Favorite Rooms: Duck Creek

This was going to be a 'Houses I Dream About' post, but I have driven myself half mad trying to find the exterior photos that I know I have of this exquisite house to no avail, so we will consider the interiors instead.

Arvid Knudsen, a Norwegian born antiquarian of exceptional taste, built Duck Creek at the edge of a salt marsh in Old Lyme Connecticut in 1940.  The house passed from Knudsen to his friend, connoisseur and dealer, J.A. Lloyd Hyde, who was one of Henry Francis DuPont's chief advisors at Winterthur, supplying him with much of the Chinese Export materials there.  The house is a testament to the power of architectural salvage.  Knudsen bought the New London post office, then being demolished, and had the materials trucked to Old Lyme, where he incorporated them into an elegant small  Adamesque pavilion.  The house had few rooms, followed a rigid classical aesthetic, and depended on the quality of its furnishings and proportions for effect.

The lovely drawing room was of a pure Swedish neoclassical bent, with plenty of air and light, contrasting grandeur and simplicity, with pale blue walls, white painted Louis XVI furniture, and sheer ruffled curtains at the windows, the better to reflect light on the antique parquet floors.  The doors were flush, and there were virtually no moldings to interrupt the smooth background, highlighting the elegant shapes within.

This is really about two favorite rooms, for I cannot pick between the airy drawing room, and the dining room...but, I think we'll go with the dining room.  Painted a pale French gray, with tall french windows, the room was decorated with some of the gentlemen's salvage, and what salvage it was---fluted corinthian pilasters saved from the white drawing room at Winterthur when it was redecorated by Henry Dupont as a period Empire parlor, and green satin taffeta curtains from the Misses Hewitt of Cooper-Hewitt fame, that remind one of nothing so much as a Charles James ballgown.  A tasty set of green painted chairs upholstered in an unexpected taupe leather compliment the curtains, and an enviable silver pagoda centers the table.  The floor is salvaged white marble, not highly polished or veined.  Between the windows is a collection of the Dilettante's favorite china, Creil faience, with restrained classical and architectural scenes on a cream ground.  The brass trumpet chandelier is almost modernist in its restraint.  I want to go to a dinner party in this room...

The White Drawing Room at Winterthur in the 1930's, showing the pilasters that were later salvaged for the Duck Creek dining room

Photographs of Duck Creek by Taylor & Dull, Magazine Antiques, December 1957

Photograph of Yellow Drawing Room at Winterthur from Christies, DuPont sale.

Houses I Dream About: Baroque Rococo on the Hudson

My thoughts have wandered out of New England again, over the border into New York and down the Hudson to this  fantasy house, straight out  of a Rex Whistler painting.

 Is it Vogue Regency?  Baroque?  Rococo?   The curvy beauty was designed by John Churchill in the early 1940's for Vincent Astor's first wife, Helen Dinsmore Huntington, later Mrs. Lytle Hull, on her ancestral acres at Staatsburg,.  It replaced a Second Empire manor built for her grandfather in the mid 19th century.  John Churchill is an architect about whom I know very little, and would love to know more.  This theatrical house, filled with light, curves and seduces,  literally embraces its site.

The new house, designed by architect John Churchill

 

The Entrance Front.  I'd do something about the overgrown plantings...something tight and architectural required here.

 First Floor Plan

 

Helen Huntington Hull in a portrait by Bernard Boutet de Monvel.  Note the wonderful mantel, with agrarian motifs. (AD)

The interior architecture was as downplayed as the exterior was fantastic.  Simple woodwork, huge windows opening onto the lawns, and elegant mantels were foils for her elegantly furnished interiors. A serpentine staircase seems downright modern in effect.

Drawing Room in Mrs. Hull's era (AD)

Drawing Room, Present Day

Mrs. Hull was a leading music patron, and weekends at The Locust saw many of the leading figures in the arts and society gathered.

The gentlemen play croquet before dinner

 

Louis Armstrong and Grace Kelly in the Library

The Library Fireplace (AD)

 

 Dining Room set for a party (AD)

Dining Room, present day view.  Notice the lovely triple hung windows allowing direct access to lawn

After Mrs. Hull's death in 1978, The Locusts passed through several owners, including Penthouse Magazine magnate Bob Guccione. The house survived remarkably well, with only the addition off the drawing room of one of those damnable Machin 'Gothick' conservatories that everyone had to have a decade ago, all wrong for this house, and an especially ill considered swimming pool on the front lawn.

