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THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE OF DESIGn

june 2008

American Country Houses

www.ArchitecturalDigest.com

June 2008

American Country Houses

140 Deer Cabin Reverie

On the Wooded Shore of Flathead Lake, a One-Room Hideaway Celebrates Authentic Camp Living Interior Design by Mimi London Text by Peter Haldeman Photography by David O. Marlow

118 Ted Turner

On His Armendaris Ranch Wild Animal Preserve, the Media Magnate Builds a Lodge in Tune with the Land

150 Seaside Sanctuary

A Cluster of Cottages on Martha’s Vineyard Defines Simplicity and Charm

Architecture by Chris Carson, faia Interior Design by Laura Hunt Text by Gerald Clarke Photography by Robert Reck

131 Invoking an Ideal

Romanticized Forms Pay Homage to Southern Architectural Traditions in a Historic Landscape

Renovation Architecture by Joseph W. Dick, aia Text by Jean Strouse Photography by Richard Mandelkorn

158 Inner Directed

Architecture by Ike Kligerman Barkley Interior Design by Renée O’Leary Text by Joseph Giovannini Photography by Durston Saylor

8

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Modern Pieces Bring a Former Barn into the 21st Century Interior Design by S. Russell Groves Text by Michael Frank Photography by Scott Frances

continued on page 10

Robert reck

Cover: A shingled cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. Photography by Richard Mandelkorn.

See page 150. Above Right: The portale of the lodge on Ted Turner’s Armendaris Ranch in New Mexico. Architect Chris Carson designed the buildings, and Laura Hunt did the interiors. See page 118.

In rural Connecticut, a rebuilt barn has been transformed into a comfortable family retreat. See page 158.

170 Capturing Traditions

Georgian Details and a Collection of Americana Lend a Period Feel to a New Residence Architecture by Patrick J. Burke Interior Design by David Guilmet of Bell-Guilmet Associates Text by Penelope Rowlands Photography by Durston Saylor

180 One Foot in the Present

Reshaping the Ranch Aesthetic at the Base of the Grand Teton Architecture by Celeste Robbins, aia Interior Design by Berta Shapiro Text by Jeff Turrentine Photography by Steve Hall/Hedrich Blessing

190 Proud Heritage

A 200-Year-Old Barn Is Born Again as a Designer’s Own Coastal Retreat Architectural and Interior Design

by Ellen Denisevich-Grickis Text by Steven M. L. Aronson Photography by Richard Mandelkorn

198 Farmhouse Abstraction

Architecture by Paul F. Shurtleff, aia Interior Design by Thad Hayes Landscape Architecture by Reed Hilderbrand Text by Joseph Giovannini Photography by Scott Frances

10

Top: Scott Frances; Bottom: Durston Saylor

A Recreational Outbuilding Mirrors Its Bucolic Setting

American folk art is displayed in the great room of a New Jersey house. See page 170.

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continued on page 14

June 2008 Volume 65, Number 6 Architectural Digest, 6300 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048, and 699 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10065, is published monthly by The Condé Nast Publications, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036.

To find Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenet.com.

The historic San Ysidro Ranch in Southern California. See page 70.

Departments

96 Design Notebook:

Spreading Out in Santa Fe The Sprawling Rancho Alegre Rekindles the Spirit of the American West in New Mexico

18 This Month on

ArchitecturalDigest.com

Architecture by Bill Tull Text by Peter Haldeman Photography by Robert Reck

26 Letters 34 Contributors

106 Estates for Sale: Editors Select

42 Design Notebook:

An Anthology of Folk In Upstate New York, a Collection Finds a Home in a Reinvented 18th-Century Barn Architecture by Robertson & Landers Text by John Loring Photography by Peter Aaron/Esto

Properties Around the World California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Florida …

208 AD Directory

A Listing of the Architects, Designers and Hotels Featured in This Issue

58 Art Notebook: Native Beauties

By Steven M. L. Aronson

70 Hotels: San Ysidro Ranch

Charting the Remarkable Renovation of a Storied Southern California Landmark

Restoration Architecture by Appleton & Associates Text by Peter Haldeman Photography by Mary E. Nichols

82 Discoveries by Designers

Architectural Digest’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

90 Design Notebook:

A Winning Design for Oscar® Architectural Digest’s Green Room at the Academy Awards ®

Interior Design by Carleton Varney of Dorothy Draper & Company Text by Kelly Vencill Sanchez Photography by Mary E. Nichols

14

Finds for collectors: an 1880s game board (page 149) and a life-size wood goat of the same vintage (page 188).

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Top: Mary E. Nichols; Bottom left: Courtesy RJG Antiques; Bottom Right: Jesse Hill/Courtesy Hill Gallery

Eugene V. Thaw on His Extraordinary Compilation of North American Indian Works

editor-in-chief: Paige Rense executive editor: Margaret Dunne art director: Jeffrey Nemeroff photographer director: James G. Huntington deputy art director: Frankie Holt senior editors: Richard Olsen, Mary Ore copy editor: Linda Goldstein associate copy editor: Laurie Perry research editor: Maile Pingel research associates: Christopher Rogers, Emily Zaiden special projects manager: James Munn associate art director: George Moscahlades associate editors: Lisa Bingham, Linda Bowles, Paul Zemanek photo rights coordinator: Katie Morrow senior designer: Jaime Ferrand junior designer: Ana Todd photo research editor: Adam Beinash editorial administrative coordinator: Beverley Montgomery art assistants: Chris Morrill, Meg Perotti editorial assistants: Rosemary Brennan, Kristen W. Terry director of public relations: Ellen Rubin literary editor: Howard Kaminsky contributor: Caroline Graham (special projects) contributing writers:

Steven M. L. Aronson, Therese Bissell, Patricia Leigh Brown, Gerald Clarke, Nancy Collins Michael Frank, Joseph Giovannini, Peter Haldeman, John Loring, Wendy Moonan, Penelope Rowlands Mildred F. Schmertz, Susan Sheehan, Jeffrey Simpson, Jean Strouse, Paul Theroux Judith Thurman, Jeff Turrentine, Amanda Vaill

contributing photographers:

Peter Aaron, Harry Benson, Billy Cunningham, Marina Faust, Dan Forer, Scott Frances David O. Marlow, Jim McHugh, Robert McLeod, Michael Moran, Mary E. Nichols, Erhard Pfeiffer Robert Reck, Durston Saylor, Tony Soluri, Roger Wade Published by Condé Nast Publications

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editorial director: Thomas J. Wallace 4 Times Square, New York, New York 10036 Published at 6300 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1100, Los Angeles, California 90048

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®

®

THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE OF DESIGN volume 65/number 6

vice president and publisher: Giulio Capua associate publishers: Jayson Goldberg/advertising, Randi MacColl/marketing executive director: R. Jeffrey Petersen director/finance & business operations: Kevin Kunis advertising director: William Pittel marketing director: Tina S. Brennan creative services director: Amy Soule business director: Nancy E. Pelzer sales development director: Terry Crowe Deegan executive director/home furnishings: Katherine Scully executive director/beauty & fashion: Dana Sergenian-Hingtgen luxury goods director: Pat McGirl category director: Thom Meintel mid-atlantic manager: Doreen Shelley account manager: Rue Richey arts and antiques managers: Wendy Gardner Landau, Nina K. Barker special projects director: Amy Bermant Adler promotion design director: Kristina Juzaitis associate marketing director: Kristen Pagano senior promotion manager: Adrienne Kauderer senior events manager: Amy Sokoloff merchandising manager: Daria Valenzano advertising services manager: Jeanette Galloway new media/merchandising manager: Alison Kudlacik promotion coordinator: Erin Hueston marketing coordinator: Talita Choudhury executive assistant to the publisher: Michelle Elezovic advertising assistants: Ashley Berg, Lisa Cacciatore, JoAnne V. Craft, Jennifer Mitschke Rachel Surwit, Diane Vasilko

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Letters

sea Breezes

ect in Seaside, Florida

The La Jolla, California, residence by Wallace Cunningham was visually stunning (“Attuned to the View,” April). My favorite part of the house was the master suite’s lounge, which looks straight out to the ocean. And those windows—I know I would have them open all day long.

(“Making a Splash in

Nathan Moore Seattle, Washington

Special kudos to Robert A. M. Stern for his proj-

Seaside,” April 2008).

I have always admired the Greek Revival style for its clarity, economy and elegance. Mr. Stern proves that the classical vocabulary continues to be fresh, clever and pertinent to contemporary life. To see such quality of design executed on a smaller scale was most encouraging.

— Charles G. Dobbs Hackettstown, New Jersey

Spring Fling

The March 2008 issue is a great testament to AD’s range. What other magazine could have the traditional White House as its cover and then include such an antithetical design as that of Greystoke Mahale—the beach resort in Tanzania—or the progressive, clean look of the Foster + Partners house on the coast of Japan (“A Japanese Modernism”)? AD truly sticks to what it has always known: great design of all shapes and sizes.

Tim Hartwell Houston, Texas

touching on tradition

I always enjoy my monthly copy of Architectural Digest, but the April issue may be my favorite yet. In particular, I admired Robert A. M. Stern’s take on a Florida beach cottage. He brought an interesting and unique architectural perspective to what is a pretty standard exterior and floor plan on the southeastern coast. (The single column supporting the porch roof really catches the eye.) The detail of the wood on the walls, ceilings and floors makes this house exceptionally warm, inviting and period in feeling, which can be difficult to instill in a brand-new house.

Victoria Brown Sacramento, California

Ian Lambot’s photographs really capture the essence of the Sagami Bay house (“A Japanese Modernism”). The bright rooms bathed in sunlight as well as the Japanese references, like Norman Foster’s interpretation of shoji screens, succeed in mating the classic with the modern.

The colors are also minimalist but effective, again staying true to an authentic Japanese style. It is an intriguing bayside home, indeed.

a second chance

David Korgan Charlotte, North Carolina

Once upon a time

The Washington, D.C., home by José Solís Betancourt (“A Capital Respect for the Past,” April) was like something out of a fairy tale. The vines covering the brick exterior, the rich wood-paneled library with a roaring fire—the memento mori painting above the fire was a perfect fit.

Meat Loaf’s house was just enchanting (“At Home with Meat Loaf,” April). Simplicity and comfort are reflected in every picture. How refreshing to hear that he leaves “rock and roll on the road.”

Years ago I visited friends living in Copenhagen, and I avoided going to Tivoli Gardens, thinking it was a tourist trap. Of course, these days I’m kicking myself for the foolish mistake. After seeing Harry Benson’s Tivoli Gardens in the Books column (April), I ordered a copy online right away. I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but if the image on the front is any indication of the contents, this book should hold me until I make it back to Denmark.

Jean Livingston Little Rock, Arkansas

Marcus Smith Atlanta, Georgia

Mark Riffle Columbus, Ohio

refuge from rock

26

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mellow yellow

The idyllic Tortuga Bay (Hotels, March) would be a relaxing vacation spot for anyone. Every window at the resort seems to have an ocean view, and the canary yellow on the walls must serve as a constant reminder that you’re on vacation. I also liked reading that the designers used materials from the area. It supports local artisans while at the same time giving each of the villas a sense of belonging.

Janice Garza Carson City, Nevada

continued on page 30

Peter aaron/esto

coastal retreat

Letters in-flight entertainment

A Toronto dining room designed by Powell & Bonnell (“All in the Details,” January 2008).

The 727 with the interiors by Craig Wright (“Engines Away!” February 2008) reflects the “good old days” of flying, when taking a flight meant dressed-up passengers and luxury. The flowers and the ice sculpture are nice touches. I’m sure there aren’t any baggage restrictions for flights on this plane.

Jennifer Cooper Albuquerque, New Mexico

french connection

The Toronto home in your January 2008 issue (“All in the Details”) was simple and graceful. Designers David Powell and Fenwick Bonnell created a house that looked as if it had been transported from Paris. The room that stood out the most for me was the dining room. What a beautiful picture of the doors opening up onto the elegant and airy room. I can imagine that a meal in there includes great conversation and, of course, a good glass of wine.

Daphne Peterson Palm Beach, Florida

International delight

a head start

The January issue has to be my choice for best cover photo ever. Dramatic and exotic all at once, it is simply perfect.

I’m 16 years old and have aspired to be an architect from a very early age. Last year my mother bought me a subscription to Architectural Digest as a Christmas gift. Since then I have found so much inspiration for my own amateur designs in your magazine. I found the Designers Tell All interviews in the January edition to be exceptionally beneficial to me and my aspirations. During the few months I have been receiving the magazine, I have visited many breathtaking places in the world through the pages of Architectural Digest. The articles help define my tastes, preferences and dislikes. Your magazine will help me prepare to be a great architect before I even finish college. I plan on having a vast library of Architectural Digests in the future.

