We Wish You a Happy 2010

Boy, Pompey, Sock Monkey, and I wish you the happiest, healthiest, and most prosperous 2010!

Photo by Boy Fenwick

My Darling Clementine(s)

This is my favorite time of year. Sure, I like Christmas and all that, but what I really love . . . are clementines! And not just any ones, but those that are shipped in a charming little wood crate with "Darling Clementines" printed on the label.

It's a silly play on the sentimental, mawkish, old song "Oh My Darling, Clementine!" about a 49-er miner's drowned daughter. And so, of course, the "Darling" on the label bears no relation to your's truly. That notwithstanding, every year I look forward to finding these tasty clementines in the grocery store and am always delighted to take them home with me. Popping a section of one of these easy-to-peel, little early-winter pleasures from Spain in one's mouth is--for me at least--a particularly Proustian experience.  It's hard to eat just one--thankfully, several dozen come in each box! 

The chorus to the mournful song takes on a decidedly new meaning, when considering where these little darlings wind up . . .

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, Clementine!

A Christmas Gift for Pompey

This year our present to Pompey was a dog bed for the master bedroom that Boy had made in a handsome ticking from Rogers & Goffigon. Last evening we lit a fire in the bedroom's fireplace, and the three of us sat in the room, reading aloud. Pompey enjoys his new bed, but as you will see he prefers to push his tushie up against the firescreen for a good baking.

"Hmmm . . . this new bed is comfy"

"The bed is OK, but this is nicer -- good and hot!"

Tomorrow: photos of the decorations at Darlington . . .

Photos by Boy Fenwick

A Christmas Greeting From Long Ago...

...and from those of us today at Darlington House

The Decorating Begins...

After our less-than-successful efforts of non-decorating at Darlington last weekend, Boy and I were determined to right this mess, and with new-found zeal plotted out our trip to the flower district in Manhattan to pick up the necessary greens to decorate our house and make up for lost time and sloth.

So yesterday morning with steely determination we pulled ourselves out of bed in our City apartment at 6:15 am and made our way to 28th Street in Manhattan, or what remains of the wholesale flower district. Our first stop was Fischer & Page, Ltd., a purveyor that always has the best, freshest, most unusual, and most gorgeous selection of cut flowers. We were happy to find Chris, a helpful and fun fellow that usually attends to us, and quickly decided with his input that a recently-arrived load of elegant quince branches would be a far-lovelier choice to decorate our drawing room at Darlington than the magnolia branches we had originally thought. We liked the fact that there’s nothing all that much Christmas-y about quince, and so much less expected than magnolia. We put a “hold” on three bunches, along with a plain balsam wreath for the door of our workhouse, and then headed out to scope out the rest of the street.

Our next stop was at Foliage Garden where, with the help of the ever-pleasant and amusing Jeff, we selected a large flat of paper-whites, two clay pots of white amaryllis, and three pots of muga pines. We then moved on to U.S. Evergreens, Inc., and chose two of their beautiful wreaths: the first, made from southern magnolia leaves, we decided would be perfect for the door of our smaller barn, and the second, made from a medley of evergreens, we thought would be perfect for the door to our kitchen, which is our primary, day-to-day entry to the house. Our final stop was Planter Resource, Inc., where we picked up a carton of votives. With all of this in hand we loaded up the Rover and drove uptown to pick up the rest of our stuff, and Pompey.

The Rover, packed to the gills

It was bit of a challenge fitting everything we needed to in the Rover, but we managed to do it. We arrived at Darlington mid-afternoon, unloaded the truck, and set about beginning the tasks and labors required to make Christmas a reality at Darlington House. 

Stay tuned for pictures of the finished results...

The kitchen with all our bags and boxes

More bags in the kitchen, plus 75 votives

The quince branches, ready for decorating the drawing room

A dozen additional Dietz lanterns to light the drive, plus our little Christmas tree

One bundle of the 175 yards of white pine roping

The balsam wreath for the workhouse door

Three muga pines, for the entry table

Paper whites for the flower-arranging room

Our collection of ornaments, organized by color, ready to hang on the tree...

Photos by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling

Boy Makes a Wreath

Boy and I have been tardy decorating Darlington for Christmas this year. I think we have a lot of company in this, though, given what I’ve heard from others and have also been reading on the blogs. It seems that Christmas occurring on a Friday this year has upset many a timetable, and we are not alone in finding it to be somewhat challenging to crank up the Christmas spirit this season.