The sight of it causes this blogger pain---someone didn't pay attention to the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' rule---poorly placed, out of sync and out of scale with the house, which had been designed to open to a sweeping lawn and the river views beyond.  If a pool in that location was absolutely required, close your eyes for a moment, and consider how much better it would have been as an oval, with larger scaled paving, and perhaps a darker surface, instead of the tropical turquoise?  Or perhaps shaping the terrace around it into  baroque scrolls?  But what do I know? I'm only a dilettante.  At least it isn't an infinity pool.

Main stair, present day view

The house is now owned by hotelier Andre Balazs, and has been re-imagined as an events venue and small hotel.

Photographs : Vintage interior shots form Architectural Digest, 1979, vintage photographs and recent interiors from the newLocusts website

ADDENDUM:  Since posting this earlier today, I happened across a terrific post about pools, all of them well designed and placed, on the Limestone and Boxwoods blog.

Favorite Rooms: Moulin de Launoy

Sometimes, I do wander out of New England for material. Today we go to France, to the Moulin de Launoy.

The Library in Moulin de Launoy, 1948.

I first saw the picture above at the age of 12, in House & Gardens Second Book of Interior Decoration (yes, I was that sort of child, completely house obsessed). and it went through me like a lightening bolt.  Here was something fresh and stylish, a real jolt to a sensibility reared in the New England of hooked rugs, tiger maple furniture and sandwich glass lamps (not a bad look either, in the right hands---look what Henry Sleeper did with Beauport).  It was a new idea of France, for me without the gilt of Versailles.  It did not hurt either, that the photographs were by the great Andre Kertesz..

Bernard Boutet de Monvel with his portrait of Millicent Rogers

The presiding genius behind this room was Society portraitist Boutet de Monvel, obviously a man of more than  usual style (see a wonderful post about de Monvel's Palm Beach folly in last week's Aesthete's Lament)

 Another View of the Library

I find this room amazing, and timeless, with its offhand mix of good furniture against rough walls, with the tile floors, even some lathe showing in the ceiling.  Flowers are arranged casually in earthenware pots.  Pattern is kept to a minimum.  According to the article, the chalky walls have a barely perceptible pink-ish wash playing against the terra cotta tiles.  No curtains to  block the light. A few well chosen pieces of architectural salvage give distinction.   The wide mantel of the dining room is very fine.   Compare this mill to the contemporaneous, nearly hysterical chicof the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's Moulin.  Here we have real style that answers to no one, completely  unself-conscious, and it puts to shame most modern efforts at this sort of interior.  The French have always excelled at this particular off-hand elegance---think Frederic Mechiche in his Provencal mode, for a modern comparison.

The photographs were originally published in an article in House & Garden in 1948, in one of the handsomest issues that lamented magazine ever published (Two more posts forthcoming from that amazing issue).  The cover photograph, of the de Monvel's entrance hall, is hauntingly lovely.

Moulin de Launoy, reflected in the mill race

Two views of the Garden, showing the same mix of refined and rustic as the house

The Salon

The Dining Room (forgive the curved line at the right, this is why I hate photographs split by a gutter.  Graphic designers should not be allowed to do this)

Mme. de Monvel's bedroom, elegant boiserie cut down to fit low ceiling space, to great effect.

Guest Room, with traditional Breton bed

FAVORITE WALLPAPER: ZUBER'S DECOR CHINOIS

'Decor Chinois' by Zuber (Christies)

Wallpaper?  Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I love it.  Here's an instance of the latter instance,  a hand blocked wallpaper by the venerable firm of  Zuber & Cie, founded in 1797.  The pattern is 'Decor Chinois', originally created in 1832 in imitation of hand painted Chinese papers.  It was especially popular in the first quarter of the 20th century, and has been used by some of the great tastemakers of that era  It was an especially popular paper for Colonial Revival decors.

 'Decor Chinois' in competition with an Italian neo-classical mirror in Edith Wharton's Dining Room  at 884 Park Avenue in the late 19th century.

 

A charming use in the front hall of the Merrick House in Hallowell, Maine, built 1800, as featured in House Beautiful in the 1910's.  The caption gives 'Decor Chinois' the seal of approval.

Enlivening an otherwise heavy handed guest room at Otto Kahn's vast 'Oheka' at Cold Spring Harbor, c. 1920

 Romantically used in the second floor room of the tea house at Martha Codman Karolik's Berkeley Villa in Newport, RI.  The tea house is a 1920's copy by Fiske Kimball of the famous Derby summer house by Samuel McIntire.