Joel Davis St. Louis, Missouri

Nicholas Ratcliff Bristol, Virginia

Gail Beck Baltimore, Maryland

all-time favorite

helping a first-timer

Thank you so much for your Designers Tell All section in the January issue. I recently bought my first home and have been completely overwhelmed with decorating tasks. The color and home office features were particularly useful. Who better to help me through this process than a panel of AD 100 designers?

Lynn Stockton Portland, Oregon

prints of the past

Recently, after I purchased a Japanese print, I was reading past issues of AD when I came across the article “Art: Japanese Woodblock Prints.” This April 1979 story helped me to identify both the artist and date of my print. Thank you for a magazine that is timeless.

Richard Baldwin Albany, New York

The editors invite your comments, suggestions and criticisms.

Letters to the editor should include the writer’s name, address and daytime phone number and be sent by e-mail to letters@archdigest.com or by mail to Letters, Architectural Digest, 6300 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90048.

Letters may be edited for length and clarity and may be published or otherwise reused in any medium.

All submissions become the property of the publication and will not be returned.

30

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jon miller/hedrich blessing

While perusing the January issue, I came across the Kenyan retreat of Elizabeth Warner (“Making a Home in Africa”).

Although the entire residence appealed to me, I was especially taken with the great room. The French doors let in an abundance of light that shows off even the smallest of details, like the geometric pattern on the area rug. Everything from the brightly colored sofa throws to the intricate trunk and wood table reflects Ms. Warner’s fine taste as well as her international upbringing.

Contributors

Our June issue has long been one of our favorites. Poring over photographs of country houses prompts us to yearn for at least one of them. A shingled cottage overlooking the sea on Martha’s Vineyard. A contemporary lodge nestled in Wyoming’s Grand Teton valley. A former barn in Connecticut with modern interiors. A rustic cabin on a lake in Montana. A 1,000-acre Virginia horse farm. A Territorial-style ranch house in New Mexico (owned by media mogul Ted Turner). Whether it’s used on the weekends or as a full-time residence, whether it’s whimsical, classic or aweinspiring, each offers its own perspective on the American country house ideal. We’ve been publishing this issue each June for years now, and each year we are surprised and delighted by the multifaceted creations brought to us by architects, designers and homeowners.

In this issue you’ll also find Ty Warner’s architectural restoration of the legendary San Ysidro Ranch hotel in Santa Barbara, California; a chat with Eugene Thaw about his extraordinary collection of Native American artworks; and an exclusive look at the Architectural Digest Green Room that Carleton Varney created for the 80th Academy Awards in the unforgettable style of the late, great Dorothy Draper.

To look at some of the country houses we’ve published in the past, go to our Web site, www.ArchitecturalDigest.com. You can search for residences in particular locations and view slide shows. While you’re there, be sure to check out the latest designs chosen by our senior staff at our most recent Open Auditions. And don’t forget Design for Sale, where you can find out about items available from our AD 100 designers’ signature lines—and objects from their personal collections. We’ll see you soon on our Web site.

robert reck (“Ted Turner,” page 118; “Design Notebook: Spreading Out in Santa Fe,” page 96). Albuquerque, New Mexico–based Robert Reck’s assignments for this month’s issue kept him in his home state—and in the shadows of media tycoons.

Besides shooting Rancho Alegre, the late R. Michael Kammerer, Jr.’s Santa Fe compound, contributing photographer Reck ventured to Ted Turner’s Armendaris Ranch, which looks out to the Fra Cristobal Mountains. There he caught up with Turner, whom he had never met (although he had shot his Vermejo Park Ranch [see Architectural Digest, June 2005], also in New Mexico, a few years before), and took his portrait. Turner, he says, “was very gracious. Passionate about environmental issues, he is deeply concerned with energy consumption and conservation. His house is wonderful and totally appropriate for the site.” Also there was designer Laura Hunt, who took him on a tour around the ranch. “We came upon a herd of antelope, and, as a result of her skillful driving, I was able to get a great shot of them running through the desert,” he remembers.

34

jean strouse (“Seaside Sanctuary,” page 150). Contributing writer Jean Strouse has been traveling to Martha’s Vineyard since her college days (“I love it in all seasons,” she confides), and she found it a particular pleasure to interview Roseline and Bill Glazer, who bought and renovated a ramshackle cottage on the island. “From an early description of the Glazers’ views, I could tell exactly where the house would be,” she says. “The location is truly spectacular.” And she adds: “Talking with Roseline Glazer was a delight. She cares about every inch—every floorboard, every plant, every cedar shingle—of her property, and she loves telling stories about the entire long-term project.” Asked if she would ever tackle a similar renovation, Strouse admits, “The idea of finding property in a perfect spot, with structures that need rescue and reimagining, has always greatly appealed to me. I haven’t acted on the idea, though— at least not yet.”

Visit ArchitecturalDigest.com for more

continued on page 38

top: harry benson; bottom left: jamey stillings/courtesy robert reck; bottom right: richard lee

Paige Rense, Editor-in-Chief

Contributors

david o. marlow (“Deer Cabin Reverie,” page 140). “It’s very Montana and real. You just want to stoke the fire, grab a book and lie down on the couch,” contributing photographer David O. Marlow says of the cabin that Mimi London, with whom he has frequently worked, designed for Connie and Martin Stone. “She fixed it up but retained its character and didn’t make it fancy. Mimi is so versatile that she can pull off anything. She just hit a home run.” Marlow was especially delighted by a few London touches: a powder room that consists of a mirror tied to a tree, and feed sacks and hay bales that serve as outdoor seating. He also had a great time getting to know Connie Stone, a fellow golf enthusiast. At the moment, Marlow is in the midst of book projects for David Easton and Craig Wright.

john loring (“Design Notebook: An Anthology of Folk,” page 42). When period structures are renovated, restored or repurposed, “often the experience of the building is lost.

You don’t have the spirit of what it was before,” laments contributing writer—and Tiffany’s design director—John Loring. So it was gratifying for Loring to see the care actor Jim Dale and his wife, gallery owner Julie Dale, and architect Malcolm Robertson took in turning an 18th-century barn into a country house in upstate New York. Their work “doesn’t deny the past of the building,” says Loring. His next book, Tiffany Style, is due out in November from publisher Harry N. Abrams.

38

Steve Hall (“One Foot in the Present,” page 180). “I never felt like I could touch a view quite the way I could there,” photographer Steve Hall says of the vistas from the windows in a Wyoming ranch house by Celeste Robbins. Hall, who has shot projects by the architect for 12 years, points out that his fellow Chicagoan was able to fluidly integrate her brand of “clean, timeless modernism, which runs through her other work” into the residence. “She kept it simple and beautiful,” he says. Hall’s photographs appear in the monograph Ross Barney Architects: Process + Projects, from Images Publishing.

penelope rowlands (“Capturing Traditions,” page 170). Contributing writer Penelope Rowlands sees “an inherent paradox” in a New Jersey house by architect Patrick J. Burke and designer David Guilmet for a couple with a lifelong interest in antiques. At first glance, it’s a Georgian-inspired country house, within which is a museum-worthy collection of antiques and thoughtful details, including wings off the main structure built to appear as if they were later additions and a Palladian window on the second floor copied from an 18th-century example. On closer inspection, however, the residence is “modern—it’s very open and light,” notes Rowlands. “Things flow perfectly.”

richard mandelkorn (“Seaside Sanctuary,” page 150; “Proud Heritage,” page 190). Shooting a restored barn in Rhode Island was a uniquely poignant experience for Richard Mandelkorn. “I grew up in a barn in the hills of western Connecticut, in Litchfield County,” says the photographer, whose bedroom, from ages 10 to 18, was in what had been the hayloft. Mandelkorn has fond memories of the place, located “on the high side of a valley at the end of a dirt road. Snow would rip down the valley. When the wind blew, the timbers would rattle,” he recalls. “Threequarters of it was living space and open to the roof, with a fireplace at one end.” Though the geography was different, Mandelkorn saw plenty of similarities between his childhood house and the restored barn Ellen Denisevich-Grickis and her husband, Bill Grickis, use as a summer residence. “It had the same sort of feel—open up to the ceiling, with rough-hewn beams. It’s built by hand, and you can see the cut of the ax.

It takes me home.”

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first row: hans neleman/courtesy steven m. l. aronson, courtesy steve hall/hedrich blessing second row: courtesy david o. marlow, marina faust; third row: harry benson, adam holtzman/courtesy richard mandelkorn

steven M. L. aronson (“Proud Heritage,” page 190; “Art Notebook: Native Beauties,” page 58). “When I drove up to see the Thaw collection of North American Indian art in Cooperstown, New York,” says contributing writer Steven M. L. Aronson, “I made it a point to take along my American water spaniel. His previous owner had—with great expectations—named him Hawkeye after the tracker in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (only to give the dog the boot when he stubbornly refused to hunt), and the Thaw collection happens to be housed in a museum on the site of Cooper’s original homestead. The director there graciously had my own Hawkeye photographed for me on the very grounds where Cooper’s Hawkeye was conceived. The Thaw collection turned out to be a revelation—what those Native Americans managed to do with a little clay, some birch bark or a bunch of porcupine quills was nothing short of a wonder to behold.”

Design Notebook

An Anthology of Folk

In Upstate New York, a Collection Finds a Home in a Reinvented 18th-Century Barn Architecture by Robertson & Landers/Text by John Loring/Photography by Peter Aaron/Esto

W

hether creating a handsome and generously proportioned country retreat out of a mid-18th-century barn skeleton of massive 40-foot hand-hewn beams or collecting works of folk art made from bottle caps, Popsicle sticks, pottery shards or simply twigs, Julie and Jim Dale— respectively the owner of Julie Artisans’ Gallery in Manhattan

and the popular British actor and comedian known for his roles in the Carry On films and as the voice of the Harry Potter audiobooks—are finetuned to the alluring charms of craft. They are keenly aware of art, objects, furnishings and, of course, architecture that transform the most humble materials into works of great personality and beauty.

Their odyssey in upstate

42 l www.ArchitecturalDigest.com

New York began in 1989 with the purchase of an 89-acre tract of woodlands with a 30acre lake. A hilltop overlooking the lake was selected as the site to relocate the remains of a 250-year-old barn.

After a fire destroyed the barn before it could be moved, they were fortunate enough to find another, from the same period and with the same footprint,

continued on page 44

Rather than build an entirely new house, actor Jim Dale and his wife, Julie, a gallery owner, opted to reassemble the skeleton of a mid-18thcentury barn on their upstate New York property. They worked with Malcolm Robertson, of Robertson and Landers Architects, to make it into a peaceful retreat.

Design Notebook

Craft and folk art fill the residence. Above: Brightly hued kilims and a wearable art piece by Jean Williams Cacicedo, hanging above the fireplace, provide color and delineate spaces in the soaring great room. Of the layout, Julie Dale explains, “We wanted to keep it true to its original function.” Right: A striped rug by Leza McVey is on the floor of the west balcony.

continued from page 42

that would become the core of a rural haven.

A 40-by-40-foot barn cannot, of course, accommodate a family, but the Dales wanted to keep the barn’s integrity. “To preserve the way a barn should be,” Jim Dale explains, “you build rooms on the outside, not on the inside. Conversions quite often divide a barn into various rooms and end up with a house rather than a barn.” So an architect was hired to make the barn into living spaces and to design a two-story wing on either side.

The chosen architect, Mal-

colm Robertson, of Robertson & Landers Architects, is, like Jim Dale, from the north of England and possesses, as does Dale, a very British love of country life coupled with an innate feel for the seamless integration of structure and setting. His youth in the unspoiled land around Newcastle upon Tyne bred an instinctive aesthetic sense. “My architecture initiates from intuitions that I then pursue,” he explains.

That such a famous film and musical comedy star as Jim Dale and his architect saw eye to eye on the barn con

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continued on page 46

Design Notebook

“We had spent many years antiquing in England and elsewhere and shifted gears to focus on the American folk markets.”

continued from page 44

version had much to do with their shared sympathy for the authentic. “We’re born with it in our DNA,” Jim Dale states.

Actor and architect agreed that using the old barn as the heart of the house would be the guide for the project. “We maintained the 18th-century flair in terms of massing and in an aesthetic that was relatively subdued,” Robertson observes.

“The barn, rather than architectural details, was always to be the dominant force. The windows are small, which is in line with the 18th century.

However, in the central 40foot-high space, we needed to

get some light, as you do in a cathedral—light penetrating to flood into the volume—so there are a number of small windows, which, unless you’re 20 feet tall, you’re not going to be able to look out from.”