Last year's garland and wreaths

But we’d better get moving, and but fast. While Christmas is only a couple of days away we’re having 75 for cocktails just a few days later and the house needs to be decorated for the party. It won’t be the end of the world if we aren’t done decorating by Christmas day, but it will be a calamity if we’re not fully decorated a few days later when the throng shows up expecting a show.

With this in mind we forced ourselves this past Saturday to get out the door and find a tree. We went to a nearby “you cut ’em” Christmas tree farm and found an acceptable option, currently sitting in our barn where we stowed it when we got home. We’ll decorate it Christmas Eve. Although there were numerous options available to find a tree on Saturday, getting our hands on roping and wreaths was another matter. Our usual sources were not only picked over, but mostly picked clean. The early-birds got there first. We bought the last bundle of plain-as-Jane white pine roping that our local florist had, in sad contrast to the long-gone boxwood roping we usually get. We found some more white pine roping at our local supermarket, of all places, so I think we’re ok in that department, particularly if we double it up to make thicker garlands. However, the only wreaths we found were desiccated, smashed, and showering needles, so no luck there.

We usually put up half a dozen or so wreaths at Darlington – one on the smaller of our two barns, another on our workhouse, and the rest on the house. So when we returned with nary a wreath to hang we thought it was a pathetic situation, indeed. Although we’re planning on going to the flower district in Manhattan to buy magnolia branches to decorate the drawing room at Darlington for our party, we wondered would we have to buy our wreaths there as well? The thought of doing so seemed extravagant and wasteful -- why not just burn our cash while we’re at it?

Fed up with the whole thing I decided that my time would be better spent working on my blog for the rest of the afternoon. But Boy came up with a brilliant idea. He would make a wreath for the front door at Darlington, so we would at least have something on our house to alert passers by that its inhabitants were not so slothful that they couldn’t at least bring themselves to find a single wreath. So off he went to one of our barns and set to work.

Boy shows how it's done

Within an hour he came back to the house with a lovely, beautifully-made wreath of the freshest greens imaginable, and hung it on our front door. All it took was the following: a wreath form (we have a handful left over from prior years), floral wire, assorted greens, and a healthy dose of flair and style – which Boy has in abundance. And he didn’t have to leave Darlington to find any of the components. We already had the necessary supplies and the greens – a combination of Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) and Western red cedar/Arborvitae (Thuja plicata) – were growing right there on our property.

The finished product

(Ignore door color, it's the undercoat)

So lessons learned here include:

• The early bird does, in fact, get the worm;
• You don't have to buy your wreaths, you can make them easily enough if you have the tools and sufficient ingenuity; and
• The prospect of making 5 more wreaths is sufficiently daunting that we probably will end up buying the rest of them at the flower district after all...

Photos by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling

Guest-Posting on Emily Evans Eerdmans

Please visit and read my guest-posting on the inestimable Emily Evans Eerdmans' blog.  I am tickled pink and highly flattered to be included in such august company!

http://emilyevanseerdmans.blogspot.com/

My Slim Keith Story

Shortly after I graduated from college I met and started dating an older man, named Fred. Well, he was 40. He was an old-money California republican, prematurely gray with steely blue eyes. Handsome. Fred grew up in Los Angeles, went to the Harvard School and Stanford, and wound up on the East Coast after a stint in the Navy where he made enough investing in real estate that he didn’t have to work that much, if at all. He was a lot of fun. He loved the good life, was always up on what was what, and he taught me a lot about the pleasures of stylish, grownup living.

Slim Hawks with Jimmy Stewart

Fred made a point of cultivating friendships with interesting, well-heeled, and well-connected people. He gravitated to people in the arts, and his California connections ran deep. One of his pals was a man named Gep Durenberger, a renowned antiquarian based at the time in San Juan Capistrano, California, who was famous for his exquisite taste and a clientele comprised of the grandest gals of the West Coast and those who aspired to join their ranks. Whenever Fred went to visit his parents, who had retired to a house overlooking the ocean in Newport Beach, he always looked up Gep. I once went with him on one of those trips and I’ll never forget spending an evening in Gep’s magical bougainvillea-covered house in the hills with rooms filled with the most astonishing assortment of antiques and decorative arts I’d ever seen outside of a museum. The centerpiece of the livingroom was a fantastical, 18th-century, red-lacquered, Chinoiserie-decorated English secretary-bookcase full of Derby porcelain flowers. Blew me away. Nothing like it in the straight-laced, serious world I grew up in.

