I RISKED MY LIFE TO TAKE THIS PHOTOGRAPH

No, seriously, I really did, although undeniably the bar lowers for what can be considered dangerous risk in late middle age.  No derring-do on ocean sailing boats, no climbing of sheer cliffs.  No, what I did was merely park illegally for five minutes and stand in a narrow traffic island in the middle of speeding commuter traffic (those suburbanites do love to drive their Audis at inappropriate speed in inappropriate locations) on Rte. 9 in Scarborough New York, all in order to photograph this amazing gate, which I've admired for years.  No false modesty about the builder of this Brobdingnagian construction.

I spent three days last week in the Tarrytown region of the Hudson Valley, researching various Maine homes of a certain family who,  after striking it rich in oil, loaded up their truck and moved to the Hills of Pocantico.  The Hudson valley has always been one of my favorite outings, combining as it does world class scenic grandeur, a romantic history and one of the country's great and varied collections of domestic architecture.   Despite the steady march of Dry-Vit and office parks, the Sleepy Hollow neighborhood around Tarrytown and Scarborough in the lower valley still offers much to see, not the least of which is this dramatic gate on Broadway, as the confusing network of routes 9 are often known on their run up the valley.

It is the former entrance to Beechwood, an estate originally dating to the 18th century.  The gates were commissioned in the early 20th century by the estate's then owner, Frank Vanderlip, one of the powers behind First National City Bank.  His architect was Rockefeller family favorite William Welles Bosworth, a Beaux Arts trained designer with a special talent for cold, cerebral evocations of the drama of ancient Rome and Greece.   For the reader who has never passed these gates, it should be mentioned that the scale is imperial.  Although the beautiful Grecian inspired iron gate is kept low to increase the dramatic effect, low in the case is actually around eight feet high at the crest, and the superb columns, rescued from a great demolished 19th century New York building---I once knew which, the answer now eludes me---are well over twenty feet.  Mr. Vanderlip must have felt like an emperor, or more aptly, Croesus, when he arrived home after a hard day of counting piles of money.

Although the gate is abandoned, the estate itself is condominums, and kept in good order, including the Roman gardens and pool added by Vanderlip, also designed by Bosworth.  The house, originally a relatively simple structure built in the 18th century, was repeatedly enlarged through the 19th and 20th centuries, is one of those places where degrees of separation abound.   The estate was purchased in the late 19th century by H. Walter Webb, a vice president of the New York central, whose brother, Seward, married the boss's daughter Lila, whose sister Margaret Vanderbilt Shepard owned the estate across the street by McKim, Mead & White, now the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.  Webb's widow, Leila Griswold, married Edith Wharton's partner in decorating crime, the confirmed bachelor Ogden Codman, whose first big  job had been for Margaret Shepard's and Lila Webb's brother Cornelius in Newport.  And so it goes.  

 The early Vanderlip years in the 20th century were the estate's most most glamorous era.  Intellectually inclined, Narcisse and Frank Vanderlip built a Montessori school and private theater (above) also designed by Bosworth, on the grounds for their and the neighborhood children.  The students later came to include those of John Cheever, who rented a charming studio house on the estate in the mid-20th century (Susan Cheever would return there briefly as a teacher).  

By the 1970's, semi-abandoned, the mansion itself became the setting for Merchant-Ivory's first production, Savages.  As with all their movies, the set is the star, and James Ivory's memory of that shoot (click HERE, pg.7) is worth a read.

Present day views of Beechwood, and the rotunda library and ballroom added by Bosworth, via Zillow

UPDATE 1:  An esteemed and ancient reader with sharp eyes sends THIS LINK to a Gant commercial filmed at Beechwood.  Would that I looked so lean and fit in my seersucker jacket :-(

UPDATE 2:   One of the pleasures of blogging is that if I don't know it, surely a commenter will (thank-goodness).   The columns, whose origin I couldn't remember, were salvaged from the old New York Customs House designed by Isiah Rogers at 55 Wall Street in 1836-42.  After the Customs house removed to Bowling Green, the building was taken over by Vanderlip's National City Bank, remodeled by McKim Mead & White.  Vanderlip had two of the columns, four stories high and turned from single blocks of Quincy granite  Think about what I just wrote.  Single pieces of granite.  Not the pyramids, perhaps, but a fairly huge engineering feat for the time..   No less amazing is that two stories of the columns' height is buried below ground in their current location.