The building completed, the Dales turned their attention to the interiors. “In furnishing the barn proper, our first challenge was to adjust our ideas about scale,” recalls Julie Dale. “For the great room, we needed to think big. We started with large kilims to define areas of use and to hang on the gable ends to add color and softness to the masculine structure. Then rus

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Above: Tucked under the roof, the mezzanine serves as a seating area. Mixed with the set of rattan furniture are wood wheel models and a clown’s head garbage lid, possibly from Luna Park on Coney Island. Left: An antique penny rug is between windows in the master bedroom. The bolster is by Mario Rivoli, an artist Julie Dale represents at her gallery.

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Design Notebook continued from page 46

tic furniture created for old Adirondack camps set the tone.

We had spent many years antiquing in England and elsewhere and now shifted gears to focus on the American folk markets. As the interior personality of the barn unfolded, we found that the wings took on a more playful folk attitude, while the barn proper became more camplike.”

Of the trove of objects that now fills the house, Jim Dale notes, “We’ve collected many things made by country people who used their hands to create something wonderful out of even the cheapest things. During the 1930s, when people had no money, they took a cap off a bottle and realized they at least had a bottle cap to work with, and they could use the cork from the inside of the cap to create something else. Those country people were real artists. We began with one or two bottle-cap figures or cork boxes, and before we knew it, there was a collection.”

Reflecting on the project, Jim Dale muses: “It is our hope that the barn will be around for a long time to come, to show future generations what an original settlers’ barn looked

like before conversion to a three-bedroom house. It sits surrounded by flower beds overlooking the lake, no satellite dish to spoil the picture, all telephone and electrical cables buried underground, its now-faded red stain giving one the impression the barn has been there forever. We hope it will be.” l

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Above: Planters, vases and tables decorated with pottery shards enliven the screen porch. The wicker and metal pieces of furniture are vintage finds. Lining a wall are English Art Nouveau tiles.

Below: The south façade. Robertson added a wing on either side of the barn but maintained, says Jim Dale, “as much as possible of the barn’s spirit.” Below Left: Julie and Jim Dale on the property’s 30acre lake. “Great pains have been taken to keep the lake edge natural and undisturbed,” notes Julie Dale.

Art Notebook

Native Beauties

Eugene V. Thaw on His Extraordinary Compilation of North American Indian Works

By Steven M. L. Aronson

there should be buses leaving every 15 minutes from every terminal and beating a path to the door

of the fenimore art museum in upstate new york—that collection you gave them is something that no one who loves art can afford to miss. i was fascinated to see

that a lot of the 800 arrestingly

beautiful objects on hand are utilitarian, relating to warfare and

hunting and harvesting and feasting. and a fair number of them, i learned, are incontestably the

best of their kind—milestones of

american indian inventiveness. every region and category of north american indian material culture

is represented, from prehistory to present day. how long did it take you to put all this together?

This was what I call my whirlwind collection—it’s been estimated that I bought one piece every four days for 10 years. the museum?

A Nez Perce horse mask, circa 1875–1900, features horsehair, feathers, glass beads and brass buttons.

In the early ’90s, and on the strength of that promise they went ahead and built an 18,000-square-foot wing to accommodate it all, which—I have to hand it to them— goes very nicely with the neo-Georgian architecture of their circa 1930 main building. It’s right on the site of James Fenimore Cooper’s original farmhouse, on the shores of the lake that he gave the name Glimmerglass in a couple of his frontier novels.

The real name of the lake is Otsego, which in Iroquois—and the entire Cooperstown area was once Iroquois country—means roughly “a place to come together by the water.” When the wing opened in 1995,

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john bigelow taylor/thaw collection, fenimore art museum, cooperstown, new york

when exactly did you promise it to

Art Notebook continued from page 58

the Tadodaho himself—the speaker of the chiefs of the whole six-tribe Iroquois Confederacy—gave the thanksgiving address. Then another one of the chiefs did the Tree of Peace planting, speaking and singing something in Mohawk and then translating it at length into English. In the heat of a brutal summer day there in upstate New York, people began to collapse and faint, but when the chief saw all the swooning, he pointed out, “You know, this is just the short version—the regular way takes four days.” how did you get into indian—i mean, you of all people, whose

thing has always famously been

Well, I retired from the business of art way back in 1986. I had simply lost the joy of it—art had turned from connoisseurship into monetary value, or future monetary value, and become terribly cheapened in the process. And since then, of course, the dynamism of that aspect of the art world has increased exponentially, which is even more dispiriting. I had just enough money to retire gracefully and do what I wanted— and the market was strong, so I also made a little money. And I had my charitable foundation in New Mexico to keep me busy, which I’d created from the sale of a single painting I owned that had been on loan to the Frick for several years—Van Gogh’s upright Flowering Garden. There’s a horizontal Flowering Garden, too. That’s in the museum in The Hague.

Above: The Tsimshian used carved and painted maple and abalone shell for a circa 1840–70 frontlet. Right: An Ojibwa bandolier bag, circa 1870, is made of cotton, wool yarn, velvet and glass beads.

how did you ever end up in

at least you picked a place to

I was asked to appraise the art in the Georgia O’Keeffe estate—they wanted someone who was not in the O’Keeffe market yet knowledgeable enough to do the job.

So I went down there in April of ’86, the month after she died, and my wife, Clare, and I soon decided to buy a house in Santa Fe. I wanted to be too far away from New York to be able to commute there easily, and this was ideally that far. And ideal in other ways, too—the mountain vistas were supernally beautiful. And then, because I’m someone who needs to have something to collect, I began to look for a project where I could continue to exercise my eye—go on using it to distinguish better from worse and then the definitively best from the better. I was seeking an outlet for my collecting energies, you could say.

a lack of galleries.

new mexico?

had you ever bought an american indian object before?

Above: A circa 1450–1500 polychrome vessel was discovered at the Sikyatki pueblo in northeastern Arizona in the 1960s.

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No, although I remember being bowled over by René d’Harnoncourt’s “Indian Art of the United States” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art when I was a teenager—1941, I think that was.

settle in that didn’t suffer from

But the art they were selling in Santa Fe was terrible! Tourist art, for the most part.

There were a few dealers in traditional Native American around, but you really had to know what you were doing, and to that end I quickly sought out my old acquaintance Ralph Coe, who had relocated to Santa Fe. He was someone I had done business with when he was the director of the great Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City—I’d sold him that famous Monet that was in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, Boulevard des Capucines. Anyway, “Ted” knew his way around American Indian art as both collector and scholar—he had, after all, organized the “Sacred Circles” bicentennial exhibition that covered 2,000 years of the stuff. he’s recounted how he advised you that there were great things to be had in this field that were

“the

products of cultures as complete and rounded, and as challenging

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john bigelow taylor/thaw collection, fenimore art museum, cooperstown, new york

old-master paintings and drawings?

Art Notebook

Left: Buckskin, glass beads and tin cones distinguish a circa 1895 girl’s dress by the Teton Sioux. Above: The Hurons in Quebec made moccasins from black-dyed hide, moose hair and silk, 1847–53.

to a connoisseur, as any you might have dealt with.” and around the

same time, you told me, some other great authority called your at-

tention to a diary entry made by

dÜrer in 1520 expressing his amazement at the aztec featherwork that cortÉs had sent back to

charles v. did you get all fired up by any of this?

I realized that I was going to have to see for myself. And, as always with me, aesthetic quality would be the deciding factor. I was determined to look at American Indian material as art, not ethnography— ethnography would be the last consideration, in fact. You have to look at the object itself, separately and apart, and have it be the chief guide to its own being, as it were. Whatever status it might enjoy as an example of Native American lifeways, you have to evaluate it clearly and coldly as art and forget all about context, put archaeology and anthropology totally aside.

Which is why this collection reflects my aesthetic sensibility as surely as any of my others. Because what I ultimately discovered was that American Indian could hold its own with any art anywhere—it could stand alongside Asian, African, Egyptian, European and Maori masterpieces.

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you’re saying that a great american indian object can be the

equal of an old-master or impressionist painting or an object from antiquity?

Oh, absolutely. And by the way, they’re priced like that—pretty much so—now.

The market has changed a lot—it’s less lively, there are fewer players, but the prices have gotten way out of line. The good things have really taken off. A mask that, when I began collecting, cost me $100,000—a similar one went just now for $1.8 million. And in Paris, at the auction house Drouot, I spent around $375,000— at the time the world-record price for an American Indian art object—for an 18th-century Tlingit war helmet with a fantastic bird’s head carved in wood on top and a crest of bristly human hair that today would be bound to fetch well over a million. how did you manage to refocus your so-called

“european” eye?

There are standard aesthetic principles that can be applied to the work of all civilizations. An eye is an eye is an eye, whatever you train it on, and I was able to teach myself to read the visual language of Indian art. It’s all the same business, really—of looking for quality, for depth of expres-

sion, for workmanship, craftsmanship, artistry. Surface appearance—patina—was an important consideration, too, every bit as much as it would be in Greek and Roman or medieval art: the effect of wear on ivory or metal or copper after hundreds or thousands of years of handling. A lot of Indian art is fugitive and fragile. Weavings, for instance. And things that were done with porcupine-quill coloring—two weeks in the light and they fade, so you want to try and find pieces where the color’s not all washed out. what was your first acquisition?

Clare spotted an attractive Victorian beaded pillow sham in a local shop. It turned out to be of Athabascan origin—later we found it reproduced in color in a catalogue. We’d bought it for only $500. As it was emblazoned with the American flag, I decided to buy some more flag-embellished stuff to try to make that a theme: a pair of Sioux leggings, a beaded Sioux violin case from 1899, and on and on until we had over 50 objects. I became known in the trade as the flag man! It had just snowballed—we’d gotten excited by the fact that you could still find things, you know. Then I branched out and bought a wonderfully carved Makah mask, and

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john bigelow taylor/thaw collection, fenimore art museum, cooperstown, new york

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Art Notebook

cent thing: There are sea lion whiskers set into the edge of the visor, abalone shell inlaid in the eyes and an ancestralcrest image of a bear with upright paws all sheathed in copper. As you can tell, I’m more strongly drawn to objects that are sculptural, three-dimensional—and there the great Northwest Coast carvings and Eskimo masks take precedent—than I am, let’s say, to beadwork and quilts and Plains material.

Above: Dat So La Lee’s 1904–5 basket is constructed of western redbud and bracken root. Right: A Micmac wool, glass bead and silk pouch, circa 1840–50.

that paved the way for many Northwest Coast purchases. And then an Aleutian Islands lidded basket that was just superbly worked—so closely woven it could pass for linen. And a sensational Plateau horse mask with a clutch of red-shafted-flicker feathers on top and a mane of horsehair attached along the back. And then a massive 18th-century eastern Great Lakes burl maple feast bowl that had been deaccessioned from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. I was off and running. where did you find all these things?

It’s a fairly small world, the world of the American Indian collectors and dealers, and your name gets out there. I began to acquire market recognition as someone who might want the great pieces that could surface at any time from God knows where. And also, some of my academic friends, experts in the field, would tip me off if something especially fine was coming up at auction. I’d make up my own mind about whether or not to buy it—it was my taste and my judgment—but I did like to get recommendations.

I also compiled quite a library on the subject. And I visited museums all over the world—I told you, I was revved up—to look at the greatest examples of things and learn major object types. The wonderful museum at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver had an open-storage gallery where the part of its collection that was not on display was still visible to the

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large-scale collecting coups.

public, and later I proposed that the open storage in the Fenimore wing be modeled on that. i guess one really has to know a field before one can own it. did

your old dealer friends think you had taken leave of your aesthetic senses when you began collecting american indian in earnest?

No, no, they understood that it wasn’t bows and arrows I was collecting. Someone like Bill Acquavella, when I told him, said, “Just make sure you end up having the best collection.” And I like to think I did. The best collection formed in my generation, at any rate. What helped move it along in that direction was when I got the chance to buy a beautiful group of 14 Northwest Coast objects from the Chicago collector Stefan Edlis in the late '80s.

Another big one was a multimillion-dollar en-bloc purchase from the man who was without question the best private dealer in American Indian art, George Terasaki.

Some of my greatest treasures—especially, again, Northwest Coast, which is the highest Indian art—came from him. He had an apartment on East 78th Street, right off Madison, in a building that at one time I operated out of the ground floor of, myself. He was difficult, but I was able to make packages of things a couple of times with him—buy a group of objects. Paying too much, of course, but not as much too much as he’d originally wanted. These were marathon negotiating sessions—we wound up having to employ a go-between, who managed to get each of us to bend, George to come down enough and me to come up enough. But whatever the sting, it was worth it. How do you put a price, for instance, on something as unique as

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he’s been in the news lately—for

selling warhol’s turquoise marilyn

for $80 million to one of those billionaire hedge-fund guys, and also for maybe being the anonymous

buyer at auction of a $40 million– plus bacon self-portrait.

