FAULKNER FARM

One thinks of late 19th century Boston as the most traditional of American cities, and cedes grandeur to New York, and innovation to Chicago.  Yet, in Brookline, a fashionable inner suburb, could be found two of the giants of American architecture and landscape, H. H. Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted, living  next door to each other.  Across the street was Charles Sprague Sargent, whose influence on landscape design was nearly as great as that of Olmsted himself, and around the corner could be found the country house of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner.  And near century's end, down the road another mile or so,  one of Boston's greatest heiresses and her husband were about to create a garden that would have a profound effect on landscape design for the next three decades.

 John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Edward Deshon Brandegee (Mary Pratt Sprague) 1907

Mary Bryant Pratt was the granddaughter of William Fletcher Weld, a shipping magnate who owned one of America's largest fleets in the mid-19th century.  Her family had owned land in Brookline since the 17th century.  Following her 1891 marriage to former Park Commissioner and future Congressman Charles Sprague, they acquired the Faulkner farm and surrounding lands from her cousin, and proceeded to develop it as their country estate.  For their architect, they chose Herbert Browne of Little and Browne, a firm that pioneered the Colonial Revival.  Browne was an architect with  an eccentric flair, and his designs combined traditional form and detail with often loopy Baroque flourishes.   The Sprague house, started in 1896,  was no exception.  Sited just below the crest of a hill, the house was an enlarged version of the Federal style country estates that dotted the region a hundred years before.  The entrance front was another matter:  here proportions and scale mixed it up with a baroque arcade, and a giant curved pediment.  An elaborate fence and wall, 12 feet high, surrounded the forecourt.

 

The garden front as originally built, as enlarged in 1903, and as it appears today.

The upper terrace, above, and the middle terrace, below

 The lake, farm and greenhouses seen across the service drive

 Concurrent with the development of the house, the Spragues almost inevitably turned to the Olmstead firm, less than two miles away, for their landscape plan.  Charles Eliot was the associate in charge.  From the first, the landscape project was fraught with tensions.  Naturally, the clients had strong opinions of their own---Mrs. Sprague that she wanted a farm, as a picturesque foreground to the view from the house---Mr. Sprague wanted the landscape terraced, not merely planted with shrubbery as in a public park.  It seemed that nothing Eliot came up with pleased the clients or the architect, although the trio pushed on.  Finally, a large formal terrace was created south of the house, drives were laid out, and relaid.  The main drive came in from stone gates on Allandale Street in the neighboring town of Jamaica Plain, and travelled uphill in a straight, impressive line, past the elegant stables and carriage house, for a quarter mile until one passed through an enormous and elaborate iron gate to the forecourt of the house.

The forecourt gates.  The giant statue of Juno in the distance required twelve oxen to haul into place after it arrived from Italy.

The entrance front and forecourt, as originally built, top, and as enlarged in 1903, center and bottom

The situation soon became untenable, and the Olmstead firm was dismissed.  On the recommendation of the their family physician, for whom he had completed a house and garden, the Spragues hired Charles Adams Platt, a relatively unknown artist turned amateur architect who had been making waves in Cornish New Hampshire with a series of small country houses and gardens that merged Italian and New England sensibilities. Half a dozen years before, after spending time in Italy, Platt, then known as an etcher and painter, published a volume about Italian gardens, which had been well received, and was well positioned to an audience ready for a shift in taste at the end of the century.

 A comparison of the plans of Villa Gamberaia, above, and Faulkner Farm, below, shows how well Platt utilized what he had learned in his studies of Italian gardens.

For his first large scale project, Platt turned again to his beloved Italian models, in particular the Villa Gamberaia in Tuscany, whose siting on a terrace at the edge of a hill was so similar to that of Faulkner Farm.  It is hard today, so familiar are we with gardens inspired by this one, to understand how radically fresh the design was to late 19th century eyes, used to either the studied naturalness of Olmstead or the stiff grandeur of the French Beaux Arts..  For the garden, Platt built a  1/2 acre terrace east and below the main terrace, on axis with a drawing room window in the house.  Here he built a garden whose shape an siting were inspired by Gamberaia, with beds filled with flowers, loosely planted in a new painterly style, the whole framed by a peristyle centered on a casino based on one at the Villa Lante,  A pool in front of the casino reflected the architecture, and splashing fountains gave sound and dimension.   Antique sculptures found on travels to Italy gave the appropriate accents.  Long sight lines gave a constant sense of vista. At the hill summit, reached by stairs, was a natural bosquet, formally layed out, centered on a temple.

Top, stairs to bosquet from forecourt, and Bottom, the temple and Bosquet as they appear today.

