friend, Lady Decies.  Mrs. George Washington who? Never heard of her.  But Lady Decies sounds familiar…

“Widow of John de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies,  Lady Decies was the former Mrs. Harry Lehr and Mrs. John Dahlgren, born Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, daughter of the famous Philadelphia banker.”  Say what?  You mean, the old dear in the middle is Elizabeth Drexel Lehr?  The one whose ravishing Boldini portrait hanging in the ballroom at the Elms in Newport I so admired just a few weeks earlier?  This cannot be!
 

Giovanni Boldini: Portrait of Mrs. Harry Lehr, 1916

But, it is, bringing this old Mary Petty New Yorker cover of an elderly lady dining in front of her youthful portrait to full life:

Mrs/Lady Drexel/Dahlgren/Lehr/Decies was a famous Society figure of her day, and should not to confused with her sister Lucy, who married Elizabeth’s first husband’s brother and after her divorce was known as Mrs. Drexel Dahlgren (builder of Champs Soleil in Newport), .  After the death of Mr. Dahlgren, she married Harry Lehr, court jester to Newport Society, the Jerry Zipkin of his day.

 Mr. & Mrs. Harry Lehr

Miss Harry Lehr

On their wedding night, he gallantly informed her that he was not interested in her as a woman (or in any women), but merely in her money.  Yet they remained married and Harry continued to play women’s roles in Tableaux vivants, and to exercise his rapier wit for the entertainment of Newport’s grand hostesses.  After Lehr’s death, she then Lord Decies, the widower of heiress Vivien Gould (who really liked cats, to the extent that she had a building for them called The Cattery on the Decies estate.  Really. Could I make this stuff up?)

Are you still with me?  I’m just warming up.

Mrs. Lady Lehr Decies evened the score with Harry Lehr in 1936 by writing a tell all biography, King Lehr and The Gilded Age.  I actually read it years ago.  Don’t ask me why, I just did.  She seems to have been much happier with the titled husband.  And the tiara.  But the question remains:  Did she ever look as lovely as in the Boldini portrait, or was the painter, famous for making his subjects appear wittier, more sophisticated and more glamorous than they really were, just practicing his artistic sorcery?  She looks ravishing in the portrait but the evidence from other portraits is that Lady D. was actually a more ordinary sort:

 1894 by Muller-Ury

1936 by Phillipe de Laszlo

 Weegee’s photograph was not the first of the two ladies together.  Here they are at Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s famous Last Ball at her Fifth Avenue Mansion in 1941.  Here we actually catch a glimpse of the Elizabeth Drexel of the Boldini portrait.

Apparently she was downright scintillating in comparison to her arched eyebrowed companion on the left.  It was more difficult to piece together a biography of Mrs. Kavanaugh.  I mean, who the heck was she?  and why couldn’t she find a better hairdresser in New York?

I persevered, and here’s what I found:

Mrs. Kavanaugh began in Richmond, Virginia, where she was born Maria Magdalena Muller.  She married William Haberle, a brewery heir from Syracuse New York.  They lived in a drab typical upper middle class Queen Anne house on Prospect Avenue in Syracuse.  Mr. Haberle died young, leaving her with two daughters.  By 1912, she was in London with her daughter Leonora (whose marriage to a ne’er do well was a failure, and who seems actually never to have left home), and is married that year to Colonel Kavanaugh, a cotton manufacturer from Waterford New York, who became colonel while serving in Governor Levi Morton’s staff.  

Nothing exceeds like excess:  Mrs. Kavanaugh, and five pounds of jewelry in her elaborate drawing room at 10 East 62nd Street.  Not for her the graceful Louis XV of the Fricks

Soon after, we find them living in a grand beaux arts town house at 10 East 62nd Street and beginning to appear in the Society columns.  Not for Mrs. Kavanaugh any published good works.  If she sneaked out to work in soup kitchens, it was a well kept secret.  Apparently, Society and jewelry were her main occupations.  If her portrait was painted, it isn’t in the public domain, but she was photographed often, from the Beaux Arts Ball to El Morocco.  Whereas Lady Decies is well documented by photos and portraits from her early years, her buddy Mrs. Kavanaugh seems to have sprung into the world, fully bejeweled and befurred (if Sarah Palin can make up words, so can I) after her 1912 move to New York.