Well, it was his Indian things certainly that put me in a different category. All of a sudden I was the owner of masterworks, major historic pieces—take that Tsimshian frontlet headdress with the face of a thunderbird and the nose that’s all marvelously beaked and curled, or that Tlingit clan hat made of wood. Now that’s a magnifi-

Collector, dealer, educator and philanthropist Eugene V. Thaw (above) amassed one of the world’s most important Native American art collections and then gave it to Cooperstown, New York’s Fenimore Art Museum..

top Left and top right: Richard Walker/thaw collection, fenimore art museum, cooperstown, new york; portrait: harry benson

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tell me about some of your other

Art Notebook continued from page 64

an articulated raven mask where the carving of the upper and lower mandibles and the delineation of the eyebrows are out of this world? Or a pipe that depicts in the most painstaking detail a large bear devouring a cadaverous shaman? Not to mention some incomparable bowls and staggeringly beautiful daggers.

And on the heels of this, I succeeded in buying another core collection: 17 Canadian Woodlands objects in mint condition, all of them bright and unfaded, including a pair of Micmac moccasins with moosehair embroidery, and a birchbark canoe model with paddler. These came from the 11th Earl of Elgin—straight out of a trunk full of artifacts in the attic of one of his castles in Scotland. His great-grandfather, the eighth earl, was governor general of Canada in the mid–19th century and was given most of these things as presentation pieces by the Native peoples. what made you decide to give all this precious, if not priceless, material away?

Once it reached a certain mass—when I had about 300 pieces of high quality and our house was positively overflowing with the stuff, and I mean walls, drawers, floors, tabletops, bookshelves—we began trying to find the right home for it. Its final resting place, if you will. Clare and I were never comfortable with the idea of a lovingly assembled collection such as ours being dispersed at auction after we were gone. We decided to give it to the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown because their crown jewel, the Fenimore Art Museum, already had a considerable collection of folk art and American 19th century. Frankly, it would be hard to envision a more ideal destination for it—the place had geographical, historical and, through James Fenimore Cooper’s epic novels, literary ties to the American Indian. And besides, we had maintained a large farm in the area ourselves for many years. The architect Hugh Hardy was chosen to do the wing—he’d designed a building nearby for the Glimmerglass Opera, where I was on the board at the time. and you continued collecting.

And how! Up to this point we had collected only those objects that appealed to

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us personally, but now that we were going public, so to speak, we had to broaden and expand, fill in the holes, buy the greatest examples from every region and period.

So then I really went to town—I went on a binge and bought far more strenuously than I had when I was buying merely for myself. what sort of stuff did you buy?

I added considerably to my southwestern holdings by acquiring the Santa Fe art dealer Gerald Peters’s personal collection of Pueblo and Navajo weavings, among them a first-phase chief’s blanket of such quality that it would surely have cost as much as 50 horses when it was made. There was one that turned up on—I don’t know if you ever watch that stupid program on public television—Antiques Roadshow. Somebody brought in a chief’s blanket that they just had sort of over a chair in their house, and they were flabbergasted when they were informed that it was worth half a million dollars and that they had a national treasure. And then when I discovered that the Taylor Museum in Colorado Springs wanted to deaccession their Northwest Coast art in order to concentrate on the Southwest, which was the area they served, I snapped it all up. This got me, among some other fine things, the famous Kwakiutl potlatch figure of a man gesturing with the index finger of his right hand and holding a copper shield against his chest with his left. did you find any memorable masks?

I did get my hands on a distinguished group of Eskimo specimens, including a couple of pairs of exquisite miniature finger masks. The women, you see, weren’t permitted to dance barehanded when they petitioned the gods for things like abundance for the coming year—they had to hold a mask in each hand. As part of the temptation for me to buy them—and they were expensive—the hopeful seller pulled out a big French book of Eskimo masks that featured them, along with masks from the collection of André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism. American Indian material was popular with the Surrealists, you know—Max Ernst and Paul Éluard also had important collections.

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Art Notebook continued from page 66 did you manage to get hold of any great baskets?

I have the most fantastic basket.

I bought it from the grandson of a Pittsburgh steel magnate who had paid so much for it in 1914 that it made all the papers—$1,400, believe me, was an unprecedented sum then for an Indian basket. It’s Washoe—that’s the tribe—and it was woven, 30 stitches per linear inch, by … Well, Louisa Keyser was her American name—her Native name was Dat So La Lee, which I was told means “big hips.” She’s the most famous Native basket weaver of North America, and this is her most famous basket, the most historically significant basket of her career. It’s known as Beacon Lights. The design is a scatter pattern of crosses repeated in rows. The crosses symbolize light or heat, and the wavy lines around them represent flames—supposedly to commemorate the big signal fires that the Washoes built in the mountains to call members of the tribe together in council from far and wide. A basket like that is worth over a million dollars today. i was particularly

and all of that. It came up at Sotheby’s in 1994 and went for the second-highest price ever paid for Indian art at the time—almost $400,000. I was the underbidder. But when the buyer told me that he was going to break the book up and sell the drawings separately, because that was the only way to recoup his investment, I offered him 10 percent profit, and he took it. it says somewhere that you took great care to avoid anything directly associated with human remains.

Yeah, on the grounds that anything involved with an actual physical burial should stay there. Where it belongs.

Native Americans have asked many museums to return their skeletons to them—along with the goods that were found with them. And we have nothing like that. We weren’t going to shoot ourselves in the foot by having stuff like that. did you keep anything back for yourself?

I have a few baskets in the house, and one or two pieces of local pottery. They’ll eventually go to the museum, too.

enthralled by the bound book of dream draw-

shared absolutely every-

That’s a world masterpiece— probably as fine as any ledger book in existence. I’d been looking for a long time for one of those complete books of an Indian draftsman. This one is from the 1880s and has depictions of Native social and religious life as well as studies of local natural history. It’s all done in pencil and crayon in a flat pictographic style so unlike the tradition of Renaissance to modern drawing, which has shading and perspective

It’s the Indians, rather, who will have—they have so much to share with all of us. My hope has always been that the collection can serve as an inspiration to carry respect forward. We are at the beginning of this chain, not the end— and that’s an optimistic place to be. l

black hawk.

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you will then have

ings by the sioux chief

thing.

Visit ArchitecturalDigest.com for the 10 Steven M. L. Aronson interviews with Eugene V. Thaw that have been published to date.

Hotels

San Ysidro Ranch

Charting the Remarkable Renovation of a Storied Southern California Landmark Restoration Architecture by Appleton & Associates/Text by Peter Haldeman/Photography by Mary E. Nichols

I

t’s the kind of place where people check in with their pugs—registering the little darlings as Jack and Jackie in the guest book—and where fellow guests will recognize both the dogs’ famous namesakes and the fact that the 35th American president and his wife honeymooned here. Such is the lore surrounding the San Ysidro Ranch, a fairy-tale-picturesque resort in Santa Barbara, California, that was once owned by film star Ronald Colman, hosted the nuptials of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier and has inspired writers from Somerset Maugham to Sinclair Lewis. San Ysidro’s 19th-century history as a citrus ranch only adds to the nostalgia and romance that hover over the place like the scent of navel orange blossoms.

If, by the end of the 20th century, its historic stone build-

Purchased by Ty Warner in 2000, San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California, has undergone a three-year renovation by architect Marc Appleton.

“My vision was to make the needed improvements without changing its innate character,” says Warner. Above: Appleton opened up the reception cottage, called the Hacienda, to the surrounding garden. Right: Olive trees and lavender line the new entrance drive.

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ings, storybook cottages and rambling gardens were beginning to look a little shabby, the ranch was beloved enough that visitors were willing to overlook its flaws. San Ysidro was sort of like everyone’s favorite maiden aunt, the one with the good bones and the slightly ratty sweaters. In 2000 the property was purchased

by Ty Warner, the so-called Beanie Baby billionaire, whose plans to renovate the place sparked concern among the faithful that any “improvements” would compromise its understated charms. They can breathe again. Auntie has emerged from a three-year, $150 million face-lift—and, frankly, she looks amazing.

Warner interviewed a number of architects for the job, but it’s hard to imagine a more likely candidate than Marc

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Hotels

continued from page 70

Top: Appleton and project architect Ken Mineau reworked the entrance to the Stonehouse restaurant and the Plow & Angel bar and restaurant just below and created a new terrace, at right, with “radiant heating and a fireplace and great ocean and mountain views,” notes Appleton. Above: Patio dining.

Right: The 1825 Adobe is the oldest building at the ranch and a California historic landmark. “We very gingerly made some minor repairs and did some structural work,” Appleton says.

Appleton. Appleton, whose grandparents commissioned architect George Washington Smith to build one of the finest Spanish Colonial Revival houses in Santa Barbara and who has fond memories of dining at the ranch as a boy, has made the restoration and construction of period revival residences in California and elsewhere the cornerstone of his career. When he was approached by Warner, he articulated two key concepts.

“I said that I felt a successful project would be one where those familiar with the ranch would come back and be a little confused as to what was new and what was old. The second thing was that I felt this was more of a landscape project, almost, than an architectural one. Because I think what guests at the ranch come away

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“What guests at the ranch come away with is this marvelous setting with the gardens and trees.”

Hotels

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with is this marvelous setting with the gardens and trees.”

At the same time, the architect harbored no illusions regarding the scope of the job: “There isn’t a single building that wasn’t totally restored or, in some cases, rebuilt entirely.”

He is quick to credit Warner’s commitment to the project.

“It’s rare that a client as busy as he is gives the time to champion such high quality or becomes as personally involved in the details as he did.”

The cottages scattered around the property (two were added, for a total of 41) were taken down to the studs and “brought into the same mode” of the classic Califor-

nia ranch house, with boardand-batten siding and pitched shingle roofs. To make them more private and intimate, Appleton designed entrance courtyards and enlarged patios. Amenities like spas and indoor-outdoor showers were

“We preserved the architectural features of the cottages,” Appleton remarks. Above: Lilac, a one-bedroom cottage. “The garden was a constant element of almost everything,” says the architect, who collaborated with landscape consultants Laurie Lewis, Sally Paul and James Hyatt on the renovation. Right: A fireplace warms Willow Cottage.

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installed, but not at the expense of character. The footprints of the bungalows were maintained, and their homey hallmarks (exposed beams, stone fireplaces) still enchant.

The ranch’s two restaurants were given a new kitchen, and

the sandstone structure that houses them was refreshed.

Appleton replaced its old wood deck with a stone terrace that matches the building’s exterior and takes full advantage of the ranch’s ocean and mountain

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Hotels

Above Left: A bedroom of the restored Kennedy Cottage, where Jacqueline and John Kennedy honeymooned in 1953. Above Right: A clawfoot tub in Eucalyptus Cottage. All of the cottages were outfitted with new bath fixtures and tile. Some also offer indooroutdoor showers. Left: The new Laurel Cottage has a creekside terrace with a spa. “We redesigned the roadway and the landscaping, so there’s an increased sense of privacy,” says Appleton.

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views. Under the terrace he put in a private dining room styled after a wine cave, and under the dining room he installed a 5,000-bottle wine cellar. The historic ranch houses that function, respectively, as the reception area and a second private dining room were invisibly restored.

As Appleton intended, it’s the improvements to the grounds that you notice first and last. Now you make the turn off San Ysidro Lane onto a gravel drive that winds below a dreamy canopy of gnarled olive trees underplanted with drifts of lavender. “It was part of our concept that we were reminding you of the agricultural beginnings of the ranch,”

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he explains. With the assistance of landscape consultants Laurie Lewis, Sally Paul and James Hyatt, he expanded the property’s citrus groves and herb and vegetable gardens and enhanced the central garden with a new lily pond and rose arbor. Warner selected oaks and peppers to supplement existing specimens, and the premises have been replanted with highly fragrant perennials. Surely California’s agrarian past was never this pretty—but then, mythologizing the state’s history is as old as the state itself. l

San Ysidro Ranch 800-368-6788 www.sanysidroranch.com

Discoveries by Designers

A circa 1860 chalkware bank, $1,250, in the shape of a dove, offered by Hamilton, Ohio, dealers Claude and Sharon Baker (www.claudeand sharonbaker.com; 513-726-5496) is a rare survivor—most were broken open to retrieve the saved money.