Gep was a great friend of John Saladino, the decorator, who lived in New York at the time, and who threw a cocktail party in Gep’s honor during one of his whirlwind visits to the City. Fred invited me to join him at the party, and so I went. Held in Saladino’s decorated-to-the-nines apartment on the Upper East Side, the place was crammed with guests and friends of Gep, a veritable crush. At one point I found myself sitting next to an old woman with pulled back gray hair, big, oversized-glasses, and a slash of red lipstick. She was obviously not all that well, and supported herself with a cane. But she was a character, and I enjoyed speaking with her, even though I can’t remember what we spoke about all these years later. I do remember, though, that at one point she turned to me and patted me on my knee and said “Well, you are a nice young man but I must leave you now as I am having dinner with Princess Alexandra, and I don’t want to keep her waiting.” to which I replied, “My, but ain’t you grand!” She laughed at that and responded “You are an amusing, impertinent boy, why don’t you come to my apartment for tea tomorrow, with your friends?”

Slim Hawks with Diana and Reed Vreeland

After she left, Gep’s nephew, also a friend of Fred’s and someone whom I had come to know and like, came up to me and asked me if I had enjoyed speaking with Lady Keith? I responded “Lady Who?” He looked at me as if he were speaking with an idiot. “Lady Keith, that’s who – don’t tell me you don’t know who she is! That was Slim Keith you were speaking to!” I had no idea who Slim Keith was and said as much, to which he responded, exasperatedly, that she was one of the greatest swans of the 20th century, and that he couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her. I said that she seemed nice enough and that she had invited me to tea at her apartment the next day. He then told me that a group of us had been invited and that I should do some homework beforehand because she was the “real deal.”

Lady Keith, photographed by Horst

Like the nephew, Fred was surprised that I had never heard of her, but he was perfectly nice about it and filled me in over dinner on exactly who she was. Married at one time to Howard Hawks, she was a perennial on the best-dressed list, the inspiration for Lauren Bacall’s Hollywood style, cuckolded by Pamela Digby Churchill while married to Leland Hayward, and the source for Lady Ina Coolbirth in Truman Capote’s unfinished “Answered Prayers”, among other things. Quite the resume.

Slim Keith, around the time I met her

So it was with a new-found appreciation of my hostess that I found myself the next afternoon sitting in her apartment in the East 60s across the street from the Plaza Athenee. The place was beautifully decorated in high California English style, with comfortable chintz sofas and a profusion of handsome furnishings. It was published on the cover of House & Garden the next month.

She was not feeling particularly well, and spent the better part of the visit sitting in a chair. The conversation was light, and largely focused on recalling memories with Gep, an old friend of hers. While tea was offered, no-one chose to drink it preferring instead to help themselves to the more potent brews also on hand. I remember thinking at the time that I was in the presence of someone who had at one point been one of the brightly burning stars of a very rarified world, and that this was something that I should take in, and remember.

And so I did.

Lunch at the Russian Tea Room

From time to time I plan on doing a posting on a restaurant where I have dined, or where I may dine regularly. Not exactly a foodie’s review, but rather Reggie’s observations regarding what made the experience worth reporting on for those who read this blog.

Today’s post is on the Russian Tea Room.  Yes, that's right: the Russian Tea Room.

I first learned of New York’s fabled Russian Tea Room as a youth living in Connecticut, where WQXR was a staple of our household’s radio dial. The restaurant was a regular advertiser on the station at the time, and all of its ads featured the lilting Kentucky-accented voice of Faith Stewart-Gordon, its owner/proprietor. In the ads Ms. Stewart-Gordon urged her listeners to take a meal in the restaurant’s sumptuous White-Russian world of samovars, blinis, and caviar, with the tag line that its 57th Street location was “…just steps from Carnegie Hall.”

When I moved to New York after college Ms. Stewart-Gordon still owned the restaurant and it was still on 57th Street, a favorite of a well-heeled clientele and media heavy-weights. I stopped in for a drink one evening after work with a friend of mine to, as-they-say, “check out the joint” and was pleased to see the interior was just as fantastically old-world Imperial Russian as I had hoped it would be. I also clocked that Barbara Walters was sitting in the front banquette. However, I also concluded that this was a richer and older venue than such as I could appropriately afford, a view confirmed by the fish-eye appraisal of me and my companion by the bartender who somewhat reluctantly took our order. After finishing our astronomically-priced glasses of champagne we beat a hasty retreat.

