This Week's Reads

For the gentle reader hoping for insights to an obscure new novel, check in another time.  The Dilettante is all about picture books this week (as he is most others).

After all the brouhaha that's been going about, including Christopher Petkanas' mean-ish piece in the New York Times (I'm not going to bother link to it, you've all read it), I'm reading Duane Hampton's ode to her late husband, Mark Hampton, An American Decorator (Rizzoli).  And yes, I know I'm late to this party.  I waited for the local library to get it.   I've always been neutral about Mark Hampton---some of his work I like very much, some I find lacking or derivative .  I barely dare say it out loud, because his fans are a loyal lot who, having crowned their God, will not brook any criticism.  Sarah Palin fans are wimps by comparison. Therefore, I am relieved to say that I like the book far better than I expected to.  Mrs. Hampton writes intelligently and lovingly, even objectively ,about her husband's work, and the best is very good indeed---and that is mostly what she has chosen here.

Susan & Carter Burden's first New York apartment, from Mark Hampton.  I like this.  How could I not with that art? (For a post about Carter Burden's uncle's house in Maine, click here)

I'm alternating Mark Hampton with Peabody & Stearns:  Country Houses & Seaside Cottages by Annie Robinson (W.W. Norton).   This book is way overdue, a serious history of the firm that was probably second only to McKim Mead & White in importance in the late 19th and early 20th century.  They were also among the major innovators in what we now call the shingle style, and that development is fully covered here.   The printing is beautiful and crisp with wonderfully reproduced vintage photos supplemented with modern material (take note Acanthus Press, publisher of seriously over-inked illustrations).  My only criticism is that the designer is guilty of one of the Dilettante's biggest annoyances in book design----the dread split gutter illustration.  What looks great on a flat layout rarely works as well once it's on the open pages of a tightly bound book, splitting the image in two and destroying the impact.  But a small quibble.  I'm enjoying the book enormously, and gasp, am even learning a few things.

K

Kragsyde, Manchester-by-the-Sea Massachussets, one of Peabody & Stearns most famous houses.  Many lesser known, but no less wonderful designs are featured in this book

I'm putting both aside now----I'm going to read Claudia Pierpont's The Dignity of Duke Ellington, next up  in this week's New Yorker, and if I'm still awake after, the May issue of World of Interiors is calling me---there's a seriously delicious library in a house in Kensington, and Jorge Pardo's house has me ready to sell up and move to Mexico.  

When I'm through with Hampton and Peabody and Stearns and Ellington, I'm hoping to have in hand the new Beatrix Farrand, Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, by Judith Tankard.  Although Farrand has been excellently covered in a couple of earlier books, this one has the largest format, and draws more heavily on the Farrand archives at Berkeley, as well as the Garden Club of America's amazing lanterns slide collection at the Smithsonian, resulting in much excellent material. I've flipped through it at the local bookstore, and it is gorgeous.  Farrand summered nearby in Bar Harbor, and designed many of the finest landscapes in this region ( a couple of which I will be posting about in weeks to come, now that garden season is here).   The vintage color photograph of the lost Satterlee garden at Great Head in Bar Harbor, a subtle masterpiece of site appropriate design, very different from the grand gardens she is most famous for, is alone worth the price of this book for me.  Another must-own is the collection of Farrand's own writings in The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens, reprinted several years ago with a new introduction by Paula Dietz.  (Ms. Dietz once kindly wrote a couple of paragraphs about the Dilettante in the New York Times.  Many, many years ago.   I still fondly remember the fact checking department ringing me up before publication, to ask if I was still indeed 36, or had I turned 37?  That's a newspaper with a passion for accuracy.  And for those who care, I am long since past 37.  Way past.)

That's it.  No big intellectual revelations here.  But, if some of my choices this week interest you, let me urge you to think about ordering them from your local independent bookseller, and not from Amazon just so you can save that $10.00 that you'd only waste on something else anyway (unless you're really really really better than most of us).   Amazon is all good and well, but when the independents are gone, something will truly be lost.  One of my favorite commentators told me the other day about a Noel Coward record  he was seeking that was misfiled at Amazon under Christmas (Noel).   I prefer a world where people who know and love the material shelve it, read it, listen to it, recommend it.

And if you aren't lucky enough to have an independent bookseller anymore, I'd be glad to recommend our local bookstore--they couldn't be better.

MRS. ASTOR DOWN EAST

Vincent Astor, principal heir to the Astor real estate fortune, publisher of Newsweek,  owner of the Hotel St. Regis, was by all accounts an irascible, difficult, yet generous, man.  He was married three times, each wife famous for her style.   I posted about his first wife, Helen Hull's, marvelous house on the Hudson last year, and An Aesthete's lament posted this picture of his second wife Minnie Cushing's drawing room.   His third wife Brooke Marshall's red library, by Albert Hadley, is one of the most famous rooms of the late 20th century.   Up here in Maine, the last Astor summer home, chintz-cozy 'Cove End' at Northeast Harbor, sits in sharp contrast to the chic of those others.