A Bed in the Berkshires Topping out at over six feet, a bed, $8,900, at Le Trianon is a tour de force of wickerwork. The American piece, produced around 1900, when wicker furniture was seeing a surge in popularity, features intricate decoration, from the delicate scrolls running along the canopy to the panels on each end that seem to suggest a peacock’s tail.

Rock and Roll Brazilian designer José Zanine Caldas is perhaps best known for the furniture he sculpted from salvaged wood. In San Francisco, Hedge (www.hedgegallery.com; 415-4332233) has a circa 1970 tête-à-tête rocker of reclaimed pequi, $32,000.

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Le Trianon, 1854 N. Main St., Sheffield, MA 01257 413-528-0775; www.letrianon.1stdibs.com

claude and Sharon BAker: Jim Callaway; Le Trianon: Richard Mandelkorn; Hedge: Courtesy Hedge; Schumacher: Billy Cunningham

Bank on It

Architectural Digest’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

photo credits tktktk.

Schumacher Good Day Sunshine is a printed linen in the Schumacher (800-523-1200; www.fschumacher.com) Modern Collection; it comes in black and white, flamingo, spring and china blue (shown).

Discoveries by Designers

AD’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

Scalamandré

Found Marbles

At Scalamandré (800932-4361; www.scala mandre.com), Raj Botanica is a floral union cloth, with background colors of ivory, soft blue, Indian yellow and Madras pink (shown).

Quite a Pair New York’s Tribeca neighborhood is home to Mondo Cane and its well-edited array of mid-20th-century furniture and accessories. Of particular note is a deceptively simple pair of bentwood-and-bamboo cantilevered chairs, $18,500, attributed to the legendary Charlotte Perriand.

Mondo Cane Inc., 174 Duane St., New York, NY 10013 212-219-9244; www.mondocane.com

Carpet of Flowers The tree of life, a folk art motif that recurs across cultures, appears on a nearly three-by-five-foot 1930–40 American hooked rug, $1,675, from A Bird in Hand Antiques (www.a birdinhand.com; 973-410-0077) in Florham Park, New Jersey.

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ScalamandrÉ, S. Scott Powers Antiques, Mondo Cane and A bird in hand Antiques: Billy Cunningham

In Brooklyn, New York, S. Scott Powers Antiques (www.burlsnuff .com; 718-625-1715) has a circa 1860 stoneware basket filled with 50 1.25-inch-diameter Bennington marbles, $3,600 for the basket and marbles; $3,100 for the basket only.

Discoveries by Designers

AD’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

Lee Jofa Rider on the Wind Obsolete (www.obsoleteinc.com; 310-399-0024), of Venice, California, has a delightful—and expressive—1920–30 American whirligig of a man riding a bicycle, $3,800.

When the wind hits him, his legs move the pedals.

Abstract floral designs and a striking combination of colors distinguish a Cliff vase.

Big Top Memories Tella Kitchen, an artist often compared to Grandma Moses, was born in Vinton, Ohio, and later moved to Attica, Indiana. Sometime in the 1960s or ’70s she painted the oil Circus in Town, $8,200, based on her memories of one that came through Attica when she was a child. The work, at Canup Antiques, captures the excitement of the event in the figures’ animated gestures.

Canup Antiques, 828-743-9435; www.canupantiques.com

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How Bizarre Toronto’s 20th Century Objects (www.20thcenturyobjects.com; 416617-9119) has a fine example of a 1930s Clarice Cliff Bizarre vase, $2,800. The English potter’s output was typified by imaginative interpretations of the Art Déco aesthetic.

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obsolete: jim Mchugh; lee jofa: billy cunningham; 20th century objects: courtesy www.20thcenturyobjects.com; canup antiques: william noland

Conjuring up old European wall paintings, Vintage Fresco is a printed linen available in champagne and pale aqua from Lee Jofa (800-453-3563; www .leejofa.com).

Discoveries by Designers

AD’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

Let’s Bowl!

Bowling sets, such as one, $195, at Houston’s Helen Warren Spector Antiques, were popular in the United States

Helen Warren Spector Antiques, 713-927-6444 www.helenspector.com

Right Direction Dating from the early 1800s, a watercolor of a mariner’s compass, $2,350, at the Wiscassett, Maine, gallery Stauble & Chambers Antiques (www.staublechambersantiques .com; 207-882-6341), is notable for its bold primary colors.

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Helen warren Spector antiques: courtesy helen warren spector antiques stauble & Chambers antiques: brian vanden brink

from the early 20th century until the 1940s. The pins measure just under six inches tall each and were likely used indoors.

Design Notebook

A Winning Design for Oscar

®

Architectural Digest’s Green Room at the Academy Awards

®

By Firstname Lasttktkt

Left: Backstage at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, Carleton Varney, of Dorothy Draper & Company, evoked Old Hollywood glamour in the Architectural Digest Green Room, which he created for the 80th annual Academy Awards. The pedestal table, foreground, is an original Draper design, as is the sconce; the doors and chandelier are Draper replicas.

Below: A life-size Oscar is at the entrance.

Nourison carpet.

M

ost designers faced with the prospect of having just five weeks to complete a job that’s key to one of the biggest events of the year could be forgiven if they opted to turn and run the other way. But Carleton Varney has never been like most designers. “It can always be done,” he says simply.

The indefatigable Varney was about to board a plane when he got a call from Architectural Digest editor-in-chief Paige Rense asking if he would like to design the magazine’s green room for this year’s Academy Awards. “Paige and I, we go back a while, and she’d seen the work I’d done for Joan Crawford and other stars,” he recalls. “I told her yes, indeed, I would!”

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There was no question about the design concept. “We wanted to give it the early Hollywood look,” Varney notes, “when movie stars were movie stars.”

The president and owner of Dorothy Draper & Company didn’t have to look far for inspiration. His green room pays exuberant homage to four of Draper’s most notable projects—California’s Arrowhead Springs Hotel, the Quitandinha Palace & Casino Resort in Brazil, the Camellia House at Chicago’s Drake Hotel and New York’s Hampshire House.

No one did glamour quite like Dorothy Draper. The legendary decorator, who once pronounced, “the Drab Age is over,”

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Screen Images Courtesy Gloria Lamb; Oscar Image: © A.M.P.A.S.®

Interior Design by Carleton Varney of Dorothy Draper & Company Text by Kelly Vencill Sanchez/Photography by Mary E. Nichols

Design Notebook

“This was a fantasy space,” notes Varney. Above: A seating area. The mirror and lamps are also vintage Draper pieces. He adapted the dishes and glassware from Draper designs. LG televisions, at Abt.com. White satin, red Ultrasuede, sofa fringe, sofa and tufted chairs, Kravet. Low table and rattan chairs from Ficks Reed. Above Right: The entrance. Table and benches, Kravet.

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was never one for the modest gesture.

Rococo-style moldings, black-and-whitemarble floors and overscale floral prints in vivid hues—all were part of her stylishly dramatic vocabulary.

The Architectural Digest Green Room, which Varney likens to “a set from a 20thCentury Fox musical,” is crisply theatrical and marked by bold colors and patterns.

There are lacquered double doors and a floor stenciled in a checkerboard design.

Mottled aubergine walls are offset by a glossy white wainscoting and oversize crown moldings. There’s a tufted-blackleather bar and luxurious fabrics: white satin, lipstick-red Ultrasuede and a bright green banana-leaf damask. A Dorothy Draper print adds a vibrant floral note.

While many of the furnishings are reproductions, others are original Draper pieces, such as the baroque sconce and the palm-tree lamps.

The room was to sit just offstage at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre and needed to

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accommodate between 25 and 30 people.

Measuring approximately 40 by 20 feet, it was more or less the size of a New York City living room.

But most living rooms have things like walls, a ceiling, electrical outlets. The green room had to be constructed in its entirety at the ABC television studios before it was dismantled and rebuilt at the Kodak.

It took the set builders about four days to create the bones of the space, and then the carpentry, electrical, painting and drapery departments performed their duties. The move to the Kodak proved a bit

more complicated. The room was a foot and a half over the fire exit doors and had to be tweaked to fit. In the end, the various departments worked feverishly to pull the room together on time.

By all accounts, the green room was an enormous success, and Varney is pleased that he can bring back glamour to interior design. “We live in a beige-and-gray world.

We need a sparkle, a way to make people smile again. That’s what it’s all about.” l Visit www.ArchitecturalDigest.com to see more Oscar-related features.

Above: Varney. Left: The bar was inspired by a Draper design. Lamps, banquette, slipper chair and leather on bar, Kravet. Carleton Varney by the Yard floral fabric; Carleton V green silk.

Design Notebook

Spreading Out in Santa Fe

The Sprawling Rancho Alegre Rekindles the Spirit of the American West in New Mexico Architecture by Bill Tull/Text by Peter Haldeman/Photography by Robert Reck

H

e was raised in the relatively civilized environs of Westhampton Beach, on Long Island, embarked upon an auspicious career on Madison Avenue and, in 1983, launched the Independent Television Network, which would become the largest supplier of non-network prime-time advertising in the country. But R. Michael Kammerer, Jr., who died last year at the age of 67, was probably closer in spirit to John Wayne than to Donald Trump. “He was definitely more comfortable in jeans and a cowboy hat than a business suit,” says his son, Rudy Kammerer. “My dad fell in love with the West through Hollywood movies and reading western writers like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. He was just fascinated with those tales of heroism and adventure.”

For a while R. Michael Kammerer successfully juggled his communications em

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Above: The compound that architect Bill Tull designed for the late R. Michael Kammerer, Jr., in Santa Fe reflects the owner’s love of southwestern art and architecture. Below: The sunroom, originally intended to be a patio, was enclosed with a bóveda ceiling and doubles as a gallery space. A feather motif by potter Maria Martinez inspired the granite floor detail.

Design Notebook

Left: Paintings by Roy Anderson and saddles by Edward H. Bohlin are displayed in the saddle room. Below: Native American weavings line a wall of the second-floor stairwell. “Western history—that’s the stuff my dad loved,” says Kammerer’s son, Rudy. “He started with small bronzes, but he became a more sophisticated collector when he made the move to Santa Fe.”

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pire and cowpoke enthusiasms. Around the time he started ITN, he bought a 200-acre property in upstate New York, where he built a log cabin and ran one of the largest beef cattle operations in the area. In 1991 he retired from managing ITN, moved with his wife to Carefree, Arizona, and indulged his inner Slim Pickens by learning the art of competitive team roping. Three years later—after divorcing his first wife and meeting his second—he purchased 175 acres of pastureland between the Ortiz and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges in Santa Fe and hired the Scottsdale, Arizona–based architect Bill Tull to build Rancho Alegre, his western Shangri-la.

“They made an intense study of Santa Fe architecture and who the best craftspeople and practitioners were,” says Rudy Kammerer. Siting the house against the backdrop of the Ortiz Mountains, Tull designed a sprawling pueblo-style compound that, while grand in scale, speaks the local vernacular. Its most prominent features are a stone torréon, or tower, and a santuario, or chapel, around which the architect built a Mexican-style plaza. Tull was exacting

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The house is filled with superb paintings by Taos School artists, Native American rugs and pottery, and western collectibles, from chaps to bridles to rifles.

Above: In the dining room, a custom-made chandelier hangs from wood beams that were smoked to give them a dark patina. The lighted niche is a Tull signature. The bronzes on the windowsill are by Dave McGary.

Design Notebook Left: Cowboy chaps dating to the early 1900s and flags decorate the walls of the office. The safe door, covered in leather, was hand-carved with a Code of the West design. The bronzes are

by Herb Mignery.

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when it came to building methods and materials, whether he was using three layers of adobe bricks in the walls or retaining master stonemason John Morris to lay the Arizona flagstone floors.

R. Michael Kammerer had started collecting small bronzes by western artist Herb Mignery back in Albany, and by the

time Rancho Alegre was completed, he had assembled museum-quality collections of western paintings, Native American art and artifacts, and pioneer memorabilia. Visitors to the house are greeted outside by Mignery’s bronze sculpture of two cowboys shaking hands, along with a plaque titled Code of the West, describing the commonsense frontier values

that the former adman championed. One proceeds under the vaulted ceiling of the entrance to the living room, an impressive space with 20-foot ceilings and handcarved beams that Rudy Kammerer says craftsmen spent half a year on their backs completing. Off one end of the room, a sunroom has travertine-and-black-granite

Above: Replicas of Plains Indian chiefs’ clothing are displayed in the conference room. Cathy A. Smith, who designed the costumes for Dances with Wolves, “spent three years creating the collection,” says Kammerer. “Every detail is authentic.” Left: Turquoise pieces in a stone jewelry case.

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Design Notebook continued from page 100

Siting the house against the backdrop of the Ortiz Mountains, Tull designed a pueblo-style compound that, while grand in scale, speaks the local vernacular.