The intervening years have not been particularly kind to the Russian Tea Room. There have been multiple owners, multiple closings, renovations, and ups and downs. Today the restaurant is primarily thought of by the city’s cognoscenti as more of an over-priced, over-the-top, food-mill tourist joint than the dining room for the city’s elite that it once was. That’s not surprising since its last renovation was under the ownership of Warner LeRoy of the now-defunct Tavern on the Green and Maxwell’s Plum empire. No longer owned by the LeRoys, today the Tea Room is controlled, I believe, by a private equity consortium rumored to be more interested in the astronomically-valuable real estate that it sits on than in the restaurant.

So it is with some surprise that I found myself there the other day for the first time since my previous visit, happily sitting in a cherry-red banquette in a still-glorious interior, delightedly tucking in to a delicious meal beautifully served by an attentive staff.

Say what?

Here’s how it happened. Several weeks ago I decided to take my business manager, a wonderfully attractive and fun lady, out to lunch to thank her for her support this year. I wanted to take her somewhere that was a bit of a destination, someplace attractive and grown-up, someplace special. I trolled around the Internet looking for suitable candidates in midtown, where our offices are located, and came up with the Russian Tea Room as an option. With its famed décor of green, red, and gold, I thought it couldn’t possibly get any Christmas-ier than the Russian Tea Room, and the location was perfect.

On http://www.opentable.com/, one of my favorite restaurant review sites, I was surprised to read that every subscriber’s review for the restaurant was uniformly favorable, and in some cases glowingly-so. On top of that, the site was offering 1,000 points in their incentive award program if I reserved a table at the Russian Tea Room, when the typical award was only 100 points. So, I decided “why not?” and booked a table for the two of us at 12:30 on a weekday, the prime-time midtown restaurant lunchtime dining hour.

It was with some trepidation that my companion and I entered the doors of the restaurant, uncertain of what we would find. We were greeted immediately by a pleasant and welcoming maitre d', our coats were whisked away, and we were ushered to a well-situated banquette in the middle of the room with a terrific view of the entire restaurant. So far so good!

As we settled into our banquette we had the opportunity to take in our surroundings. The physical décor was all that one could hope for: a fiery playground of an over-the-top Russian fantasy with its famed red banquettes, green walls covered with gold-framed oil paintings, and a gold-leafed ceiling. Although I thought it could have benefited from some additional Christmas decorations, I wasn’t disappointed. However, the room was only about half full at what should have been peak occupancy, and the majority of the patrons -- mostly tourists in for a day of Holiday site-seeing -- were dressed badly. Not so good.

However, our dining experience was delightful! The wait staff at the Russian Tea Room is well-trained and efficient, and we were very well-attended to. Service was solicitous without being over-bearing, we were never ignored, nor were we rushed through our meal. And the food was delicious.

We ordered from the restaurant’s very reasonably-priced $35.00 Business Express Lunch three course prix fixe menu where the selection was more than sufficient. I started out with their signature red beet borscht, followed by truffle-marinated poussin, and finished with a melt-in-your-mouth cheese blintz dusted with cinnamon sugar accompanied by a double espresso. The food was delicious, served perfectly, and beautifully presented.

Some reviewers complain that portions at the Russian Tea Room are on the small size, particularly in relation to the menu’s pricing. I beg to differ. Given who else was dining there that day I suspect that such comments say more about where those reviewers are more accustomed to dining than it does about the Russian Tea Room. I for one do not like gargantuan portions at luncheon, particularly when spread over three courses. And at $35.00 a head, who are they kidding!

My business manager and I left the Russian Tea Room agreeing that it merited getting the word out among our acquaintances that it was, in fact, a lovely place to have a delightful meal, and that they should consider going there -- again if they haven’t been there in years, and for the first time if they’ve never been there before. In my view, it would be a shame to relegate this grand old girl to the sneaker-wearing, holiday sweater-sporting out-of-towners that largely populated the room when we were there.

And that’s why I'm writing about the Russian Tea Room.  It's well worth a visit.