 Mrs. Astor at Cove End (Vanity Fair)

When widowed Brooke Marshall became the bride of Vincent Astor in 1953, the wedding took place in Bar Harbor, at Beach Croft, the new summer home of his friend Joseph Pulitzer II, who had demolished the family home, Chatwold, a few years earlier.  Vincent Astor had many ties to Bar Harbor--several of his cousins had summered there, his parents were regular visitors on their yacht Nourmahal in the 1890's, and after his father died in the Titanic disaster, his stepmother Madeline Force (whom he despised) first rented La Selva, a chateauesque cottage on the Eden Street shore, and then Islecote Cottage on the George Vanderbilt estate, Pointe d'Acadie.

Cove End, Entrance Front (All black & white photographs, George Davis, House Beautiful, May 1934)

After their marriage, Brooke and Vincent Astor divided their time between his New York apartment, and the former indoor Tennis Pavilion, which Brooke Astor hated, on Ferncliffe, his family estate at Rhinebeck.  Vincent Astor had sold the Astor house, Beechwood, at Newport, and they were temporarily without a summer home.  In 1953, while cruising off Mt. Desert Island they both agreed that they loved Maine, and decided to look at local real estate.   They were shown Cove End, a roomy and understated New England colonial design built in 1931 by Barton Eddison, a millionaire inventor.  Mr. Eddison's architects were Roger Griswold and and Millard Gulick of Little & Russell, and his landscape designer was Beatrix Farrand, who summered in nearby Bar Harbor.

The water front, facing Gilpatrick's Cove, as originally built (HB)

The house, not large by Mt. Desert Island standards, was a carefully studied adaptation of a classic Maine farmhouse.  A huge center chimney dominated the scheme, and a dormitory for the Eddison sons occupied the space over the large living room.  Not shown on the plan is a large suite of servant's rooms over the garage.  Included on the property were two guest cottages and a greenhouse and service garage.

 

The landscape was similarly understated---Beatrix Farrand was a master at the game of contextual design---grand and exotic when grand and exotic were what were needed, and understated and old fashioned, when that was what was appropriate, as here at Cove End.  The plantings were of old fashioned plants, lilacs, viburnum, and ferns, with a large cutting garden of irregular geometric beds near the greenhouses.  Sometime after the original design, a stone terrace was added to the water side of the house.

 

The cutting garden (Vogue)

 

The Astors purchased the house completely furnished with the Eddison's collection of New England country antiques, and added possessions of their own, including huge sofas that had been cut down from those that were originally used in the indoor pool at Ferncliffe.  After Vincent Astor's death, Mrs. Astor had the house freshened up by the ubiquitous Sister Parish.  Further freshening was performed over the years by Mrs. Astor's Northeast Harbor neighbor, Nancy Pierrepont, all in a comfortable chintz-and-hooked rug summer house idiom.  After Sister Parish's death, the living room was re-done by Mark Hampton.  Personally, I prefer the Parish version, less stiff and in colors well suited to the seaside,  but I include photos of both that the reader may decide for himself.  After all, taste is subjective, no?

 

Alcove in hall

The Living Room in its Sister Parish garb (Vogue)

Personal Note:  The unpleasant family squabbles about Mrs. Astor's late years were sparked by the broken promise to gift this house to a grandson.  Of all this I know little, other than I find the behavior of both sides faintly repellent, and shockingly contrary to the way my own family handled my grandmother's late years, but this quick memory of a visit to Cove End when Mrs. Astor was still in residence is what I can offer to the record.

Another view of the living room, looking out to the cove (John Dominus photograph, Architectural Digest, May 1986)

The living room as redecorated by Mark Hampton (Brian Vanden Brink, Architectural Digest, July 1996)

In the early 1980's, a friend, on magazine assignment to photograph the gardens, and I had tea on the terrace with Mrs. Astor.  She was, true to reputation, stunningly charming, kindly of manner, and a real pro, skillfully and quickly processing us before handing us over to the gardener for the garden shoot   The gardener was a terribly nice guy, obviously devoted to Mrs. Astor, and when one of our party gently (read inappropriately) inquired, as Mrs. Astor was then in her 80's, what would happen to the place after she died, the gardener replied that Astor's son, Mr. Marshall, had assured him that everything would go on  exactly as before, and not to worry.   That memory immediately resonated when I read that some 20 years later, after assuming ownership of the property, Mr. Marshall fired that same gardener by telephone.

Mrs. Astor at tea on the terrace with neighbor John Pierrepont (Dominus, AD)

Cove End today, while hardly shabby, no longer has the stunning level of maintenance and grooming that it had during Mrs. Astor's day, and the hundred foot long flower border along the fence between the shore road and the estate no longer groans with summer bounty of seven foot delphinium and bright annuals.

 

Sitting room as decorated by Nancy Pierrepont (Vanden Brink AD)

Mrs. Astor's bedroom, as decorated by Nancy Pierrepont ( Vanden Brink, AD)

Cove End from Shore Road, 2009 (Gabor Degre, Bangor Daily News)