 In 1943, Mrs. Kavanaugh bought, for cash, the house next door, number 8, apparently to protect her property.  The value of the combined properties that year was $211,000.  Just as a point of reference, number 10 is currently valued at $22,500,000, and the far less grand number 8 at $2,160,000.

Numbers 8 (center) and 10 (left) East 62nd Street

In 1944, Lady Decies died, and LIFE again photographed Mrs. Kavanaugh at opening night at the Met.  As Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the star audience attraction in most seasons, couldn’t attend, Mrs. Kavanaugh was the center of attention. Interviewed later about her jewelry display that evening, she explained that she would have worn more, but didn’t feel it was right in wartime.  Interestingly, Mrs. Kavanaugh and Leonora sat in the front row, and not in the Golden Horseshoe, the first tier balcony where most of the fashionable set were. And their drinks (Mrs. Kavanaugh had beer, a nod to the origins of her fortune, perhaps) were had at Sherry’s on the mezzanine, not in the more exclusive Opera Club.  Just sayin’.

At El Morocco after the opera.  Daughter has certainly inherited her mother’s style.

And back to El Morocco in 1950.  Get Mrs. Kavanaugh’s hat, an apparent riff on Bullwinkle

After the Weegee photo appeared A story circulated that her grandson, William Warner, son of Leonora, was in a foxhole in Europe when copies of the photograph were dropped by the enemy, bearing the caption “GIs, is this what you’re fighting for”.   Warner’s friend John Pierrepont set the record straight, which was that after the photo appeared, Warner had an unusual amount of mail that week, filled with clippings the friends had sent of the photo.  

Wait a second.  William Warner?  It couldn’t be.  But, yes, it is.  Mrs. Kavanaugh’s grandson is the same William Warner, who wrote the wonderful Pulitzer Prize-winning Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay.  I read this book too.  Much better than King Lehr and the Gilded Age.  Much. In the introduction to his fourth book he writes of 10 E. 62nd St. that he was born “in a house without great books, without a father, and, for some periods of the year, without a mother.”

And now you know as much as I do about ‘The Critic’, if you didn’t already.  It took me an hour to suss out this information, and another hour and a half to write it down, a half hour to choose the pictures, and it took you less than ten minutes to read it.  Lucky you. I’ll never get those three hours back

Speaking of A Night at the Opera, here is Margaret Dumont with the Marx brothers on a disastrous opening night in the 1935 movie.   Looks familiar, doesn’t it?   The silly socialite, living only for jewels and being seen at the right places was a standard cliche of old comedies, and one glance at Decies and Kavanaugh makes it easy to understand why.

Peter Pennoyer Down East

For almost every decade of the last century, one of the standard arguments in design has been new vs. old.  On one hand,  modernists insist that new is the only true religion, and that copying is bad.  On the other, traditionalists will put a gable roof on anything from cabin to shopping mall, and be satisfied that their God is being served.  Both sides have their points of course, but in the end, to my own eye, only one question matters—modern or traditional, is it good?  And in the last twenty years, as big traditional houses have come back in fashion, that question is more pertinent than ever as sheetrock and vinyl palaces have risen across the country, blighting the landscape wherever they land.

 Rendering of a house in Massachusetts, from Peter Pennoyer, Architects.  Described as ‘Federal’ in the book, it more fairly reminds this writer of the smaller houses of Philip Schutze.

Stair hall in the Massachusetts house.  Graceful in design & execution (I especially like the boxed treads and landing above the arch), its location in the center of the house recalls Ogden Codman’s Berkely Villa at Newport

I recently received a review copy of Vendome Press’s new monograph, Peter Pennoyer, Architects, by Anne Walker, Pennoyer’s collaborator on previous monographs about Delano and Aldrich, Grosvenor Atterbury, and Warren & Wetmore, and as I turn its lush pages, the question of tradition vs. modernism is foremost in my mind.