The Russan Tea Room
150 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
(212) 581-7100
http://www.russiantearoom.com/

Darlington House

Boy and I bought Darlington House in the winter of 1998 as a country retreat from our Manhattan high-rise apartment. Both of us had lived in the City since graduating from college, and were ready to own a house. While we had taken shares in beach houses on Long Island over the years, we wanted to send out more permanent (and stable) roots, and so went house hunting. We wanted a comfortable place with architectural merit and roots in the early 19th century.  However, our budget was such that while plenty of options that fit this bill were available in weekend communities on Long Island and northwestern Connecticut, they were out of our price range at the time. So we needed to look farther afield at more affordable locations. After doing homework we found that it was still possible to acquire a house that fit our requirements in the Hudson River Valley at a price we could also afford. And so we became home-owners in the Village of Van Rensselaer, New York, just two hours by car north of the city. We named the house “Darlington” because, well, my last name is Darling and we thought it would be amusing to give our house such a name.

Darlington in the 1920s

Darlington is a center hall Federal house built in the 1810s that was added to in the 1830s and then more recently by us. It was built as a gentleman’s farm on 165 acres and has always been lived in by people who appreciated it and cared for it. It is what the academics call “Upper Middling”, which means that it was built for people of means and stature in the community, but who were not members of the landed aristocracy or “Gentry”. The builder of our house was of Dutch ancestry, like many in the area, and was a well-respected and well-connected Doctor. He and his wife raised a family of 6 children in the house. Over the years it took on a Greek Revival cornice and the land was whittled away to only two acres, but remarkably all of the Federal interiors and detailing remained entirely intact. Three outbuildings, comprised of two wooden Greek Revival barns and a brick Federal workhouse, also survived. The previous owners, the Proctors, acquired the property in 1931 and installed modern plumbing, heating, and electricity in the house and raised a family of 5 children in it.

People in the community still speak of Mrs. Proctor, who lived in the house into her late 90s, as a force to be reckoned with. She apparently considered herself to be the Queen of the Village, was rather outspoken, enjoyed her cocktails, was president of the Garden Club, wore a mink coat because she could, and sent her children off to boarding school because she and her husband preferred to spend the winter in Bermuda. Sounds like my kind of gal!  I wish I'd known her...

By the time we came along Mrs. Proctor had been shipped off to a nursing home, and the house had languished on the market for several years, unsold. We bought it from her children, all by then in their 70s and none of whom were interested in taking on the task of bringing the house up to modern requirements. While it had been well-cared for by the Proctors, little other than routine maintenance had taken place since the 1960s. Both Boy and I had grown up living in houses, but neither of us had actually owned one, and so were excited about the prospects for fixing up this house and breathing new life into it.

In retrospect I now fully appreciate why Sam Proctor, the son who negotiated the sale, burst out laughing at the closing when the last document was signed and the sale proceeds had been wired into his account. He was convinced he’d just sold a Money Pit to two suckers from New York City who had no idea what they had taken on.

And he was right.

Photo courtesy of Sam Proctor

The Joys of Old-Fashioned Calendars

I am a fan of calendars, which I consider to be a convenient resource for measuring the progression of days, weeks, and months. While I no longer rely on them as I did before the days of laptops and BlackBerrys, which rendered my Filofax personal agenda and monthly date books obsolete, such electronic devices have yet to replace the old-fashioned calendars I enjoy. Although some readers may find calendars quaint or anachronistic in today’s world, I still find them to be a convenient and aesthetically-pleasing tool for noting the passage of the days and the progression of the seasons. If you no longer use a calendar I recommend that you go out and get one; you’ll be surprised how useful they can be.

I have a number of calendars in my City apartment and at Darlington. They range from the very humble to ones of more elevated beauty and refinement. Here’s a tour of the ones that I have, starting from the humblest:

This little magnetized calendar, which is affixed to the refrigerator in our City apartment, is an indisputably useful tool. However, its usefulness is not due to the calendar it shows but rather for the telephone number emblazoned on it for the liquor store around the corner that stands ready to deliver an extra bottle of hooch after hours if required…at the mere tinkle of a telephone.

This silver-framed perpetual calendar is a more rarified one than the previous one (how could it not be?), and sits on my bedroom chest of drawers at Darlington. You’d be surprised how useful it is to have a calendar in one’s bedroom. I frequently consult it while dressing or plotting our future dates and obligations. It originally belonged to my Mother and came from Tiffany & Co.