BACK TO DORCHESTER--THE AMERICAN SAPPHO, CHARLES BULFINCH, AND A LITTLE MORE OGDEN CODMAN

Since writing last week about Hepzibah Swan's French-inspired pavilion in Dorchester, Massachusetts, I've been thinking about curves and ovals in Federal architecture.

The 1772 version of Monticello is outlined in bold.

Although American architecture had started breaking out of the square box as early as 1772, when Thomas Jefferson designed an octagonal bayed pavilion as the first house at Monticello, the movement toward more innovative room shapes did not begin in earnest until after the Revolution.

 In 1788, William Hamilton built a house in Philadelphia with the earliest known surviving oval rooms in America, in a complex plan probably derived from an English pattern book. The curve and the octagon did not fully enter the American design vocabulary until 1792, when James Hoban won the competition to design the new President's house in Washington, with its garden room centered on an oval bay fronting three oval rooms, each above the other.  

James Hoban's plan for the President's House, the beginning of a vogue for houses with oval bays at center, after the English fashion.

 The new fashion traveled quickly through the major cities, but nowhere did it gain foothold than the Boston area, where many country houses, beginning with Charles Bulfinch's Joseph Barrell mansion in Charlestown, in 1792. 

Charles Bulfinch's drawing for the Joseph Barrell house in Charlestown, with portico above and oval salon. (For a 1920's adaptation of this design in the Stotesbury cottage at Bar Harbor, click HERE)

 These houses were built by the city's new plutocracy, the men and women who had come to prominence during the revolution, and the early years of the Republic.  Their portraits were painted by Gilbert Stuart, their houses were often designed by Charles Bulfinch, and they led the stylish aspirations of their day.

The Jonathan Mason house on Beacon Hill, designed by Bulfinch, and likely the first of the hundreds of bow front townhouses that defined domestic building in Boston for the next century.  This house survived only a few years after construction, torn down when Beacon Hill was lowered.

 Within the next decade, at least a dozen houses with garden facades centered on a curved or octagonal bay were built in the countryside around the city, and in town, the bow front brick town house, first introduced by Bulfinch, became the most enduring architectural symbol of the city.

Perez Morton, by Saint-Memin

Mrs. Perez Morton (1759-1846) by Gilbert Stuart, 1802 (MFA, Boston)

It was against this background that Mr. & Mrs. Perez Morton, he a lawyer, she a descendant of one of Boston's most distinguished families, the Apthorps, built their country house in Dorchester, practically across the street from the Swan's fashionable concoction.

 Although under construction at the same time as the Swan house, the Morton house was less fashion forward than the former, its facade centered on pairs of engaged pilasters supporting a traditional pediment.  

The Perez Morton house, Dorchester, MA, 1796

The Stable complex

 To the side was an extraordinary complex of stables and outbuildings, all adjoining---the ultimate example of the famous New England paradigm of 'big house, little house, back house, and barn', in which all services are connected under cover, from main house to privy to stable to wood house, that one might not have to brave snows and drifts to attend to the various functions of life.  In this, the New England houses may be thought to have a direct link to the Italian farm villas.  

Morton house, garden facade prior to demolition

At the rear, an octagonal bay projected from the house, containing both an oval salon with a chimney piece imported from France, and an upper veranda, a simpler echo of the upper portico at the Barrell house.