Above: “It’s the kind of room that makes people’s jaws drop,” Kammerer says of the master bath.

Stonemason John Morris modeled the space after the pueblos at Chaco Canyon. “The layering of rocks and the vigas and latillas are what the Anasazi used. An archaeologist took photos and enlarged them so the design could be replicated.”

Top: The cantina was dubbed “La Tinaja de Miguel, or Michael’s Watering Hole,” says Kammerer. Right: To further Rancho Alegre’s authentic look, Tull anchored the compound with a stone tower. Black-walnut doors mark the entrance.

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floors featuring an American eagle-feather motif. A cantina situated off the other end of the room, “where things tended to end up late at night,” was inspired by a 300-year-old Spanish cowboy bar.

But the “jewel of the house,” according to Rudy Kammerer, is the master bath.

Here John Morris has fashioned a tribute to Chaco Canyon—the Anasazi ruins in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin. The bath’s banded sandstone walls, viga-and-latilla ceiling and petroglyph-like etchings all recall the astonishing skills of the Puebloans.

Of course, the Anasazi didn’t enjoy freestanding pedestal showers or Roman tubs, but then the Anasazi didn’t revolutionize television advertising.

R. Michael Kammerer continued to develop his collections at Rancho Alegre.

The house is filled with superb paintings

by Taos School artists, Native American rugs and pottery, and western collectibles, from chaps to bridles to rifles. The saddle room exhibits the workmanship of masters like Edward H. Bohlin (he made Roy Rogers’s saddles), while the conference room showcases quotations from Native American chiefs and precise replicas of their dress by Cathy A. Smith (she did the costumes for Dances with Wolves).

“People will say things like, ‘This is the second-best holster collection in the country,’ and the holsters were a small part of my dad’s collection,” says Rudy Kammerer. “It was sort of the way it all fit together that made the collection special.” This spring Sotheby’s auctioned off a good share of the paintings and Native American crafts. And Rancho Alegre itself will probably be sold. Whatever the fate of the ranch, however, it’s a safe bet the Code of the West will endure. l

Estates for Sale

Editors Select Properties Around the World California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Florida…

south carolina

A

five-bedroom, 7.5-bath Caribbean colonial–style house in Sea Pines Resort was designed by Michael Ruegamer, of Group 3. The oceanfront residence has geometrically patterned railings, custom mahogany doors and windows,

heart-pine floors and 14-foot ceilings. A gym and a wine cellar are among its amenities.

Two decks and a 500-squarefoot veranda look out on the pool and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. $8.25 million.

Call 843-785-7215.

COLORADO A Historic Home in the Heart of Downtown Aspen

I

n 1892 businessman John Atkinson built what is now known as the Sardy House.

Despite several renovations, the six-bedroom Victorian, with stained-glass windows, has held on to its period charm.

The property, which includes a neo–Queen Anne carriage house with an eight-bedroom wing and a one-bedroom suite, operates as a bed-and-breakfast. $21.5 million.

Call 970-925-8810.

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south carolina: brian vanden brink/courtesy the ocean broker; colorado: courtesy christie’s great estates

Hilton Head Gem with a Refined Yet Relaxed Ambience

Estates for Sale Florida Barrier Island Opulence Among the Palm Trees

T

he first impression one gets of a nine-bedroom, 7.5-bath Georgian-inspired residence on Jupiter Island is a suitably grand one: The approach to the house is defined by a plethora of palm trees, which add to the regal but welcoming feel of the structure itself. It’s a building that could have been here since the 1920s but was in fact completed more recently, in 2000, as evidenced by the hurricane-resistant windows, the open plan of the kitchen/family room and the inclusion of two state-of-the-art amenities—a home theater and a wine cellar. A sweeping lawn leads from the triangular pool down to the shore of the barrier island. $16.95 million.

Call 561-818-6351.

MEXICO Ocean View on the Rocks in Cabo San Lucas

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looks out to Cabo’s famous stone arches), expansions of the hot tub and pool, the reimagining of the third floor as a media room and guest quarters, and a renovation of the upper terrace, now a comfortable gathering spot. $5.495 million.

Call 52-624-144-2848.

florida: courtesy corcoran group real estate; mexico: michael calderwood

recent reconfiguration of the four-bedroom, sixbath Casa Tortuga (AD, April 2006) by owner and interior designer Alison Palevsky saw many changes, among them the installation of floor-to-ceiling windows in the living and dining areas (the oceanfront house

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Estates for Sale

Hawaii Black-Sand Beach House with Elemental Focus

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doorways and clerestory windows. A pool and spa overlook the ocean, as does one of two outdoor sleeping areas (the other is in a garden setting). The residence, which also has a gym and a sauna, as well as access to the Mauna Lani Resort, comes furnished. $24 million.

Call 808-987-4218.

andy carlson/courtesy macArthur & Company

9,000-square-foot, sixsuite compound strikes the right chord for its location along the Kohala Coast, on Hawaii’s sleepier Big Island. The 1.19-acre property is a tranquil oasis of exotic plants, flowers and trees, koi ponds and antique sculptures. Architectural features include carved Indonesian

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Estates for Sale California Bay Area Panoramic Pleasure

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Bay, Tiburon, Belvedere, Mount Tamalpais and Sausalito harbor.

(Even the laundry/storage room has a view.) The baths and kitchen feature Italian glass tiles, and the cherrywood floors throughout have radiant heat.

Floating stairs and a barrelvaulted Douglas fir ceiling in the family room and dining area lend the spaces additional drama. $3.995 million.

Call 415-464-3741.

courtesy christie’s great estates

iews abound for a contemporary house on a quiet cul-de-sac along a Sausalito ridgeline five minutes from the hiking and biking trails of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The four-bedroom, four-bath residence’s large windows and open floor plan maximize vistas to the north, east and south—of downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, Richardson

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Estates for Sale MASSAchusetTs On the Edge of a Peninsula Northeast of Boston

more than two-acre waterfront property in Nahant is where the daughter of financier F. Haven Clark, for whom the residence was built in 1938, married the youngest son of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The seven-bedroom, 8.5-bath house, which has since been converted into a Mediterraneanstyle villa, features a wine cellar and a mahogany-paneled media room, not to mention sweeping views that take in the Atlantic Ocean, the Harbor Islands and the Boston skyline. The grounds include a one-bedroom apartment, a pool and cabana, a vineyard, an orchard and a private beach. $4.95 million.

Call 617-357-8996. l

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fred christiansen/courtesy landVest (aerial), Greg Premru/courtesy landvest (interior)

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Special Issue

American Country Houses

“I learned about New Mexico when I first started dating Jane Fonda,” remarks Ted Turner (right), who built a private desert lodge on Armendaris Ranch, his 350,000-acre wild animal preserve along the dramatic Fra Cristobal Mountains.

“I come out here in the winter.”

New Mexico

Ted Turner

On his armendaris ranch wild animal preserve, the media magnate builds a lodge in tune with the land Architecture by Chris Carson, faia/Interior Design by Laura Hunt/Text by Gerald Clarke/Photography by Robert Reck

“I wanted a hacienda-type house,” says Turner. “I like Mexican architecture.” Above: He staked the site of the entrance early on. Right: The portale is open to a courtyard.

Mirror and Navajo rug, Christie’s.

Ralph Lauren Home pillow plaid.

O

h, give me a home where the buffalo roam” is the opening line of one of America’s most famous folk songs. But Ted Turner might be excused if he thinks it was written especially for him. As the largest individual landholder in the United States—he has title to nearly two million acres in 11 states—he has not one but many homes where the buffalo roam. And he lays claim to about 50,000 of those majestic, if sometimes ornery, critters—the largest land animal, he proudly observes, in all of North America.

Turner’s main residence is near Tallahassee, Florida (see Architectural Digest, July 2004). On visits to his many western and midwestern ranches, he usually stays in the house, however humble, that was already there. “I just want someplace where I can close the door to keep the flies out,” he says.

When his friends visited his Armendaris Ranch in New Mexico, for instance, they stayed in what had been the cowboys’ bunkhouse: one room for everybody, a bath with open showers and nothing for entertainment but the sound of the wind, which sometimes reaches 50 miles an hour during the winter. “The girls had to wait until the boys were done in the bathroom,” he says of that spartan desert dormitory.

“It was rudimentary.”

It was too rudimentary, in fact, to be the center of such a vast property—350,000 acres. In 2006 he decided it was time for a proper house, beautiful yet simple, and in

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“It’s a nice house, but it’s not fancy,” says Turner, who hired San Antonio architect Chris Carson and Dallas interior designer Laura Hunt to carry out the design. Left: For the great room, as throughout, Hunt wanted “European overtones,” she says. Paintings by Albert Bierstadt flank the fireplace, and a side table displays circa 1910–40 Navajo copper boxes. Vigas, typical of Spanish colonial architecture, were stained dark brown. John Rosselli lamps. Above: “Ted said, ‘Lots of windows,’ and he got them,” says Hunt, who hung prints by George Catlin in the dining area.

no sense wasteful. “I don’t believe in wasting anything,” he says. “I’m fairly wealthy, but I even save paper clips.” A haciendastyle house with four bedrooms is what he wanted, and when Laura Hunt, the Dallas designer who was in charge of the project, and Chris Carson, a San Antonio architect, inspected the site, they found two stakes firmly embedded in the Armendaris’s dusty soil. One was where Turner wanted his front door; the other was where he wanted his bedroom windows to look out on the Fra Cristobal Mountains.

Hunt thought he should have chosen a site in the Fra Cristobals themselves, one that would look down at the desert, rather than one on the desert that would look up at the mountains. But Turner, the man who irrevocably altered television broadcasting with the introduction of CNN and 24-hour cable news, knew what he

was doing. “It was a brilliant choice,” Hunt now admits, “and I’ve had to eat my words.

When you’re in the house, you’re part of the desert—and you still have beautiful landscapes.”

On one thing everyone agreed: The house should be a partner to its surroundings. “I didn’t want people to drive up and say, ‘Oh, wow! Look at that house!’ ” explains Hunt. Everyone also agreed that it be built in the Territorial style, the look and form 19th-century settlers in New Mexico found so appropriate to that arid and often inhospitable land. It was not for nothing that the Spanish conquistadors gave the name the Jornada del Muerto— the Journey of the Dead Man—to a trail that runs through the ranch.

The purpose of the house—it was to be a desert lodge—was foremost in the designers’ minds. Carson placed the front

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Above: Antique Native American baskets decorate the walls of the informal dining room. Right: “The kitchen was based on historic kitchens of Spanish colonial homes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,” explains Hunt. Wolf range and SubZero refrigerator, at Abt.com. Faucet from Kohler.

door where Turner had planted his stake, but the door opens not to an entrance hall but to a walled courtyard. “The courtyard provides a sense of enclosure from the wild desert,” says Carson. The outdoors is as much a part of the house as the indoors, and the three guest rooms are entered from a wide, open-to-the-air corridor.

To reach the main part of the house from their rooms, guests must thus walk briefly through the open air.

The designers were also keenly aware that their client was a passionate environmentalist. Whatever they built had to meet his stiff standards. What Hunt and Carson discovered was that the old way of building, which was their intention all along, is also best for the environment. Masonry walls 18 inches thick keep out the cold in the winter and the heat in the summer, and, in New Mexico anyway, old-fashioned tile and clay, made from the earth itself, are ideal for both roofs and floors.

Both designers made several trips to the historic Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende, returning with 14,000 tiles for the roof, red-painted tiles for the baths, stones for the fireplaces and antique doors for the courtyard entrance. “The more natural materials are used,” says Carson, “the more interesting they look.” Most people think of mesquite, another natural material, as a fuel for cooking. Hunt put it to a better use as the floor of the great room, a long

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“Ted doesn’t require luxurious accommodations,” says Hunt.

“He’s very cool that way. He just needs a pillow and a bed, and he’s happy.” These Pages: The master bedroom. The paintings over the walnut writing table and the console in the hall are by Bierstadt; the print is by Catlin. Stark carpet. John Rosselli bench. Schumacher lamp.

“I’m trying to save life on Earth. We have an obligation and a privilege to preserve our planet and the species we share the planet with.”

“Half my land holdings are in New Mexico,” says Turner (left), who founded the Turner Endangered Species Fund in 1997. He developed the property to raise buffalo (below left) as well as to provide a sanctuary for imperiled animals, such as pronghorn antelope (below), bighorn sheep and Bolson tortoises.

space that combines the living and dining areas. “Beyond beautiful,” is how she describes floor colors that vary from a rich brown to a brown so dark that it could be mistaken for black.