  .....And perhaps the most brilliant use of the paper, in the Belfry Bedroom at Henry Davis Sleeper's 'Beauport' at Gloucester, Massachusetts.  Notice how perfectly positioned the motifs are in relation to the complicated architecture. (photograph by Samuel Chamberlain, from Beauport at Gloucester, the Most Fascinating House in America, Hastings House, 1951)

 

 The paper plays against the gardens below the windows, and forms a foil for the figured maple furniture and lively hooked rugs

 

The almost dizzying array of intersecting ceiling slopes in this room bring 'Decor Chinois' to life. (Chamberlain photograph)

Here the paper is seen in two other colorways, from A.L. Diamant Company, which has distributed  Zuber papers in America since 1885

Favorite Rooms: Smalt

Yes, you read correctly.  Smalt.  Read on.

 Warner House (Beaupre Photo, Historic Portsmouth Website)

One of my favorite  houses is the McPhaedris-Warner house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, built by a merchant-privateer in 1718, and one of the earliest brick houses in New England.  A noble Georgian presence near the harbor, it has all the appearance of a fine townhouse in a small English city, and was the inspiration for many a good brick colonial revival house in the suburbs through the early 20th century.  Inside are handsome rooms, high and richly paneled.  The house remained in the hands of McPhaedris's descendants until the early 20th century, when the last of the family, Evelyn Sherburne, deeded the house and extraordinary contents to the Warner House Association, which has maintained it ever since.  The interiors have that romantic, rich flavor that only the accumulation of generations can give.  The hall has crude and enigmatic murals, the earliest in America to survive, with life size Native American chieftains flanking the huge arched window on the stair landing.  The dining room has interesting graining and marbleizing on the paneling.

The Warner House Association have been conscientious stewards of the property, maintaining it well.  In recent years, given the rich primary materials available, the curator, Joyce Geary Volk, clearly  a person both erudite and imaginative,  has restored different rooms to reflect varying periods of occupancy.  The drawing room is particularly evocative, restored to its Colonial Revival/ late Victorian appearance as Miss Sherburne had it.

But we'll return to all that in a future post.  Today's post is about smalt.  If anybody knows what smalt is, please raise your hand, but don't tell the others.  I didn't know smalt from s'mores until I saw this room. Continue reading.

An essential component of restoring an historic room is a chemical paint analysis, in which layers of paint are studied and broken down under a microscope to determine pigments used, to arrive at the colors for the desired period.  One of the early examples of this was the dining room at Mt. Vernon a couple of decades back, where it was found that verdigris in the pigment indicated an almost surreal shade of green originally covered the walls.

When a routine analysis was undertaken for the Parlor Chamber upstairs, a great surprise was in store.  One of the earliest layers of pigment was found to contain smalt.  For those who did not raise their hands, Smalt is ground cobalt blue glass.  It is most typically used in sign painting, to create the rough background surface one sees in older signs.  At the Warner house, the smalt was found to be of a particularly fine grain.  Although there were isolated instances of smalt being used for highlighting details of interior woodwork in England, this was the first time that researchers had encountered it in America, and the first time in an entire room.

The Parlor Chamber (photograph by Geoffrey Gross from Antiques & Fine Art)

With great excitement, the decision was made to restore the room to this appearance, and the hunt was on.  First, a smalt of the proper consistency had to be found.  Then, the painters had to find a way to properly adhere it to the paint.  A smalt-out was held, with many techniques tried.  The winner was----are you ready for this (pay attention, Martha Stewart)--- A glitter gun.  Another photo of the room may be found on Flickr

I recently visited the Warner house for the first time in years.  The tour was wonderful, given by an actress of talent playing Miss Sherburne, taking one through 'her' house and its history---lively, and not at all as corny as it sounds.  A giant improvement it is over the usual dry house tour given by well intentioned docents reading off long facts..

As we went up the stairs, and into this beautifully proportioned room, richly paneled, with its large deep windows of wavy glass looking out to the Portsmouth Harbor, I stopped breathing for a second.  It was like nothing I'd ever seen, and photographs cannot capture the ethereal effect; it has to be experienced  to fully appreciate it. The paneling had a low sort of luminescence, enhanced by the light from the river.  The color is difficult to pin down, sort of taupe/violet/mauve from the combination of a blueish green base shot with the cobalt smalt.  The already extraordinary effect was heightened by the reproduction of the original bed and curtain fabric, in a rich emerald green brocade.  It must be extraordinary by candlelight. The surprising combination of these colors and textures, with rich old San Domingo mahogany furniture, has to be seen to be believed.  Sometimes one sees something that challenges pre-conceived notions, and this is one of those instances.

Note to readers: Although this puts to shame  the gaudy and expensive paint effects various Park Avenue acquaintances have been allowing their decorators to smear over their walls for lo these many years, you should not try this at home.  Really, you shouldn't.  Unless of course, you have gorgeous 18th century paneled rooms that garner light from nearby water....