Reggie's Rooms IV: The Wheeler Library

Lest you think, given the previous three installments in this series, that Reggie admires only rooms decorated in styles predating the turn of the 20th century, today's essay is about a favorite room that was decorated not only well in to that century, in the 1930s, but done up in a manner that could only have occurred after the advent of modernism.  It is a room that has much to recommend it, I believe, and there is much to be learned from it, too.

Wheeler library, gallery view

The room in question is the library in the Lake Forest, Illinois, house of Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Wheeler.  Designed by David Adler (1882-1949), one of the greatest residential architects of the first half of the twentieth century, the room was decorated by his equally talented sister, Francis Elkins (1888-1953), with whom he collaborated extensively.  What an exceptional team they were, this superbly gifted brother and sister, and how lucky we are that so much of their work was photographed (in the case of this room, in 1934) and recently published in books by Stephen Salny and the Art Institute of Chicago.

David Adler in 1904                           Francis Elkins in 1938

I first came across David Adler's work, and the Wheeler library in particular, in the early 1980s when leafing through the pages of an out-of-print monograph on the architect that belonged to my dear friend George Pinckney, a fellow appreciator of traditional architecture.  Looking for the first time at the photographs of the Adler houses featured in the monograph was an astonishment for me.  Not only had I never heard of the architect, but I had also never seen such a concentration of handsome, well-appointed houses and interiors of the featured period, and all by the same hand.  At the time, I was certainly familiar with the work of McKim, Mead and White, as well as other illustrious architects of their and earlier eras, but this was the first time that I saw a book with the work of an equivalent master of traditional residential architecture of a more modern and, for me, accessible period.  Lots of books were available at the time featuring the twentieth century work of the masters of the International style of modern architecture, but little had yet been published on the work of their then less-celebrated, classically-inspired counterparts.  This has only been remedied more recently, in the last fifteen or so years.

The coveted Adler monograph; photo by Boy Fenwick

Written by Richard Pratt and published in 1970, the monograph is David Adler: The Architect and His Work.  It was and remains much sought-after by collectors, libraries, and practitioners of traditional (or classical) architecture, as it was the only book on Adler and his work available until recently.  It was, as it turns out, a very valuable book, too, and could only be had at a price that reflected its rarity and the fevered demand for it.  Looking through it for the first time I was determined to own a copy of it, but I was only able to do so many years later when my pocketbook could support such an extravagance.  It remains to this day one of the treasures of our book collection at Darlington House.

Wheeler library, fireplace wall

The Wheeler library is a room that I return to again and again in my mind's eye, as it is not only a handsome room, but the stuff of fantasy for me: a special-purpose room dedicated to the pleasures of reading, set apart from the owners' other sitting and entertaining rooms.  We have a room at Darlington, which we call our Snuggery, that holds many of our books; but I would not say that it is a library, per se.  For our Snuggery is not the sole repository for our books, which are scattered throughout our house in bookcases and piles, and in it resides, also, our lone television.  Frankly, we use our Snuggery more as a cozy, personal sitting room than we do as a place to read, contemplate, and study books.  I would be thrilled to live in a house that had an actual library, such as the one the Adler/Elkins duo created for the Wheelers.

Our copies of Adler/Elkins books; photo by Boy Fenwick

So, what is it, exactly, that I so admire about the Wheeler's library?