“I envisioned the house blending into the landscape,” says Hunt, “and I wanted it to be painted the color of the grass around it. I worked for I don’t know how many months to get that color for the stucco.

The inside is a shade lighter.” Though she wanted the interior to suggest a European hunting lodge, Hunt was not shy about using items from the American West—

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Native American artifacts, for example, and bison hide for the master bedroom’s headboard and bed skirt. “It’s like suede,” she says, “but a little rougher.”

Turner and Hunt share a grandson— her daughter Gannon was married to his son Beau—and she was designing not just for Turner but also for her grandson, Beau Jr., as well as future generations of Turners.

“I built it for family,” she says, “so that my grandson will say, ‘Grandma did this.’ ” Turner is also thinking of future generations. Through his Turner Endangered Species Fund he is trying, on all his prop-

erties, to save and reintroduce endangered species. On the Armendaris these include bighorn sheep, Aplomado falcons and Bolson tortoises. The largest tortoise in North America, the Bolson—la tortuga grande del desierto, or the big turtle of the desert—has probably not been seen in those parts in several thousand years. “I’m trying to save life on Earth,” says Turner. “We have an obligation and a privilege to preserve and maintain our planet and the species we share the planet with. If we destroy the environment, we’re committing suicide.”

A hundred years ago the bison was also in danger of extinction. Now Turner himself owns so many that some of his herds stretch as far as the eye can see. For Hunt, it seemed only right that the emblem of his new house should be that shaggy beast he is so devoted to, and she has put the bison logo on just about everything but the lightbulbs—from towels and T-shirts to poker chips and M&Ms. Not only has Ted Turner found a home, or homes, on the range. So, on the Armendaris and on his many other ranches, have the buffalo. l

“I’m not buying land now,” Turner says. “I’ve got enough, though I may buy adjacent pieces of property for bison.” Opposite: The latilla-covered porch shades the great room. This Image: People gather on the west patio to watch the sunsets.

Landscape architect Jennifer Bear used native plants, including soaptree yucca, black grama grass and tobosa grass.

Architecture by Ike Kligerman Barkley Interior Design by Renée O’Leary Text by Joseph Giovannini Photography by Durston Saylor

I

n some circles, having multiple personalities may be viewed as a psychological disorder, but in architecture, it can be a good thing.

When the New York firm Ike Kligerman Barkley was commissioned to design a house in the Virginia horse country, several considerations pulled the architects in complex and contradictory directions.

Thomas Jefferson, Monticello and the Palladian tradition of plantation houses still weigh heavily on the collective architectural psyche. Yet in the more specific context of the Green Springs Historic District, a protected agricultural landscape, most buildings are modest farmhouses. While the house had to hold its own on a 1,000acre site within the historic-land trust, it couldn’t overwhelm empty nesters who were retiring from New York to live in a landscape they had no intention of dominating. “We wanted something that would fit in with the area,” says Renée O’Leary, the client, a professional designer who did the interiors. She and her husband had worked previously with the architects on their home in Connecticut (see Architectural Digest, August 1999).

The land, then, with rolling hills, pasturage, native cedars and a 10-acre lake, looked innocent—and large enough to handle just about anything—but it was actually a multivalent site charged with conflicting expectations. Fitting it into a context polarized between manor and farmhouse meant multiplying its architectural personality. The big house had to be small, underbuilt for a very large piece of land, and it had to be significant yet discreet. “We wanted to do something appropriate, something that would sit lightly on the land,” says Thomas Kligerman, one of the firm’s three partners. The clients needed a horse barn, one that could also shelter the cats and dogs the couple foster.

“It was the first house of any size in that Left and Right: Ike Kligerman Barkley employed Neoclassical and English precedents in creating a Virginia residence for interior designer Renée O’Leary and her husband. Notes Joel Barkley, “The white, almost Greek severity of the architecture produces a miragelike effect in the warm, earthy verdure.” Marvin windows.

Chadsworth’s columns. Weatherend benches.

Virginia

Invoking an Ideal

Romanticized forms pay homage to southern architectural traditions in a historic landscape

“I wanted to build on the classical ideal of taking refuge in the landscape. Southern architecture is like a white mirage in a green world,� says Barkley.

area since the 1880s, so we felt a lot of pressure to build something worthy of the setting,” says partner-in-charge Joel Barkley, who was born and raised in the South and who seemed to breathe a southern accent into the project. Complicating— and enriching—the task was the ruin of Hawkwood, a pre–Civil War Tuscan-style house designed by the eminent New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis. “It’s just across the road, so there’s a direct visual connection,” Barkley adds. “Since it’s a ruin, there’s a kind of romantic sense here, a nostalgia, that I wanted to pursue.”

Barkley brought other extrinsic concerns to weigh on the character of the design: “Escaping to the country from city living makes me think of Virgil and his Bucolica,” he says. “I wanted to build on the classical ideal of taking refuge in the pastoral landscape, a civilized retreat that

would contrast with the brutal reality of the great heat here and the hard clay soil.

I think southern architecture can be so powerful because it’s like a white mirage in a green world.”

The architects were essentially mining the spirit of the place to shape the design, but sensing the subtleties of the land, weather and near and distant history meant that no single form could embody all considerations. Barkley chose several forms rather than one, creating an episodic structure with a narrative instead of casting the building as a single image built at a single point in time. The centerpiece of the house is a stuccoed, templelike entrance pavilion with an august portico of four columns. The roof slopes down to a clapboard appendage, which looks as though it was added by subsequent owners in more humble circumstances. On the

other side of the portico, there’s a slightly grander wing with tall, aristocratic, triple-hung windows, which in turn abuts a two-story clapboard building that reads as a farmhouse. The rear side opens to a second-story porch over a gallery paved in brick. An arched porte cochere springs to a pure, pointedly simple two-story, Greek Revival–style structure that recalls small country churches.

The house may be large at 6,500 square feet, but it is modestly rather than proudly large, and it appears even smaller because the architects have broken the whole into a rambling, charming concatenation of sections expressing different historical periods and social conditions. Barkley purposely made the house unsymmetrical, but he explains that it is composed of “locally symmetrical objects that form a kind of jumble outside any normal hi-

Opposite: Inspired by architect Harrie T. Lindeberg, John Ike turned the house’s Greek pediment on its side to create the silhouette for the 28stall barn. Above: O’Leary chose a bold hue to offset the trim in the vaulted living room. A Nobilis fabric covers the love seat. The chairs near the fireplace are done in a Bergamo fabric. Odegard orange rug. Holly Hunt lamp.

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Above: Just over the porte cochere is a book-lined, shiplike space outfitted with two bunks. The dogs are among those the couple foster for a shelter.

Right: Barkley calls the library a “perfect idealized cube. The moldings are lyrical and as fancy as we get.” An oil by Susan Sales hangs above the fireplace. At left is a work by Suki Bergeron. Sofa from Donghia. Stark carpet.

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The house may be large at 6,500 square feet, but it is modestly large. The architects have broken the whole into a charming concatenation of sections.

Above: The vaulted master bedroom is lit by windows on three sides. The pastel is by Ted Larsen. Cowtan & Tout drapery fabric; Ralph Lauren Home hardware. Grass-cloth wallcovering from Decorators Walk. Below: Porches along the pasture side of the house allow for dining and relaxing. Right: The 1,000-acre farm includes a lake and an old wheat barn. The property is in a protected historic district.

“When I’m away, I can’t wait to get back to Virginia,” says Renée O’Leary. “It’s a wonderful area.”

erarchy.” Each segment is only one room deep, without corridors. “I maximized the outside surface area to get lots of windows, breezes, views and sunlight,” he says, noting, “It’s not the cheapest way of building a house.”

To add more diversity to the diversity, partner John Ike designed the nearby barn as a steeplelike building, inspired by entirely different sources. “We heisted the idea from an early-20th-century architect named Harrie T. Lindeberg, who himself probably took it from English structures,” explains Ike. “We wanted to create a simple, iconic form.”

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The stable adds another chapter to the narrative on the property. The geometrically abstract, acutely triangular structure houses the tack and feed rooms and 28 stalls for Renee O’Leary’s horses, as well as a spiral staircase that leads up to an apartment for the groom, in the gable, where there’s a steep, 60-degree pitch. The architect ties the barn visually to the main house via the standing-seam Galvalume roof and the spanking-white paint.

Despite the ramble of exterior shapes in the main house, its interior flows with ease and logic. A tall, impressive

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Montana

Deer Cabin Reverie on the wooded shore of flathead lake, a one-room hideaway celebrates authentic camp living Interior Design by Mimi London/Text by Peter Haldeman/Photography by David O. Marlow

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ccording to the Small House Society, an Iowa-based organization dedicated to the promotion of humbler housing alternatives, “living small can free up your mind, your wallet, and your soul.”

Consider, if you will, Deer Cabin, a oneroom, 300-square-foot log cabin that, its owners, creators and loyal visitors swear, is the last word in soulful comfort.

The Stone family knows from comfort.

For years Martin Stone—who developed the manufacturing conglomerate Monogram Industries in the 1960s and once owned the Phoenix Firebirds—his wife, Connie, and their five now-grown children split their time between a modern adobe-and-glass house in Tucson, Arizona, designed by the Austin, Texas, architect Arthur Andersson, and a 200-plus-acre ranch in Lake Placid, New York. But they eventually tired of the high maintenance that the ranch demanded and began to investigate alternative summer getaways.

“We traveled for four or five years,” re-

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Above: On Flathead Lake in Montana, Mimi London transformed a “funny little shack” from the 1930s into a rustic refuge for Connie and Martin Stone. “I did it in about two weeks—it was as if I were possessed,” says the designer, whose own line shack across the lake was inspiration.

Left: Firewood is stacked in the screen porch of Deer Cabin, which serves as an “on-site pied-à-terre” while the couple’s main house on the property is being built. Opposite: London removed plastic finishes from the floors and painted “everything that needed it,” she says.

Left: The foreman built simple shelves for the indoor serving area, which is used during winter.

“They’re designed to allow your shoulders to drop, your neck to relax,” explains London. “This is a place where chores are slow, quiet and therapeutic.”

“Everything in this cabin must func­tion—there are no extras— and everything is used frequently.”

Above: An armoire holds dishes, linens and candles. “There’s minimal electric light,” London notes.

Opposite: A daybed is covered in old Swiss Army blankets.

ports Connie Stone. “We went up and down the East Coast, to Hawaii, around the Pacific Northwest, all over California, Aspen, Santa Fe—everywhere—and we just couldn’t find any place where we felt at home.” Finally, at the suggestion of their friends Meredith and Tom Brokaw, who have a ranch in Montana, they looked into the area around Flathead Lake. The couple checked into a dude ranch near the lake—and the very next day purchased a 15-acre site supporting a lot of pine trees and one 1930s-era fishing shack.

If it was an impulse buy, their decision was ratified by two neighbors in the know. One was Arthur Andersson, who, the Stones discovered, had been vacationing on the lake for years. The other was the designer Mimi London, who owns a

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house directly across the lake from the couple’s property (see Architectural Digest, June 1987), has spent her summers in the area since she was a girl and manufactures a line of eco-friendly furniture there. The three met at a party one evening, and London was impressed enough with the Stones’ idea of building an unassuming Adirondack-style compound on their land that she issued a rare invitation to visit her line shack—a very humble mountain abode that once served cowboys riding the fence line (see Architectural Digest, June 1992). For Connie Stone, the line shack was something of a revelation. “We sat on her rickety, falling-down porch and put our feet up,” she sighs. “Mimi pulls out some ripe Brie from an old cooler and grabs some basil out of a tub with birds

kind of hovering over it. Her horses are walking around trying to take food from her. I kind of expected a unicorn to come walking through.”

It was, according to perhaps the most outdoorsy interior designer in America, “a beginning point for what we were going to do, for the attitude.” More introductions were made—London to Andersson, Andersson to the line shack, London to the Stones’ fishing shack. The conversation turned to how they could make the cabin function as a venue for project meetings, entertaining and sleepovers while buildings Andersson designed for the property were under construction. “Mimi made a little drawing and said, ‘How does that look?’ ” recalls Connie Stone. “Two and a half weeks later the cabin was done.”

“Even people you wouldn’t think would respond to it want to be there washing the dishes and heating the water.”

Opposite: “I modified the concept of a wilderness camp cook tent with mouseproof containers, a propane stove and kerosene lanterns,” says London (left). “There are no walls, and the view is beautiful. Connie and I have done the dishes more than once in the snow.” Below: The fire pit is the site of “cocktails or after-dinner coffee.” Following Pages: Logs replace the original railings in the “dining room.” Janus et Cie lanterns.