These calendars have been published by the Travelers Companies since 1936, always featuring a different Currier & Ives print each month. Growing up I had neighbors who had one of them hanging on the wall in their kitchen and I looked forward to seeing what the new print would be whenever I visited. Over the years I completely forgot about the Travelers calendars and lost my appreciation for Currier & Ives as well. However, last year some dear friends of ours in the country gave us this calendar, unframed, as a gift when they came over for dinner one night. Boy and I decided that such a Currier & Ives calendar would fit right in at Darlington, so long as it had a period frame suitable for our house. We found an early lemon-yellow frame at a dealer in Hudson and had it cut down to fit the calendar and have enjoyed having it on our wall ever since. In the meantime we changed our insurance coverage to the Travelers, since Chubb, our previous carrier, had jacked up our rate to an astonishingly high level. Now we are on the regular distribution list to receive these calendars annually from our insurance broker. We just received the 2010 Travelers calendar in the mail recently and I look forward to seeing each month unfold next year.

The final calendar I am showing here is my favorite. I bought it at an auction some years ago and it sits on our desk in our City apartment. Like the Tiffany calendar I inherited from my Mother, it is also perpetual. It is made from Shagreen with silver mounts, and the calendar components are made of celluloid, a precursor to plastic that was first widely used as an ivory replacement. It was likely made in the first quarter of the 20th century, almost certainly in England.

So what calendars will you not find in our house or apartment?

• Wall calendars featuring pictures of shirtless firemen, cute kittens, Thomas Kinkade paintings, or the greats of sport and cinema;
• Page-a-day calendars featuring 365 days of Dilbert jokes, brain puzzlers, fluffy bunnies, one-minute devotions, or chemistry fun facts to know and tell;

Photos by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling

Preparing Darlington for Winter

We get a fair amount of snow at Darlington during most winters. Although only two hours north of Manhattan by car, the climate in our village in the Hudson River Valley is appreciably-colder than in the City. As the winter season takes hold more often than not we’ll find ourselves blanketed with snow when it’s raining in the more-temperate City.

To prepare for the snowy season a lot of planning and industry is required. While our property is not particularly large, sitting on only two acres in a village setting, there is much to do to get it ready for winter. Once the weather turns cool the screened porch is emptied of its furniture, which is stored in our basement, and its sun-blinds are taken down and put away in the barn.  The most critical task is to have the property raked of the leaves that fall from our many trees, mulch the beds, and amend the lawns, which takes weeks of work to complete. While that's going on we empty and store the large clay pots in which we grow herbs and decorative plants during the summer, and clean and store away the gas grill. We also empty and then re-plant the cast iron urns with evergreens for “winter interest”, and store the wooden garden furniture in the barns. Water in the outbuildings and spigots is turned off and the pipes are drained. Gutters are cleared of debris. Reflectors are placed along the perimeters of the drives, and vulnerable shrubs along the village road are protected from salt and spray with burlap-wrapped snow-fencing. Firewood is procured and stacked away from the weather, the wood storage box is brought up to the house from the barn and stocked, and the wood baskets within the house are brought out of storage and filled, ready for the first fires to be lit in any of our six working fireplaces.

I am the one in primary charge of engaging and over-seeing the necessary support to make this happen at Darlington. Managing the logistics and timing is not without challenges, particularly since we live in the City during the week. Given the relatively short window that exists between when the last leaves have fallen and the snow begins, this can be somewhat nerve-wracking. But it is highly satisfying when I succeed in buttoning up our property before the first snowflakes flutter down, usually to remain in place until the spring thaw.

A lot of manpower is required to prepare the property for the winter. Boy is responsible for emptying and planting the urns (more on that in another post). Other than that we depend on others to do the lion's share of the work.  The bulk of the leaf clean-up is done by the locally-based county lawn service company that takes care of our lawns during the summer. They come four or five times during leaf fall to rake and remove leaves from our property. We are happy for them to take the leaves away since we know they will compost them as opposed to sending them to land-fill. It is an impressive sight to behold when their trucks arrive and dis-engorge half a dozen workers armed with rakes and blowers, and to see them in action. They also put up the snow-fencing and burlap along the village road.

But there's more. Once the service has completed the bulk clean-up of the leaves, we then have our handyman, named “Rich”, come through the property and do a more-detailed leaf removal, plus most of the other projects on our checklist. He is usually accompanied by his teenage son, until recently known as “Junior” but more recently as “Richard”, and often another worker when the job demands it. Rich works for us on most weekends, usually Saturdays, and is someone whom we rely on for much of the work done maintaining our property. We first engaged him shortly after buying Darlington to plow our drives, which he still does, and over time he has taken on more and more responsibilities for us. He’s a great guy, we like him a lot, and he is someone that we feel blessed to have in our lives.

