4 months ago
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
One man's trash is another man's castle, one man's castle is another man's outrageously-decorated monstrosity
I'm feeling a little weird about the fact that I'm leaving Milford in less than a week; I'm exciting to be heading home (my big bed! my lovely sheets! cable! INTERNET!) but also sad to be leaving Grey Towers (my rustic farmhouse! work I really love! old objects!) and I am really, truly, wholeheartedly terrified about not having a job. So, because my whole brain is consumed by this mixture of excitement, wistfulness, and full-fledged panic, I don't have many words to spare for this blog post. What I do have, though, are pictures!
This post has been a long time coming. How can I write about Grey Towers if I never post a single picture of the building? So here it is, in all its goofy, fake-castle-y glory.
Of course, I've written about the turrets - I've even, dare I say it, waxed poetic about them. But what about the interiors, say you? Well, Grey Towers is used by the Forest Service as both a museum and meeting center for conservation conferences, so its multiple floors are put to multiple uses. The first floor is made up of the historic museum rooms and offices (in the servants' wing, of course), and the second and third floors are conference rooms and more offices. The interesting rooms, therefore, are all on the first floor, and that's what I have pictures of. My office is actually on the third floor, tucked under the eaves, but while it sounds super-romantic that mostly means that I occasionally hit my head on the sloping ceiling.
But anyway, the interior! When you enter the house from the front door (which we never do... staff/servants' entrance, dontchya' know) you step into the great hall, a huge wood-paneled room filled with heavy Dutch and Italian Renaissance furniture. It is very, very dark. The most interesting part of the great hall is the inglenook, which sits to the left of the main entrance. Here it is:
Like I said, dark. Also, yes, that is a stuffed owl clutching a stuffed squirrel in its sharp little claws. It is pretty strange. On either side of the owl are stag heads mounted to the walls. Here is the one to the right of the owl (who I call Hooty, of course):
I can't tell you much about the sailor's cap, except that it is entirely historically accurate. The restoration, done in the 1990s, used historic photos to recreate the furnishings and look of every room. Every historic photo of the great hall dating back to the early 1920s showed the sailor's cap sitting on top of the stag's antlers. We don't know how it got there, but I like to think of it as further proof of the fact that Cornelia Pinchot was a hilariously tacky but amazing decorator.
The library is probably my favorite room. You enter it from a door on the right wall of the great hall. Originally two very small rooms (a billiards room for the gentlemen and a sitting room for the ladies), Cornelia tore out the wall between the rooms when she married Gifford and paneled the walls in wooden bookshelves to make it a library. Here is the part of the room that used to be the ladies' sitting room:
We have a number of lovely empire sofas in the house, but this one is my favorite - the arm rests are high enough that it almost feels like a box.
Across from the sofa is a huge painting of Mary Pinchot, Gifford's mother, sitting with Gifford and his little sister Antoinette. He had another sister, Lucy, who died as a baby and a younger brother, Amos, who wasn't yet born when the portrait was painted. I consider the official family painting that is missing Amos to be further proof that Amos was really the black sheep of the family. Certainly Gifford got the better house and furnishings, and even though Amos was quite accomplished (he founded an organization that was the precursor to the ACLU, and was a noted lawyer who worked for equal rights and fought to free Sacco and Vanzetti, among others) the whole family clearly had the highest hopes for Gifford. My housemate Shannon and I would often hear something really complimentary about Gifford and say to each other, "sucks to be Amos, though." Anyway, the painting was done in Europe and cost $12,000 which is more than half of what the entire house took to build.
There is a door to the right of this photo that leads to the sitting room. The sitting room is arguably Cornelia's greatest contribution to the house (or at least the interior of the house - she was also responsible for the entire landscaping project, as well as the addition of multiple outbuildings to the property) and you can get a good sense of her design aesthetic from a look at the sitting room:
And by "design aesthetic," I mean "her way of throwing crazy colors on the walls and stuffing a room full of mismatched furniture and calling it "decorated."" I mean, really, this woman was AWESOME. I can sort of imagine her stomping through the house, a team of assistants behind her coughing as they inhaled the smoke trailing from her thin french cigarette as she claimed in her patrician voice, "Nooooo, sea green walls are nothing without red velvet drapes and some lovely fake marble trim! Nothing, I tell you! Have you no imagination? No joie de vivre? You must think of this house as a caterpillar, and we are the chrysalis process that will turn it into a beautiful butterfly! Be the chrysalis!!" Or something to that effect.
The large expanses of walls in the sitting room not covered with mirrors, candelabras, or mounted fish are papered with huge murals of Dutch seascapes and farm scenes. The murals were painted onto canvases which were then plastered like wallpaper onto the walls. Cornelia found the paintings in the Hague and insisted that they be brought over to line her sitting room walls, completing the maritime theme she had going. When the Forest Service took over the house in 1963 they claimed that most of the paintings were too damaged to restore, so they just painted over them. I've since heard conflicting stories (that the Forest Service just didn't want to pay for them to be fixed, or that they didn't feel they were appropriate for the house, etc.) but whatever the reason, most of the paintings had to be re-created for the restoration. One wall was saved, though, and the mural on it is original:
So those are the three main historic rooms. There is also Gifford's office, which sits in one of the towers off the corner of the library - I mention it because it has one of my favorite pieces in it, a lovely and strangely delicate Federal-style desk. Also, the wallpaper is goofy:
Gifford's bedroom is the only historic room on the second floor, but I couldn't be bothered to document it. It is a small tower room, and his bed is bizarrely little, especially when you consider that he never lived there as a child. He and Cornelia had separate rooms, as was the style of the times, but still... weirdly tiny bed.