Another portrait of Mrs. Morton by Gilbert Stuart (Worcester Art Museum

The Morton house is sometimes attributed to Charles Bufinch, who was Mrs. Morton's cousin, and he may well have advised, but Mrs. Morton herself wrote that the house was designed to her own 'whimsical plan'.   Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton was a woman of considerable talents.  Well educated, she wrote verse as a child, and in 1789, at the age of 30, she began contributing to the 'Seat of Muses' in Massachusetts Magazine.  Her books of verses came to include Ouâbi: or the Virtues of Nature. An Indian Tale in Four Cantos, 1790, and The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact, 1799, as well as an anti-slavery poem, The African Chief.  Mr. Morton, like his exiled neighbor across the street, appears to have had a caddish streak, and had an affair with his sister-in-law, which did not end well.

Stair hall in the Morton house.  The placement of the stair in a side hall off a long main hall was less usual in New England than the mid-Atlantic or Southern States. 

The interiors of the Morton house featured elaborate Adamesque plasterwork ceilings, a relative rarity in the United States.  The slightly awkward oval room featured a coved ceiling, also unusual, and a less sophisticated echo of the Swan's domed circular room across the street.  According to early accounts, the friezes over the doors featured swags centered by American eagles and shields, a first floor room in the octagonal bay had Zuber scenic wallpaper, and the 'sky parlor' in the attic monitor was a room about 10 x 16 feet, with corner fireplace with delft tiles, and windows on four sides looking out to the gilded dome of the State House Boston and the harbor and bay beyond, all now gone.

The oval salon in the Morton house. (From Some Old Dorchester Houses, 1890, via Dorchester Athenaeum)

The drawing room was on the second floor, unusual for a New England country house.  It is seen here prior to demolition in the late 1800s.

A French window, also unusual in America in the 18th century, opened from drawing room onto the upper veranda. (Some Old Dorchester Houses)

 As he did with the Swan's house, Ogden Codman later mined the Perez Morton house for inspiration for one of his designs in Newport, this time for his cousin, Miss Martha Codman.  Miss Codman's house, Berkeley Villa, was an amalgam of several iconic American houses around Roxbury and Dorchester.  The entrance facade was based on the Crafts house designed by Peter Banner in Roxbury.  

Berkeley Villa, Newport Rhode Island, designed by Ogden Codman, 1910 (NYSD)

The Crafts house, Roxbury, Massachussets, 1807, as drawn by Ogden Codman, 1892

Shirley Place, Roxbury, Massachusetts, as it appeared in the 19th century.  Notice dormer configuration later adapted at Berkeley Villa. (Boston Public Library, Department of Prints & Drawings)

 As Berkeley villa was much larger than its model, and required an attic story for servant's rooms, a steeper roof line was based on Shirley Place, the surviving Royal governor's mansion, also in Roxbury, both drawn by Codman as part of his study of early American houses in the 1890s. 

Garden facade of Berkeley Villa, inspired by the Morton House

 For the garden facade of Miss Codman's house, the octagonal bay and porch of the Morton house were copied.  Charming though the 'authentic' Federal style facade might have been, this house was in Newport, after all, and for the interiors, Codman abandoned the simplicity of late 18th century America in favor of Robert Adam's England, inserting a rotunda stair hall in the center of the house.

Stair Hall at Berkeley Villa (Andy Ryan, New York Times)

 In 1928 Miss Codman married Maxim Karolik a Russian opera singer, and together they formed one of the finest collections of American furniture, with which they furnished Berkeley Villa.  That collection is now a cornerstone of the American decorative arts collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where of course, also resides the French furniture brought back by James Swan years earlier.

Sofa by Samuel McIntire and painted side chair once belonging to Elias Hasket Derby, both from the collection of M&M Karolik, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

These blog posts are, as much as anything, just me thinking out loud about things that intrigue me, and making connections.  I could go on and mention the garden house (click HERE) designed by Fiske Kimball in 1922 in the grounds of Berkeley villa, that copied one designed by McIntire at Elias Hasket Derby's country estate, and that Kimball in turn was the man who first wrote about Thomas Jefferson's architectural life, as author of the seminal book on McIntire, and that Kimball in turn lived for a time, as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Lemon Hill, a house built in 1800, with central bow and oval rooms, or I could just go make lunch.

 

"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 retired jewel thief Cary Grant introduces a stodgy English insurance investigator 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....