Rich and his son will spend at least two-to-three Saturdays doing detailed leaf removal after the lawn service has done their bulk removal, and when he’s done the property looks almost as manicured as a golf club, or as our friend Warner says: “coiffed”. They also mulch the beds, store the garden furniture, clean out the gutters, place the reflectors along the drives, and take care of the firewood. We have our plumber shut off the water to the outbuildings and blow out the pipes so they won’t burst. He’s best-equipped to do this, since he was the one who installed the exterior plumbing in the first place.

This year we were able to get all of the preparations completed ahead of the first snowfall. But we really timed it down to the wire: Rich and his crew of Richard and their friend Tony finished raking up the last bit of leafage just as the first snow flakes started to come down last weekend. Since then we’ve had another snowfall, and it looks as if the ground may well be covered with snow until the spring.

Maintaining a property like Darlington well requires attention, labor, good-timing, organization, and resources, too.  I enjoy making it happen and appreciate that it wouldn't be possible without the support of those who do the hard work and take pride in a job well-done.  I consider our stewardship of Darlington to be much more than a responsibility: it's a privilege.

Reggie’s Five Favorites: The Series

One of the things I enjoy seeing on other people’s blogs is lists of their favorite things.  These can be drawn from any number of sources and can include favorite restaurants, movies, cars, flowers, etc., anything that strikes the author's fancy.  Such postings usually include pictures of the selections and some commentary about why it is that they are admired.

Photo: Boy Fenwick

I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring and join the fray.  But instead of copying the “Ten Things I Can’t Live Without” spreads in “Elle Décor” (which I love) I’ve come up with something a bit pithier, and more focused: “Reggie’s Five Favorites”.

This will be a series of regular postings where I will provide an overview, including pictures and commentary, of five particular favorites of mine focused in a single category.  These will be drawn from inside and outside Darlington House and elsewhere, and will cover such topics as favorite cookware, gadgets, clothing, bibelot, shoes, books, ephemera, household products, gardening tools, music. . . and whatever else I dream up to share with you.

Oh, and to make it a bit more interesting, I will usually also note some examples of what you won't find on my favorites list, too...

I can assure you from the outset that whatever appears in this series will be entirely of my own selection, and will not have been supplied or recommended to me by the manufacturer or its agents for review or endorsement.

So stay tuned…

Our Black Friday

For many years Boy and I have spent Thanksgiving day with dear friends of ours who live in a lovely late-18th-century house not far from us in the country.  It's almost the perfect place to spend Thanksgiving – classic New England compound, handsomely furnished, rooms warmed by roaring fires, and charming and amusing friends.  It doesn’t hurt that the inhabitants are wonderfully attractive too; one of the sons spent a stint in New York modeling for the likes of J Crew and Banana Republic.

This year we reluctantly tore ourselves away to spend the holiday in the City, as we had been invited to spend Thanksgiving with friends of ours there, and we thought a breath of change would be pleasant.  Boy became friends with what is now the wife of the couple whose Thanksgiving gathering we joined when they both attended Sotheby’s American Arts course a decade or so ago, and has maintained a fond friendship with her since then.  She is absolutely lovely – tall, slender, and every bit a lady in a modern, of-the-moment way – and she is married to a dashing fellow who looks like an up-to-date version of Clark Gable, only better.  While at their party the hostess excitedly told us that they had only recently been photographed for Italian Vogue for a story covering up and coming young couples in the contemporary art world. I can’t wait to see that!  The party was really quite swell – delicious, yummy food, plenty of hooch, people of all ages, gorgeous flowers, lots of laughter, and no-one sulking in the corner even though the guests were mostly drawn from the couple’s large and extended families.

We woke the next morning, a day that has become rather hideously known as “Black Friday”, to find ourselves in our Manhattan high-rise apartment, and a lazy day ahead of us for the drive to Darlington House.  After spending an hour or so perusing the Sotheby’s catalogs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor sale that I had recently ordered and were delivered that morning by our building’s valet, Boy, being the inveterate shopper and with a long list for his decorating clients, suggested that we drive up to Stamford, Connecticut, to shop the numerous, huge antiques and decorative arts malls the town is known for (among other things).  So we got into the family buggy, along with Pompey, and drove up to Stamford to see what we could find.