Mirrored Entrance Hall leads to central stair hall

 

Mr. Pennoyer first entered my consciousness years ago, when his country house for Louis Auchincloss was published.  It was an interesting house, designed for a book lover, traditional, based on Swedish precedent, and with more than a nod to post-modernism in its interiors.  Since then Pennoyer’s houses have grown increasingly pure in their traditionalism, and exponentially larger and more expensively detailed, following exactly the pattern of wealth redistribution that has overtaken the country.  When looking at one of Pennoyer’s designs, one is transported back to those halcyon years before the great depression, when understated but lush country houses were being built on Long Island, and quiet, elegant townhouses rose on the upper East side.  Mr. Pennoyer’s architectural world recalls limousines (not limos), silver cocktail shakers, and Lanvin gowns, and nobody does it better.

Drawing Room in an upper East Side town house betrays no sign that it was not built and decorated in the 1920′s

And herein, as I carefully examined each house pictured, trying to keep thoughts of revolution, or at least tax reform, from clouding my critical judgement, I had what was for me an interesting revelation.  And that is, that the houses that Mr. Pennoyer and his peers are creating for the latest generation of plutocrats, impeccably detailed, beautifully crafted, are interesting, not just for themselves, but because they are a new generation of the type—based not on early precedent, but rather on the latter work.  Thus, if a 1920′s Long Island country house of classical Georgian design draws its inspiration from 18th century English precedent (or 17th century  England or Italy, or 18th century France, pick a style)—Jane Austen meets the jazz age, if you will—and the 18th century house in turn evoked ancient Rome, Pennoyer’s houses go back to the latest model, and give a new, respectful version for the 21st century of the sophisticated, tasteful, architecture of ninety years ago.  In short, think if Ogden Codman channeled Blondel, Pennoyer is channeling Codman channeling Blondel.  This was brought home to me by a photograph caption, which gave inspiration for a beautifully carved Corinthian capital to Clarence Hanson, the carver who did much of Philip Schutze’s millwork, rather than to the 18th century carvers who in turn inspired Hanson.

Stair hall in upper East Side Town house, again, purely evoking the pre-depression past

The best of these houses are beautiful indeed, with a level of correctness in design (no shortcuts taken here, moldings are full and complete, curving staircases sweep beautifully skyward), and a sure sense of proportion that is rarely seen in traditional architecture today.  These are buildings meant to convey a message of taste and luxury, of money that is correctly spent, and that rebuke the sprayed on stucco chateaux and palazzi that have appeared across the country in this latest gilded age, filled with Real Housewives waiting for their closeup.

 Channeling Delano & Aldrich–a Georgian paneled drawing room mixes with neoclassical in its oval shape, and acanthus grilles above the windows

If I have a quibble with the Pennoyer firm, it is that they are almost too respectful in their homage, and missing is the wit and genre bending of some of his heroes—the sublimely elegant reductionist designs of Delano and Aldrich, who made traditional so modern, or the picturesque and materials-oriented Atterbury, or the over the top, rule-breaking Warren & Wetmore.

But these are small quibbles indeed, and for this Down East Maine boy, the issue was brought home by a very large shingled summer house that Pennoyer designed on an island not far from here.  Variations on the Shingle Style have been the favorite of big new houses up here for the last two decades, and many of them are just bad and overwrought and over constructed.  Too many borrow too much from the famous examples, and are turreted, gabled, Palladian windowed and gambrel roofed within an inch of their over-designed lives.   This house takes it down a couple of notches—paying close attention to the local vernacular—and succeeds admirably, addressing its site and the conditions of the region, with none of the cliches that characterize much modern shingle work
 

  A shingled summer house on an island overlooking Penobscot Bay in Maine pays careful homage to the local vernacular without falling prey to standard cliches

The production values and photography in this book are first rate, as is Anne Walker’s text., a welcome contrast to several recent design books.  As one would expect with a monograph of a living architect, critical assessment is beside the point, but the book is beautiful, and thought provoking, nevertheless.  I was especially delighted with the inclusion of several splendid renderings and sketches illustrating the Pennoyer firm’s couture approach to design.

What could be more perfect than a library with a secret door?