So yeah, that is the interior of Grey Towers! I guess I had more to say than I thought, but hopefully the photographs made up for my senseless babbling.
I'm leaving Milford in six days, so if you're in the SF Bay Area and want to see me, I'm home November 7! Otherwise, stay tuned - I'll try to post some more before I leave.
This post has been a long time coming. How can I write about Grey Towers if I never post a single picture of the building? So here it is, in all its goofy, fake-castle-y glory.
Of course, I've written about the turrets - I've even, dare I say it, waxed poetic about them. But what about the interiors, say you? Well, Grey Towers is used by the Forest Service as both a museum and meeting center for conservation conferences, so its multiple floors are put to multiple uses. The first floor is made up of the historic museum rooms and offices (in the servants' wing, of course), and the second and third floors are conference rooms and more offices. The interesting rooms, therefore, are all on the first floor, and that's what I have pictures of. My office is actually on the third floor, tucked under the eaves, but while it sounds super-romantic that mostly means that I occasionally hit my head on the sloping ceiling.
But anyway, the interior! When you enter the house from the front door (which we never do... staff/servants' entrance, dontchya' know) you step into the great hall, a huge wood-paneled room filled with heavy Dutch and Italian Renaissance furniture. It is very, very dark. The most interesting part of the great hall is the inglenook, which sits to the left of the main entrance. Here it is:
Like I said, dark. Also, yes, that is a stuffed owl clutching a stuffed squirrel in its sharp little claws. It is pretty strange. On either side of the owl are stag heads mounted to the walls. Here is the one to the right of the owl (who I call Hooty, of course):
I can't tell you much about the sailor's cap, except that it is entirely historically accurate. The restoration, done in the 1990s, used historic photos to recreate the furnishings and look of every room. Every historic photo of the great hall dating back to the early 1920s showed the sailor's cap sitting on top of the stag's antlers. We don't know how it got there, but I like to think of it as further proof of the fact that Cornelia Pinchot was a hilariously tacky but amazing decorator.
The library is probably my favorite room. You enter it from a door on the right wall of the great hall. Originally two very small rooms (a billiards room for the gentlemen and a sitting room for the ladies), Cornelia tore out the wall between the rooms when she married Gifford and paneled the walls in wooden bookshelves to make it a library. Here is the part of the room that used to be the ladies' sitting room:
We have a number of lovely empire sofas in the house, but this one is my favorite - the arm rests are high enough that it almost feels like a box.
Across from the sofa is a huge painting of Mary Pinchot, Gifford's mother, sitting with Gifford and his little sister Antoinette. He had another sister, Lucy, who died as a baby and a younger brother, Amos, who wasn't yet born when the portrait was painted. I consider the official family painting that is missing Amos to be further proof that Amos was really the black sheep of the family. Certainly Gifford got the better house and furnishings, and even though Amos was quite accomplished (he founded an organization that was the precursor to the ACLU, and was a noted lawyer who worked for equal rights and fought to free Sacco and Vanzetti, among others) the whole family clearly had the highest hopes for Gifford. My housemate Shannon and I would often hear something really complimentary about Gifford and say to each other, "sucks to be Amos, though." Anyway, the painting was done in Europe and cost $12,000 which is more than half of what the entire house took to build.
There is a door to the right of this photo that leads to the sitting room. The sitting room is arguably Cornelia's greatest contribution to the house (or at least the interior of the house - she was also responsible for the entire landscaping project, as well as the addition of multiple outbuildings to the property) and you can get a good sense of her design aesthetic from a look at the sitting room:
And by "design aesthetic," I mean "her way of throwing crazy colors on the walls and stuffing a room full of mismatched furniture and calling it "decorated."" I mean, really, this woman was AWESOME. I can sort of imagine her stomping through the house, a team of assistants behind her coughing as they inhaled the smoke trailing from her thin french cigarette as she claimed in her patrician voice, "Nooooo, sea green walls are nothing without red velvet drapes and some lovely fake marble trim! Nothing, I tell you! Have you no imagination? No joie de vivre? You must think of this house as a caterpillar, and we are the chrysalis process that will turn it into a beautiful butterfly! Be the chrysalis!!" Or something to that effect.
The large expanses of walls in the sitting room not covered with mirrors, candelabras, or mounted fish are papered with huge murals of Dutch seascapes and farm scenes. The murals were painted onto canvases which were then plastered like wallpaper onto the walls. Cornelia found the paintings in the Hague and insisted that they be brought over to line her sitting room walls, completing the maritime theme she had going. When the Forest Service took over the house in 1963 they claimed that most of the paintings were too damaged to restore, so they just painted over them. I've since heard conflicting stories (that the Forest Service just didn't want to pay for them to be fixed, or that they didn't feel they were appropriate for the house, etc.) but whatever the reason, most of the paintings had to be re-created for the restoration. One wall was saved, though, and the mural on it is original:
So those are the three main historic rooms. There is also Gifford's office, which sits in one of the towers off the corner of the library - I mention it because it has one of my favorite pieces in it, a lovely and strangely delicate Federal-style desk. Also, the wallpaper is goofy:
Gifford's bedroom is the only historic room on the second floor, but I couldn't be bothered to document it. It is a small tower room, and his bed is bizarrely little, especially when you consider that he never lived there as a child. He and Cornelia had separate rooms, as was the style of the times, but still... weirdly tiny bed.
So yeah, that is the interior of Grey Towers! I guess I had more to say than I thought, but hopefully the photographs made up for my senseless babbling.
I'm leaving Milford in six days, so if you're in the SF Bay Area and want to see me, I'm home November 7! Otherwise, stay tuned - I'll try to post some more before I leave.
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