Our first stop was Harbor View Center for Antiques where, after what was appearing to be a fruitless journey, Boy pointed out a pair of German porcelain pugs, circa 1890, each holding a basket in their mouths containing two pug puppies.  Our beloved Pompey is a pug, and I have developed a weakness for pug figures (at the right price); since these fit both bills, “sold” they were. In the same case I also noticed a small, velvet-backed silver frame from the 1940s that had openings for three snap-shots, and would be perfect for upgrading a triptych of photos I have of me and two of my siblings that sits in a rather degraded leather case on my chest of drawers at Darlington.  So in the bag it went, too, joining the pugs.

While at Harbor View I came across a diminutive pair of fruitwood Louis XV-style slipper chairs, probably from the 1940s/50s, done up in charming needlepoint covers that could easily have been supplied by Jansen for the Windsor’s country villa, the Moulin de la Tuilerie.  Not my style, per se, but they’d make someone like Louis Bofferding skip a heartbeat I would think.  So I passed. I also didn’t ask, though tempted, to see their collection of vintage shagreen and silver cigarette boxes, despite a weakness for them.  Not only do I not smoke (any longer) but I already have more silver cigarette boxes than I know what to do with.

After a number of other bootless stops at other antiques emporia in town our final destination was Hiden Galleries, a monster of an antiques mall chock-a-block with several hundred dealers.  We were quite enamored of an absolutely marvelous lamp of a Harlequin figure in full costume, mask and tricorn from the 1950s, in perfect condition.  Large scale and beautifully done, this was the “real deal” made for a highly sophisticated (and rich) client as opposed to the crappy “kitch” ones you see in junky group shops.  It would be perfection in the right space – perhaps a games room in Palm Beach or South Hampton – but not in either of our residences.  So we passed on it, speculating (again) that we wouldn’t be surprised to shortly see it in the window of Louis Bofferding, or Mallett for that matter.

While we were at Hiden I found a vintage silver-plated, mercury-glass-lined, lidded ice bucket that will be perfect for our drinks table.  I’ve wanted one for some time now (ours sweats) and was delighted to find the exact model I’ve been looking for, fruitlessly on eBay. So with it safely ensconced at the front desk, Boy and I continued our shopping.  We took out and then returned a 19th century English glass and silver match strike (too expensive for its condition) but did pick up a couple of pieces of green majolica.

Back in the 1980s there was a fashion in certain circles for 19th century green majolica, made in England.  To meet demand, modern day copies became available at places like Horchow, Bloomingdales, Keesal & Matthews, and Scully & Scully.  At the time I bought and used a small set of plates, maybe 6, but after a few years got rid of them at a moving day tag sale because I had grown weary of seeing it everywhere.

However, time heals all wounds as they say, and more recently – within the last year or so – Boy and I had begun to remark on how we were beginning to like green majolica again.  About six months ago Boy bought a single 19th century green majolica plate that we’ve enjoyed having about (the green is really lovely – grassy and luminous).  More recently, we bought two, near-identical sets of 12 plates (for a total of 24) at auction for an astonishingly cheap price and were delighted to serve dessert on them several weeks ago at a brunch we held for several dozen.

So when we came across the 19th century Wedgwood majolica footed compote and an incidental serving plate in one of the cases at Hiden Galleries, we were quite happy to add them to our stash.  And the price was right.   I'm showing our full collection here, which I think looks quite handsome assembled en masse.  The actual shade of their green is closer to the second photo than the first.

As we drove through Connecticut and then New York on our way to Darlington, our day of shopping completed, we passed any number of Big Box shopping malls with parking lots jammed with cars indicating that “Black Friday” was a success (at least in terms of foot traffic) for retailers of new merchandise.  I’m happy for them.  However, I much prefer to spend my “Black Friday” strolling in peace through the aisles of antiques stores.  Not only am I not annoyed by the hustle and bustle of today’s retail experience, but I am confident that what I come across will not be found in every shopping mall or under every Christmas tree in America.  I also know that the sticker price is almost always negotiable (no “manufacturer’s suggested retail price”), and that I’m doing my part for the environment by buying previously owned, recycled products.  Sure, I know I use carbon footprint by driving around, but – hey – I’m carpooling with Boy and Pompey when I do it.

Photos by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling