IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: YELLOW HOUSE

Few architects  had more impact on a region's built environment than Fred Savage, who practiced 100 years ago and more on Mt. Desert Island, and whose houses practically define the architecture of Northeast Harbor.   In the 1880's, he worked as a draftsman for Peabody & Stearns before setting up his own practice back home on Mt. Desert, and his early shingle style houses, large and small,  demonstrate that he learned the lessons of that office well.

The H.A.C. Taylor house at Newport

Peabody & Stearns were not the only firm who inspired him.  Savage clearly admired the work of McKim, Mead & White, arguably the most influential firm of their era.   In 1885, they designed one of the seminal houses of the era, the first great formal Colonial Revival house, for H.A.C. Taylor in Newport Rhode Island. Drawing inspiration from many early American sources, yet copying no house, it was a sensation, and was to inspire a generation of similar houses. Pictured below is just one random example, the home of a Mr. Parker  in Detroit, designed by Rogers & McFarlane, published in American Architect in 1897

Here in Maine, there are several spiritual design descendants of the Taylor house--among them is 'York Hall', built for  the Sewalls, owners of the Bath Iron Works shipbuilding firm.  Another great square 'Colonial' house, it has more than a whiff of both the Taylor house and the iconic 18th century home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Cambridge, itself one of the most copied of early American houses.

'York Hall', the Sewall mansion in Bath,  1897. (Photo via Swan Agency)

But  my favorites among the offspring of the Taylor house is 'The Yellow House' also known as 'Rock End Colonial', in Northeast Harbor.  It is a bijou homage to the Taylor house, designed by Savage in 1892 for his brother Herman as a rental cottage in the grounds of the family's Rock End hotel.  Its precise and formal form, a decorated square on a raised foundation and high pitched roof contrasts effectively with the shingled cottages that surround it.

'The Yellow House'

 Savage referenced many details of the Taylor house in 'The Yellow House', including the broken arch pediment of the central dormer of the garden front, and the 'Salem' portico of the entrance, but made themfinished work his  own, with a Palladian window in the highly decorated dormer opening onto the balcony of the portico.  The white trim contrasting with yellow clapboards perfectly reference a traditional old Maine color scheme, as on the Kavanaugh house below.

Kavanaugh House at Damariscotta, Maine, an early 19th century Federal, with many of the sorts of elements  (and traditional New England color scheme) that inspired the later revivalist houses above

In later years, the 'The Yellow House' achieved footnote in architectural history, when it was owned by portraitist Betsy Flagg (Mrs. John) Melcher, who occupied it for many summers with her mother, Mrs. Ernest Flagg, widow of the famed Beaux Arts architect whose own portfolio included the Singer Building, one of the early great skyscrapers.

THE ROCKEFELLER GATE HOUSES

I first consciously saw these buildings when I was five or six, and my little eyes nearly popped out of my head---veritable fairy tale houses sitting at the edge of the woods in the enchanted landscape of Mt. Desert Island.  Whither Hansel?  Gretel?  Sleeping Beauty, are you there?

Designed in 1930 by Grosvenor Atterbury, they were built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. as protective entrances against motor cars for his great public/private project, the network of carriage roads that traverse Acadia National Park and the Rockefeller estate in Seal Harbor on Mt. Desert Island.  Rockefeller's vision for the park was one in which the  public could travel and recreate quietly within the wild landscape.  With the gatehouses, beautifully designed and maintained carriage trails and their ornamental bridges, the effect is often less of nature unspoiled than of a very sensitively landscaped country estate amidst spectacular surroundings, and very beautiful it is, regardless.

The two structures, with their unlikely evocation of rural France, one at Brown Mountain in Northeast Harbor, and the other at Jordan Pond in Seal (we'll deal with the Jordan Pond House and its famous popovers another time, class) are far more charming than they have any right to be.  Textures and picturesque details are all at high volume, but in the hands of a master designer like Atterbury, they are always under control, each playing its part in the whole.

 THE JORDAN POND GATE HOUSE

Drawings and b&w photos from Historic American Buildings Survey

The larger of the two gatehouses is at Brown Mountain.  Long used as housing for park staff, it is no longer in use as an entrance, in favor of a new gate a hundred feet away.  

 THE BROWN MOUNTAIN GATE HOUSE

 

Details count:  Naturally, masonry repairs have been necessary over the years.  Originally, under Atterbury's watchful eye, local craftsmen carefully distressed brick, and used dark mortar.  Repairs have been made with smooth modern brick, and wide white mortar joints.  While obviously the work of a good mason, they stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.  Yeah, I know I'm a grump, but details count. (When I'm King, things will be different. Fake plastic shutters will be first to go).  We so need to give the National Parks more money---or is this one of those sometimes misguided but well intentioned edicts from the Department of the Interior in which new work on historic buildings must be identifiable from the old?