• It is an attractive, symmetrical, well-proportioned room, embellished only with severe moldings and restrained architectural elements; it relies on the integrity of the materials for its beauty rather than surface decoration;
• It is a special-purpose room, designed for the holding and studying of the Wheeler's extensive collection of books, set away from the house's more public rooms;
• While clearly within a residence, it attractively resembles an academic library, with stacks projecting into the room at regular intervals;
• It is paneled and fitted out with pickled pine, a great favorite of mine;
• It is filled with an array of handsome furnishings spanning several hundred years, including English furniture from the eighteenth century and modern chairs and lamps by Jean Michel Frank--the modern master whose work Mrs. Elkins introduced and championed in this country;
• The modern upholstered seating is both stylish and commodious, and a comfortable place to wile away hours reading;
• The windows are hung with the simplest, plain curtains;
• It is fitted out with good, modern lamps and the niceties of comfort and convenience--one need not look too far for a place to rest one's drink or set one's pipe, if one smoked such a thing;
• The gorgeous, polished, antique parquet-de-Versailles floor is bare of carpets, giving the room a clean and fresh look, and it is scattered with boldly graphic Zebra skins--long before such skins had become the decorating cliche of the first decade of this century;
• And it has a gun rack!  And not just any gun rack, either, but one built into the paneling and surrounded by a frame based on ones found on early English Georgian mirrors.

Wheeler library gun rack

Finally, the Wheeler library channels for me on a very personal level a number of academic libraries that I spent many pleasant hours in years ago, first as a student at Sherborne School, a boys' public school in England, and later as an undergraduate at Yale.

Sherborne School library
Image courtesy of Sherborne School

Sterling Memorial Library Reading Room
Image courtesy of Yale University

Unless noted, all images are courtesy of Francis Elkins: Interior Design by Stephen M. Salny, published by W. W. Norton & Company.  Additional images of the talented Adler/Elkins partnership can be found in Stephen M. Salny's The Country Houses of David Adler, also published by W. W. Norton, and in the Art Institute of Chicago's David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style, published by the Art Institute in association with the Yale University Press.  

Reggie's Rooms III: The Reception Hall at Homewood House

One of my favorite rooms in America is the Reception Hall at Homewood House, a lovely Federal house in Baltimore, Maryland.  Homewood was built in the first decade of the nineteenth century by Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832), a signer of the Declaration of Independence and at the time one of the richest men in America.  He built it as a wedding present for his wastral son, Charles Carroll, Junior (1775-1825), who married Harriet Chew (1775-1861) of Philadelphia in 1800.  Originally a fashionable country seat on 130 acres, Homewood House today is the centerpiece of the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University.  The University meticulously restored the house in the 1980s and operates it as an historic house museum, open to the lucky public.

Homewood House, Baltimore Maryland

Image courtesy of same

Boy and I first visited Homewood House in the late 1990s, shortly before we bought Darlington House.  We were dumbfounded.  Not only had the building been beautifully restored by Johns Hopkins, but its rooms were exquisitely and perfectly furnished with the loveliest of period antiques and furnishings, befitting the house's elevated heritage.

While all of Homewood's rooms are lovely, the one that I revisit again and again in my mind's eye is its sublime Reception Hall.

View into the Reception Hall

Image courtesy of The Magazine Antiques

When touring Homewood House one enters the Reception Hall through a beautiful, leaded glass, windowed interior doorway.  The Hall's walls are dramatically painted a gorgeous, vivid, grassy green.  In contrast, the trim is painted white, the baseboards are painted to resemble black marble, and the doors are grained mahogany.  The floor is covered with a canvas floorcloth, strikingly painted with a white-and-black diamond faux-marble pattern.  On it sits a reproduction Brussel's carpet, made for the room from a pattern of 1807.

View of the Reception Hall

Image courtesy of Homewood House, by Catherine Rogers Arthur and Cindy Kelly

The Johns Hopkins University Press, Publishers, Baltimore and London

(note, the color of the walls reads more blue in this photo than is the case)

One of the room's walls is covered with a collection of eighteen of William Russel Birch's first edition of Views of Philadephia, c. 1800, framed in eglomise mats and gilt frames.  Against the periphery of the room sit ten English mahogany chairs, c. 1790, sleekly upholstered with green haircloth.

Detail of the Reception Hall

Image courtesy of The Magazine Antiques

(note, this is a closer approximation of the Hall's actual green color)

The Reception Hall contains several noteworthy sculptures, including a marble bust of Alexander Hamilton, after one by Giuseppe Ceracchi, and a nineteenth-century bronze copy of a fifth-century B.C. bust by the Greek sculptor Polyclitus.