The completed garden was a national sensation.  The first pictures of Faulkner Farm were published in Harper's Monthly in 1899, to universal acclaim, and it became possibly the most published in the world for the next 20 years, featured in practically every major design and gardening magazine, and at least two dozen books.  Platt's reputation was secured, and for the next 20 years he was to become America's premier country house architect, repeating and refining his formula for many of the finest designs of his day.

The Spragues were generous with their creation, permitting the public to visit on Wednesdays through the summer months, in a time less concerned with security and privacy than today.  In keeping with one of America's greatest gardens, their head gardener, H. W. Craig, was for many years the president of the Gardener's Association of America.

The Casino, top, in the main garden was inspired by one at the Villa Lante, bottom

The main cross axis of the garden, seen from the driveway, top, and looking from garden across drive to steps to bosquet, bottom

Two Views of the casino and pool.

The main garden and casino.  Top, an early 20th century handcolored slide, Center, as it appeared after simplification of plantings, an the lowering of the casino roof, 1920's, and Bottom, as it appears today.

Interior of the casino, with Pompeiian style frescoes

In 1902, while his wife was in Egypt with the children, Charles F. Sprague died of a brain disease.  For the next two years, Mrs. Sprague threw herself into renovations and improvements on the estate.  The house was clad in brick, and a third floor, taller than the original second floor, was added.   A ballroom wing replaced the marble pergola on the upper terrace.  The neoclassical ballroom was one of the grandest private rooms in the Boston area, with allegorical ceiling murals by Allan Schwartz, Gobelins tapestries on the walls, and ending in a domed rotunda that would have done Pavlosk palace proud.  On the south wall, six tall French doors opened into a huge conservatory, in turn opening onto the terrace.  With ground floor and mezzanine, the house now had five floor levels.

View of the house from the casino, c. 1900, and today.  The view from the casino was compromised by the greatly enlarged house and the intrusion of the ballroom wing.

A pergola on the upper terrace was sacrificed for the addition of a ballroom wing, a necessity lacking in the original house.

In 1905, Mrs. Sprague remarried, to a friend of her husband's, Utica clothing manufacturer Edward S. Brandegee, and life continued much as before.  In the 1920's, the main flower garden was simplified, and the casino inexplicably remodeled, the arch removed and the roof lowered.  Stone paths replaced gravel, the parterres were replaced by simpler borders around an open expanse of lawn to accomodate large gatherings.  The statuary collection was reduced, and the garden took on the form it has today.

Handcolored slides of the garden in the late 1920's. (Smithsonian Institution)

Mr. Brandegee died in 1942, Mrs. Brandegee in 1953.  Amazingly, Faulkner Farm, now know as the Brandegee estate, or as Allandale Farm, is still in the hands of her descendants.  150 acres remain of the original 192, and are still operated as a working farm, complete with seasonal farm stand, the last remaining farm in greater Boston.  The main house has not been occupied as a residence for many years.  After being leased for many years to the Academy of Arts & Sciences, it is now offices, and occasionally used for private functions, including last year's wedding of John Kerry's daughter Vanessa.  The stables and carriage house are leased to the Boston police department, and house the department's Mounted and K-9 training units. 

The carriage house

Much of this story is a well known chapter in design history, but I have been mesmerized since childhood by Platt's artistic creation, and offer it here for my readers pleasure.  Unbelievably, on a neighboring hilltop, the entire program was to be performed again, by the same team of designers, for Mrs. Brandegee's cousin.  Stay tuned for that story.

For an in-depth account of the creation of Faulkner Farm, I recommend Alan Emmet's wonderful book, So Fine a Prospect, Historic New England Gardens, which also includes the story of Hamilton House, remodeled by Herbert Browne, featured in a previous Dilettante post.  (Click HERE for that post)

And, being the Down East Dilettante, how do I bring this story back to my part of Maine?  With this photo of Birnam, a cottage at Bar Harbor, designed by Rotch & Tilden, where the Brandegees held forth summers.

NEGLECTED

I was searching the internet for something else when I came across these vintage photos of a garden house on the Joseph Cudahy estate in Lake Forest Illinois, which was designed in 1930 by David Adler.  Cudahy was a meat packing executive, and his wife Jean Morton, a passionate gardener, was daughter of Secretary of the Interior Sterling Morton, who created Arbor Day.  The garden house was listed as among the ten most endangered buildings in Lake Forest in 2005, apparently being totally neglected with caved in roof.  The main house was recently for sale for in the neighborhood of five million dollars, so laziness, rather than money, would seem the culprit here.  Naturally, I don't understand, because a little Orangery with arched windows and a fountain pool in the center seems like just the ticket to me here in Maine on a January afternoon, and I can't imagine it would be any less so in the Chicago area...

Be sure to click on photo for larger to see the fine detail.

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.

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.