Looking at  the new gate, I am reminded of Vincent Scully's great quote about the new Pennsylvania Station after the demolition of the old one: "We used to enter the city like Gods, now we scurry in like rats".   And so though luckily the Gate House is in no danger of demolition, one still enters more like a racoon.   When these gate houses were built, Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., Beatrix Farrand and others, as well as Atterbury, were involved in the design of public circulation and space and they chose their materials wisely to integrate with the landscape and designed entrance to the beautiful land beyond as an event.  We so need to give the national parks more money. And who designed those Leaning Tower of Acadia trash cans?

I had originally intended to natter on at length about the history of the Gate Houses (the Dilettante does tend to go on), but while researching facts, I read a piece by Aimee Beal in the National Park Traveler that tells the story so well that anything I write would be tantamount to plagiarism.  For that account, click HERE.

For the Dilettante's account of another section of the Rockefeller Carriage Roads, click HERE

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

Just a reminder in honor of New Year's that not everything up here in Maine is old and held together with handmade nails....and because I'm under deadline to finish an article for pay about a lost modernist building with a connection to the early days of Design Research, I give you this intermission.

Peter Aaron/Esto, from New York Times, Dec. 1, 2005

This house, a stone's throw from Dilettanteville, is built of 12 shipping containers, around a central  great room, a project by artist-architect Adam Kalkin.  The interior design is by the estimable Albert Hadley, and needless to say, five years later, it is still one of the most discussed buildings up here.

For a New York Times slide show featuring the container house, click HERE

Brooks photo, Ellsworthamerican.com

Over on Mt. Desert Island, the Gwathmey Siegel designed house for Washington billionaire Mitchel Rales, replacing the shingle style summer house of Washington saloniste Susan Mary Alsop, continues to rise, as do the rumors around it.  Published cost estimates, which began with the issuance of an $18,000,000 building permit are now rumored to be $30,000,000, on top of the $5,000,000 paid for the property.  So far it looks like nothing so much as a small suburban shopping mall with rotunda food  court.  It sure doesn't sit as sympathetically on the property as the old house, and the materials are very pedestrian.  .But of course, sympathetic design is not usually what people who build $30,000,000 houses are after.  They're usually much more about displaying what they can afford, and features that they don't need.  And as you can see, the rugged scenery of Mt. Desert Island is difficult to completely overpower, in the way Gwathmey Siegel tamed all those potato fields on Long Island.  I'll reserve further judgment until the place is finished.  After all, I might be pleasantly surprised.  Not that I think Mr. Rales or his architects care one fig about the Dilettante's opinions.  But you care, don't you?  For the Dilettante's earlier post about this project, Click HERE

Photo by Sandy Agrafiotis, Design New England, Dec. 2010

And over on the other side of our little county, at the gateway to the hardcore Down East region, is this recent work by architect Bruce Norelius.  Interestingly, nearly 40 years ago, when the Dilettante first ran away from home, he lived on this same dusty back road, although unfortunately not in this house, which was not yet a gleam in anyone's eye.  This is the one that I decree to be just right, clean, crisp, subtle, and timeless, attuned to its site on a ledge amidst blueberry barrens with views across to Mt. Desert Island.  For the  full article and many excellent pictures in the Dec. issue of Design New England, please click  HERE

The Dilettante is still under the spell of a friend's New Year's Eve supper party  of fresh shucked Maine oysters, Lobster Newburg, and crisp apple pie, all prepared by and consumed with, excellent company.  I hope you all celebrated in your preferred fashions, and wish you a Happy New Year. Good riddance to 2010.

Down East Tear Down

As my youth took place pretty much between the two gilded ages, both of which produced lavish summer architecture in this part of Maine--for the millionaires of the first, and the billionaires of the second---I've had a front row seat for the decline of the first age, and the rise of the second.

Blueberry Ledge, Entrance Front

Forty years ago, many of the large houses on the strip of coast from Camden to Winter Harbor were being reduced or demolished, in favor of something less taxable, and easier to paint.  Many fine buildings, even some seminal works by great architects of a hundred years ago, were lost, or became institutions.  New construction was almost inevitably modest and tactful, even when expensive.  In those years there was also very little innovation.  All this changed, as taxes were lowered, and deregulation of financial industries enabled very large fortunes to be made very fast, and old fortunes suddenly gained new life.  Handsome old cottages were no longer being torn down or reduced because they were too large, but rather, were being torn down because they were too small.  It's been startling to watch, as billionaires start to outnumber lobstermen along the coast, as old shingled bungalows on splendid sites give way to McMansions or orgiastic arts and crafts fantasies, all stone and tiresomely earnest joinery by craftsmen imported from unpronounceable countries---the new equivalent of Lord Duveen providing his clients with 18th century boiseries.

Blueberry Ledge, water front.

One example of the new trend is this house, Blueberry Ledge, in Northeast Harbor.  Designed in the 1880's by the important firm of Peabody & Stearns for President Charles Eliot of Harvard, not a masterpiece, it was relatively small by the standards  time and place, and was the setting for a simple, high minded summer life.  Roomy, unpretentious, full of pleasant crannies and old fashioned porches, it was spectacularly sited on a rocky bluff at the Eastern Way entrance to the Harbor, overlooking the islands offshore.

  Later the house was acquired by Mrs. Peter Jay, who had given up 'Breakwater', her enormous Tudorbethan pile in Bar Harbor, left to her late husband by an Astor aunt.  Mrs. Jay in turn left it to her daughter, the noted Washington hostess and writer Susan Mary Alsop, one of the glittering figures of her day, and possessor of one of the finest cases of lock jaw to ever grace the East Coast (I actually do not intend that remark unkindly.  Her diction was remarkable to the ear, redolent of another time, another world).  Here, in the summer, she gathered and entertained many of the most prominent figures of arts, politics and society.  After Mrs. Alsop's death, her heirs placed the house on the market.   It was snapped up for $5,500,000, a pittance by Hamptons standards, but substantial in our part of the world, by a billionaire whose privacy I'll respect, and almost immediately razed, with plans for a new complex, covering far more of the site, designed by Hamptons favorite  Gwathmey & Siegel.   The building permit, issued three months after last year's economic crash, was for $22,000,000.

Views of two of the buildings by Gwathmey Siegel that are replacing Blueberry Ledge (and yes, the Dilettante obeyed the 'Keep Out' signs.  They seemed very sincere.

And by the way, about Mrs. Jay's pile in Bar Harbor?  After years of benign neglect by the next owner, a dissolute oil heir given to importing beautiful German boys for parties in the seventies, it was sold again, and in the spirit of the new gilded age, restored to a splendor far beyond its original, with hundreds of feet of gilt spike iron fencing surrounding it.

  Breakwater, Susan Mary Alsop's childhood summer home at Bar Harbor, designed for her great aunt, Mrs. John Innes Kane (Annie Schermerhorn) by Fred Savage

 I'll let my gentle readers draw their own conclusions from here.

Saving Mrs. Farrand's Plants: Asticou

 Note:  Because I have included an unusually large number of photographs in this post, I have kept the picture size smaller than usual.  Please click on images for larger detailed full size views.
  

 

 Beatrix Farrand in the 1940's, from The Reef Point Bulletins

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Asticou Azalea Garden on Mt. Desert Island a few days ago.  I was a little late this year---an early summer and almost endless sunshine ensured that the usual Memorial Day peak of this garden had actually come a week before.  Do not misunderstand.  It was still ravishing, as the photographs will show.  The story of how this lovely spot came into being, as a rescue effort,  is an interesting one. 

The great garden designer Beatrix Farrand had a lifelong love affair with Maine, having summered in Bar Harbor since early childhood.  Her feeling for the rugged landscape inspired much of her best work in a series of subtle gardens that blended into their rugged settings.  Her own Reef Point estate, inherited from her mother, was for many years her laboratory, where she experimented with design ideas and plantings both native and exotic.

Ocean front view of Reef Point (Reef Point Bulletins)

It was her hope to turn Reef Point, its extensive library, and collection of gardens into a foundation for the study of plants and landscape architecture, and to that end a board was formed, renovations were made to house and grounds for their future use, staff was hired, and plans were made for a distinguished future.  In addition to the plants and gardens and extraordinary library, the collections included the papers and plans of the English designer Gertrude Jekyll, which Mrs. Farrand had purchased at great personal expense when they were threatened with certain dispersal.

 A corner of the Library at Reef Point, as refitted for public use (Reef Point Bulletins)

Over one decade in the 1940's and 1950's, the world, and Bar Harbor, as Mrs. Farrand had known it, changed irrevocably.  A World War followed the Great Depression.  Two years after the end of the war, a forest fire devastated much of the town, destroying many of the estates of her friends and clients, and when the town re-built, it was not as a fashionable resort, but as a tourist destination.  Motels sprang up on the ruins of the estates, and masses replaced classes on the Main Street.  Not liking what she saw, worried about the future endowment ( the only niece of Edith Wharton, Mrs. Farrand was  not wealthy by the standards of the world she inhabited), and feeling that the new, less rarefied Bar Harbor, geographically remote, was not the appropriate location for the endeavor, she shut down the foundation in 1956.