View from the Reception Hall through the back hall to the door to the garden

Image, courtesy of The Magazine Antiques

Homewood House's Reception Hall was designed to be used for multiple purposes.  It could be used for dancing or dining, and in the summer may have been one of the coolest rooms in the house.  Front and back doors open to take advantage of breezes that would have made it more comfortable on a sultry Baltimore evening.

The Reception Hall set up for dining in the summer

Image courtsey of Homewood House

Along one of the Reception Hall's walls stands a mahogany and inlaid sideboard, or slab table, a piece of furniture frequently seen in halls in grand houses of the period.  Above it hangs a beautiful gilt-framed convex mirror.

The Reception Hall, showing the sideboard wall

Image courtesy of Homewood House

So what is it, exactly, that excites me about Homewood House's Reception Hall?

• It is a large, handsome room of generous proportions;
• The architecture is symmetrical and restrained;
• It is exquisitely furnished with clean-lined furniture and beautiful ornaments;
• It is not over-furnished, relying instead on the architecture for impact; and
• It is beautifully and dramatically painted with the most wonderful, gorgeous green walls, set off by white trim and a graphic black-and-white floor.

But, I must confess, it really is the green of the room's walls that makes me weak at the knees.

The green paint used in the Reception Hall was an important statement of the Carrolls' status.  Green pigment had been difficult to achieve successfully until the discovery that copper oxide would yield a green pigment that remained true.  New and fashionable at the time Homewood was built, green paint was very expensive. 

Boy and I fell in love with the green of Homewood's Reception Hall, and we took away with us a chart of Homewood's restoration paint colors that was available when we visited the house more than a decade ago.

Homewood House's paint colors

Shortly after visiting Homewood we acquired Darlington House, all of whose rooms were covered with mid-twentieth century wallpaper at the time we bought it.  In planning what we would do at Darlington, which is also a Federal period house, we thought we would paint our much smaller and far less grand hall the same green color as the one at Homewood.  Imagine our surprise when we stripped Darlington House's hall of its wallpaper and found that it had originally been painted almost the same green as the Reception Hall at Homewood House. 

Here is a photograph of the stair in our hall at Darlington House, showing the walls in their unrestored state:

Darlington House's hall, prior to restoration

photo by Reggie Darling

We have since restored Darlington's center hall walls to their original vivid, grassy green color, based on analysis of the paint that had survived 180 years of multiple redecorations of the room.   You can see images of the restored hall here and here.

Pretty cool, what?

Homewood House Museum
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 2128-2608
(410) 516-5589
www.museums.jhu.edu/homewood.php

Reggie's Rooms II: The Saloon at Avenue House

I first came across images of Sir Albert Richardson's enchanting drawing room at Avenue House in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, in John Cornforth's absorbing book The Inspiration of the Past: Country House Taste in the Twentieth Century published in 1985 by Viking Penguin in association with Country Life magazine.  According to Mr. Cornforth's deliciously informative and lavishly illustrated book, Professor Richardson (as he was also known) was considered to be "one of the first admirers" in England in the early part of the twentieth century "...of the style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as one of the principal promoters of the continuity of the classical tradition."  This view is amply borne out by the beauty of his decoration of the Saloon (as it was called) at Avenue House.

The Saloon at Avenue House in 1934

photo courtesy of Country Life

While many of the rooms shown in Mr. Cornforth's book are beautiful, the image of the Saloon took my breath away when I first saw it and still gives me a frisson of excitement whenever I come across it to this day.  Sir Albert was a true connoisseur and collected many of the furnishings for the Saloon specifically for the room, as opposed to bringing them from other houses that he already owned.  So there is a uniformity of taste and style, rigor perhaps, to the Saloon that is not seen in rooms where the assembled furnishings are more diverse or "eclectic", a word much overused in decorating circles in our day.

According to Mr. Cornforth's book, Sir Albert acquired Avenue House in 1919 and spent the better part of twenty years furnishing it.  And furnishing it he did, exquisitely, with supreme taste and restraint--the true hallmarks of elegance.  While the photographed interior is lovely to look at (the quality of Country Life's mid-twentieth-century photography is mesmerizing), the black-and-white image does not convey the room's color scheme, which, according to Country Life, was as follows: "A greenish grey carpet covers the floor, and grey, too is the colour of the walls, in contrast to which is the purple taffeta, with old-gold filigree used for the window hangings, and the yellow chenille of old French pattern used for some of the chair coverings..."  How I would love to see color images of this room.

So what is it about the Saloon at Avenue House that so vividly speaks to me?

• It is finely proportioned, with high ceilings, handsome plasterwork, and large windows;
• In it hangs a lovely, appropriately scaled chandelier;
• The furnishings are from a narrow band of time, drawn from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so they are not slavishly in only one style or period; they include a mix of Regency and earlier furnishings;
• There is plenty of airspace and breathing room.  Sir Albert had the luxury of space to furnish the Saloon sparely and appropriately for a drawing room devoted to entertaining and congenial pursuits;
• The furnishings and architecture are arranged symmetrically and with balance;
• The furniture is attennuated and leggy, which gives the room a light appearance--all "en pointe;"
• The seating is easily movable, to provide for intimate groupings and diverse purposes, the signature of a successful drawing room.  There are no stationary to-the-floor upholstered club chairs or Lawson sofas to lower the room's sight lines or confine the occupants to one place.  This is appealling to me because we have also furnished our (much smaller and far less grand) drawing room at Darlington House in a similar manner, with no fully upholstered seating.  While I don't object to entirely upholstered chairs and sofas, I prefer them in more intimate rooms devoted to cozier pursuits; 
• Most of the furniture is painted, rather than stained and varnished.  Painted furniture is most pleasing in drawing rooms, I believe, as it is pretty and less serious-looking than brown wood furniture, which is more appropriate in dining rooms and libraries.  Much of the seating in our drawing room at Darlington is also painted, but--unlike the Saloon at Avenue House--ours is mostly Louis XVI, with only a smattering of Sir Albert's English Regency;
• There are large, plate-glass mirrors over the fireplace and between the windows.  I have a weakness for mirrors in rooms, and large ones in particular when the room's proportions allow for them.  Mirrors, when used such as Sir Albert does, lend a light and fresh appearance to the rooms in which they hang;
• The floor is covered with a large, single-color, velvet carpet, providing a unifying and visually serene base for the furniture.  I think that there is a tendency today to believe carpets should have some pattern in them, to create "visual interest" (another much over-used expression) in rooms and to avoid the dreaded broadloom "wall-to-wall" carpet look of the 1960s and 70s.  It is noteworthy that our forebears had other views, as pieced carpets such as Sir Albert's were quite expensive and luxurious in their day, bearing little resemblance, when examined closely, to the more modern and degraded versions for sale in today's big-box retailers;
• The curtains are plain and unfussified, with neither swags nor jabots.  My only complaint with them is that I wish the valances had been placed a foot higher on the wall, above the windows, rather than hanging down over them.  As in Canon Valpy's drawing room, my first and previous "Reggie's Rooms" subject, Sir Albert's curtains lack any extraneous upholsterer's tricks, relying on the beauty of their materials rather than bows or gimgracks. 

The Saloon at Avenue House in 1922

photo courtesy of Country Life

But it was nearly 10 years later when I first came across this earlier photograph of the same room that I truly came to appreciate what Sir Albert had wrought at Avenue House.  And how fortunate we are that Country Life chronicled the Saloon's transformation from an under-furnished, almost raw, and obviously only-recently-moved-into space into the beautiful swan that it became over the twelve years of Sir Albert's careful attention.  It is in examining, comparing, and studying these two photographs that we come to fully appreciate Sir Albert's academically grounded genius.  (It also appears that the curtains faded considerably in the period between when these photographs were taken.)