The Blue Reception Room at Reef Point, with some of Mrs. Farrand's large collection of 18th century landscape prints on the walls. (Reef Point Bulletins)

She donated the library, the vast collection of landscape prints of three centuries, and the Jekyll archives to the documents collection at the University of California at Berkeley, where her husband, historian Max Farrand had taught.  She had the main house at Reef Point demolished. She herself arranged to retire to the family farm of her horticulturalist, Amy Garland, building an apartment between the Garland's house and barn, where she would live with her personal maid, Clementine Walter.  To create this new home, Farrand used salvaged architectural elements from Reef Point, and created an intimate garden, with many of her beloved roses, perennials and heaths and heathers, also brought from Reef Point.  Here Farrand died in 1959.

View of main garden axis from house at Reef Point, looking across heather plantings to Frenchman's Bay.  Urns in foreground are by Soderholtz (more about Soderholtz here)

 Another garden path at Reef Point.  The undulating edges of the flower borders, mimicking the edge of the forest, and the way the cultivated seemlessly blends to the natural, is deceptively simple, and brilliant. (Reef Point Bulletins)

Meanwhile, Reef Point was to be sold, and remaining there was the bulk of Mrs. Farrand's plant collection--(as late as the 1970's, I remember being struck by the perfect  effect of a Laburnum,  Golden Chain tree, over the fence, framing a view on shore path in front of the former Reef Point), including her remarkable collection of Azaleas and Rhododendrons.  Enter, to the rescue, the remarkable Charles Kenneth Savage.

The pool at the Asticou Azalea Garden

Charles Savage's family had long lived in nearby Northeast Harbor, where they owned the Asticou Inn, a big old shingled summer hotel.   Young Savage, noted for artistic talent at an early age, was at boarding school in Boston when his father died, and at the age of 17 he returned home to help his mother run the inn.  Savage, who loved the island, and its unique landscape, became friends with many of the leading talents of the day on Mt. Desert, notably Farrand, and landscape architect Joseph Curtis, who summered on the hillside just beyond Asticou Inn.  From both, Savage absorbed important lessons in the principles of landscape design, and the importance of using native plants and materials.   When Curtis died, leaving his property, with its carefully designed trails (a future post) as a public trust, Savage was its first trustee, and for many years the presiding genius of the place.  He also had a seat on the board of The Reef Point Foundation, and when Farrand decided to dismantle her life's work, Savage was given a year to rescue what plants he could.

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Casting about for a site, Savage seized upon the alder swamp across the street from his family's hotel, and armed with his ambitious plan, approached neighbor John D. Rockefeller Jr. whose own garden had been designed 25 years previously by Farrand, and Rockefeller agreed to finance the project.

Paths at Asticou

Savage, using the lessons he had learned so well from Farrand & Curtis, dredged the swamp to form a pool by the road, with the garden in the distance.  He conceived it as a Japanese stroll garden, harmonious with the rocky spruce clad landscape surrounding it.  A stream, with a gentle waterfall was formed, crossed by two bridges.  Savage, a talented sculptor in wood, had a particular feeling for stone, and selected many pieces of worn granite for integration into his design.  In this framework were planted azaleas, rhodendendrons and other shrubs from Reef Point.  A Japanese sand garden, inspired by one in Kyoto, was a surprise as one traveled the carefully raked gravel paths.

Two views of the sand garden at Asticou

A detail of stonework at waterfall at the South Bridge at Asticou, featuring Rhodendendron Kiusasianum

After Savage's death, stewardship of the garden passed to the Mt. Desert Land & Garden Preserve, funded by the Rockefeller family to maintain this garden, another Savage garden at Asticou (future post), and the spectacular Farrand garden designed for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller on their estate in neighboring Seal Harbor. Several additions have been made to the garden in recent years, notably a new entrance by Patrick Chasse from a parking lot at the rear of the property.

  Cornus Canadensis, Bunch berry, a favorite native ground cover of Farrand (and of the Dilettante)

Paths of finely crushed native pink granite are raked in patterns each morning, as they have been since Charles Savage's day.

An interesting fence screens the work area from the gardens

 

Do not adjust your sets.  The picture is not upside down.  Sky reflected in pond at Asticou