Almost all of the rooms we see today in books and magazines (and now on the blogs) are presented as fully realized and "done," giving no indication of the thought, effort, and consideration that went into creating them.  Seeing a room's transformation over time, as we do here with the Saloon,  is a rarity and a treat, and something of great interest to those of us who enjoy the pleasures (and dare I say "process") of interior decoration.  What else would explain the enduring popularity of the "Before and After"--or, as Boy and I call them, the "During and Done"--issues of the often odious Architectural Digest magazine?

I believe that the Saloon at Avenue House is a room that merits careful study and has much to teach us today regarding placement, proportion, symmetry, and purpose.  It is one of my most-admired interiors and has been one of the inspirations for the furnishing of our more modest drawing room at Darlington House.

Reggie's Rooms: Canon Valpy's Drawing-Room

From time to time I shall post about rooms that I have come across over the years that I find notable or inspiring, for one reason or another. These are rooms that I come back to again and again, and where there is something about them that I find particularly pleasing. Often they trigger a visceral reaction in me--an “I want that!” response. In most cases these are interiors that I would be delighted to call home, either by transporting myself back to the period when they were depicted, or today by the most subtle introduction of such modern conveniences as electric lighting or central heating.

 Canon Valpy drawing-room, 3 The Close, Winchester

Painted by B. O. Corfe, c. 1900

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I begin the series with a watercolor of the drawing-room at 3 The Close, Winchester, that belonged to Canon Valpy, a well-to-do member of the Chapter of Winchester Cathedral. Painted in 1900, this is a room where the heavy clutter one associates with High-Victoriana has largely been dispensed with, and it is furnished in an eclectic, comfortable manner presaging the “English Country House” look that Nancy Lancaster and her circle perfected a generation or two later. One sees in Canon Valpy’s drawing-room a way of arranging and decorating an interior that surely informed, if not inspired, Mrs. Lancaster’s subsequent vision.

What is it about this room that I find so compelling?

• The proportions are pleasing. The architecture is solidly Georgian in appearance, undoubtedly built in the 18th-century, symmetrically arranged around a lovely fireplace, with large windows, classical moldings, and a chair-rail.
• It is comfortably-furnished with a handsome collection of upholstered and incidental furnishings. The decoration is clearly inspired by the English 18th-century, but not slavishly so as it is augmented with examples from other periods and countries, including France and Morocco.
• There is a lot to interest one’s eye: the walls are hung with stacks of gilt-framed prints and paintings, and the tables are covered with collections of china and objects of interest; there are flowers and green plants about.
• It is redolent of time spent in scholarly, musical, and social pursuits: there are numerous stacks of books (this is clearly the room of people who enjoy reading), and a piano stands at the ready, either for one’s own enjoyment or others. The furniture can be easily moved to promote intimate conversation or for a party.
• It is softened by the presence of attractive textiles. The upholstered seating is uniformly slipcovered with the same pretty chintz, and the floor is covered with a beautiful oriental carpet. The windows are generously hung with handsome curtains. I find the simplicity of the slipcovers and curtains pleasing, too. No dress-makers’ tassels or ribbons in sight and no swags or jabots.
• It doesn’t look overtly-decorated, and is obviously not the work of one of the firms that delivered so many “lock-stock-and-barrel” interiors seen in many English country houses of the period. Although thoroughly furnished by today’s standards, at the time it was painted prevailing taste would have considered this to be understated.

While clearly a room of its time and place, I find Canon Valpy’s drawing-room to be particularly pleasing. It is comfortable, attractive, and – with the addition of a few table lamps – a room that I would be delighted to live in today.

Canon Valpy’s drawing room, along with many other lovely interiors, appears in Victorians At Home by Susan Lasdun, published by Viking Press in 1981