Among other things, London replaced the old structure’s porch railings, gave it a fresh coat of paint, stripped the plastic surfaces and added shelving inside and built a “cook tent,” made of log posts and Plexiglas, off one end of the cabin. Not a square inch was wasted: A mini-refrigerator and shelves put up by the Stones’ foreman make up the kitchen area; a bed covered in old Swiss Army blankets and

Navajo rugs serves as the bedroom; a table and captain’s chairs out on the porch act as the dining room; a weathered armoire from Nova Scotia provides storage. “Did you see the powder room?” London asks, referring to a mirror hung on a pine tree above a wire trashcan holding a water pitcher and bowl. “Nice, doncha think?”

To furnish the place, the designer relied on rustic pieces from the Stones’ for-

mer house on Lake Placid and rounded these out with eBay purchases and local finds—“dumpy” calico curtains, 1920s light fixtures, period hickory chairs and Amish rockers.

“Mimi’s talent is that she creates an intimate and nurturing environment just instinctively,” says Connie Stone. “When I walked into that space, it felt like some

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Discoveries by Designers

The legend of Jesse James continues to capture the nation’s popular imagination.

Outlaw Ephemera On March 2, 1882, just a month before he was shot and killed by a member of his own gang, Jesse James, using the alias Tho. Howard, responded to a newspaper ad placed by J. D. Calhoun for a 160-acre plot of land in Franklin County, Nebraska. The two-page letter and the ad, along with a pamphlet and a dime novel, both also from 1882, detailing the notorious outlaw’s exploits, are available for $350,000 at The Kenneth W. Rendell Gallery.

The Kenneth W. Rendell Gallery Inc., 46 Eliot St. South Natick, MA 01760; 508-647-1776 www.kwrendell.com

Little Tent Made for a child, a circa 1890 Plains tepee, $10,500, at Denver’s David Cook Fine American Art (www.da vidcookfineamericanart.com; 303623-8181), is just over a foot tall. Unlike similar pieces of the era, it has quill, rather than bead, decoration.

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AD’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

Arrowing In

The kenneth w. rendell gallery: richard mandelkorn; david cook fine american art: courtesy david cook galleries morning star gallery: courtesy morning star gallery; rjg antiques: courtesy rjg antiques; Vallejo Gallery: Jim McHugh

Geometric designs in strong colors define a parfleche, $4,500, at Morning Star Gallery (www.morning stargallery.com; 505-982-8187) in Santa Fe. The envelope was fashioned by a member of one of the Plateau tribes around 1900.

Fun and Games From RJG Antiques (www.rjgan tiques.com; 603-433-1770), Russ and Karen Goldberger’s Rye, New Hampshire, gallery, is a circa 1880 American game board, $2,500.

On one side is a Parcheesi board; on the other is a checkerboard.

Sail Away A full dockyard builder’s model from circa 1894 of the Union Castle liner RMS Carisbrook Castle, $120,000, is at Vallejo Gallery (www.vallejogal lery.com; 949-642-7945) in Newport Beach, California. The model measures over five feet in length.

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Renovation Architecture

by Joseph W. Dick, aia Text by Jean Strouse Photography by Richard Mandelkorn

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ong before Roseline Glazer bought a small house overlooking the sea on Martha’s Vineyard, she fell in love with a painting by Claude Monet of a small house overlooking the sea on the northwest coast of France, Fisherman’s Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville.

She acquired a print of the picture—the original belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—and had it framed for her husband, Bill, who hung it on a wall in his office.

Fast-forward to 1988. The Glazers are living in New Haven, Connecticut, where he works as a psychiatrist, she in real estate, and they spend every August at a cottage they own on the Vineyard. They are content there, but one day a friend takes them to see property on a hilltop near the shore. They drive through thick woods, park in the brush and walk along a path till they come to a cottage surrounded by trees, facing a fishing village and Vineyard Sound. Roseline Glazer recalls, “The place was in shambles. Large pines obstructed the views; the cedar shingles had curled with age.

Still, I saw the bones of a small, delicate house that was fallingapart perfect. It just grabbed me.” It turned out, however, not to be for sale.

A year later the property was on the market—cottage “We knew we would have lots of work to do, but we didn’t care, because we fell in love with its shape, the land, the view,” Roseline Glazer says of the shingled cottage on Mar­tha’s Vineyard, built by Roger Allen in 1930, that she shares with her husband, Bill. Architect Joseph W. Dick helped renovate the structure, one of several on the property.

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Massachusetts

Seaside Sanctuary a cluster of cottages On martha’s vineyard defines simplicity and charm

and outbuildings, on 3.3 acres bounded by 24 acres of conservation land sloping down to the fishing village and a beach—and Roseline Glazer had a real estate license in Massachusetts. She showed the place to friends, hoping no one would buy it. No one did. Then, in 1990, she and her husband took the plunge.

“There was not one thing on the property that didn’t need care,” she says. “Anyone else would have torn the house down. But I loved it.”

The renovation took 10 years—during which time the Glazers became grandparents and moved from Connecticut to downtown Manhattan to Key West—and it is still a work in progress. With a local contractor, the new owners tore down trees to open up views and create space for gardens. (“I apologized to the trees,” says Roseline Glazer, a passionate, gifted gardener. “We really had no choice.”) They built a garden shed and refurbished the one-bedroom guest cottage—laying wide-plank fir over a concrete floor, installing bead-board on the interior walls and new cedar shingles outside, replacing windows and adding new kitchen appliances, insulation and heating. Glazer furnished each space with antiques—in the fully renovated bunkhouse, a croquet set from the Antique Garden Furniture Show at the New York Botanical Garden, a lamp from the market in Brimfield, Massachusetts, and a dresser and wicker chair (both had to be stripped) that she found on the Vineyard.

Bill Glazer, who now runs a medical consulting business, left most of the project to his wife. “I trusted Roz,” he says.

“My instinct was that her instincts were right.” They built an office for him on the hillside above the main house, with a small gym downstairs, a deck, its own gardens and wide views of the sound. “I

Opposite: A brick courtyard wraps around the entrance to the kitchen, at the rear of the house. Gla­zer (left) searched for 15 years before she found the railings. “The chokecherry tree over the cottage is nature’s umbrella,” she remarks.

Above: A corner of the living room.

Vintage fabrics cover the pillows.

“There’s little art on the walls. We mostly enjoy looking out the windows,” says Glazer, who kept the window treatments to a minimum.

Marvin windows throughout.

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needed a separate space for work, but the grandchildren have figured out how to find me,” he says without a trace of regret.

Nature, in Roseline Glazer’s hands, is a key element of design. She created gardens for every building: gardens banked above walls, gardens lining stone steps, spreading out under trees, spilling from pots on a brick terrace. Clumps of daffodils wake the property up in the spring; lilies of the valley follow, thriving in the shade, then peonies, irises and columbine. Clematis climbs cedar-shingle walls. Down the hill toward the beach, a fence keeps deer out of the vegetable garden. Full summer brings a perennial abundance that includes roses, helenium,

euphorbia, dahlias, asters, hydrangeas, hostas, astilbe, Russian sage, lavender, phlox and a raspberry patch.

Parking behind the office, a visitor crosses a lawn to a stone path and steps that lead to the kitchen at the rear of the main cottage—the door everyone uses. The Cape Cod– style house, built in the 1930s

by Roger Allen, has gone from “falling-apart perfect” to simply perfect. And thanks to the combined efforts of Roseline Glazer and Joseph W. Dick, it feels larger than its 1,450 square feet. Owner and architect opened it up to the light and its glorious setting, raising the ceiling, widening and deepening porches that face north and west. “We don’t have much art,” Glazer says. “The

Above: The addition of a dining room to the main house “took place years after we thought we were finished renovating,” she explains. “It’s small, in keeping with the proportions of all the cottages.” Bead-board lends a textural quality to the walls and ceiling. Bentwood chairs surround the farm table. Opposite: The kitchen. Kohler sink. Right: In the attic, two small bedrooms were combined to create a larger master bedroom.

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“I saw the bones of a small, delicate house that was fallingapart perfect.

It just grabbed me.” landscape and sea are all the art we need.”

Still, she collects vintage fabrics, buttonhooks, hatboxes, antique lace and linens, pincushions, pottery and porcelain—all of which are on display in the house. A few years ago she added a dining room adjacent to the kitchen—a clean-lined, shed-roof structure that looks as if it has been there forever, with 11 windows, a bead-board ceiling and walls, a round oak table she found in

Oregon, bentwood chairs and an old Hoosier cabinet.

Upstairs, a former attic with two small bedrooms and no views is now a loftlike master bedroom, with a full bath and a shed dormer that has five windows facing the sea. The Glazers kept the house’s original wide-plank floorboards, even in the baths and kitchen.

They use no shades on the windows, preferring to see the steady flash of a lighthouse beam on nights with no fog. In

Left: Glazer relocated a parking area to provide a garden spot. The couple’s dog, Murray, is on the office’s terrace. An avid gardener, Glazer massed plantings, including hydrangeas and salvia, around the perimeter.

“From the chairs, there’s a 180-degree view,” she notes.

calm weather, the sound of a bell buoy announces the changing of the tide.

Roseline Glazer had forgotten all about the Monet painting when she fell for a ramshackle cottage by the sea in 1988. She remembered the image only after she and her husband had bought the property they now live on half the year and consider their true home. “I think we don’t necessarily find houses,” she says.

“They find us.” l

Above: The bunkhouse, left, and the guesthouse “are exactly where we found them,” says Glazer. They installed new windows, white-cedar shingle siding and shingle roofs. A potting shed is now between the two structures.

Top: Ocean breezes billow curtains in the bunkhouse.

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Connecticut

Inner Directed

modern pieces bring a Former barn into the 21st century Interior Design by S. Russell Groves/Text by Michael Frank/Photography by Scott Frances

“They are modernists who have ended up living in old structures,” designer Russell Groves says of longtime clients—a hedge-fund manager and his wife, parents of three-year-old twin daughters—who asked him to reimagine the interiors of a 19th-century barn that had been moved from Canada to Connecticut and subsequently converted into a 15-room house.

“We chose modern pieces that had a sense of warmth, a tactile quality,” says Groves, whose challenge was “to find a way to bring a breath of modernism” to the rustic spaces. Idelle Weber’s Across the Meadow, left, and Jardin de Paris, an 1897 poster by Jules Chéret, hang in the living room. Sofa fabric, Robert Allen. Stool fabric from Dedar.

It fell to Groves to “get all the pieces to cohere,” as the husband puts it, and “make the place feel fresh, young and alive.”

Above: The kitchen’s modern appliances contrast with the barn’s original wood beams, posts and flooring. “What we did here, basically, was revise what we found,” says Groves (top). “We used zinc and marble countertops. They’re materials that get better with time.”

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n designing the interiors of a Connecticut house for a family with whom he had collaborated on two earlier projects, Russell Groves once again found himself in the position of working with an unusually discerning and knowledgeable client. There cannot be too many hedge-fund managers out there who majored in art history at Harvard, won a prize as an undergraduate for

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collecting and know how to “read” an old house as a genuine antique or a hybrid that has been tinkered with over the decades. The key question is, How does all this mold the way a design project unfolds?

“It’s surprising,” says Groves.

“Sometimes the more educated client will give you the most leeway. In the beginning you talk about the central ideas.

You agree on the use, sensibility, general ambience and

level of formality of a house, and then, if you’re lucky, you’ll be free to design.”

Now hear it from the client’s side: “Russell worked on our Brooklyn Heights town house and my Manhattan offices. He knows my wife and me pretty well by now, but I remember when we first sat down, with our clippings and notes. He sifted through them and said, ‘Some of these translate into practical solutions; some are

inspirational.’ He has a way of getting to the essence of a project. By now we’ve learned that the best way for him to work, and for us, too, is simply to lay out all the goals—then cut him loose.”

The goals for the clients’ Washington Depot house were very different from those in town. In Brooklyn, the couple and their three-year-old twin daughters live in an 1830 town house. Groves’s task there was

to infuse the intricate period interiors with a sense of refined modernity that still maintained a connection to the architecture. Modern sofas and antique chairs coexist with sleek contemporary lighting and a lively collection of abstract or Conceptual art made in the 1960s and 1970s and work by younger contemporary artists.

From the beginning, the house in rural Connecticut was

intended to be a markedly, but not entirely, different experience. Where the city house was stately, urbane and inward-turning, the place in the country was open, relaxed and bathed in abundant light. This is a house for bare feet, long summer dinners, unbridled children’s play. Yet it is also a place of work—the husband maintains a home office here— and, like the city house, it is an environment that deliberately

“There was a lot of texture already present here,” the designer says of the dining room. “So we chose a very simple table and chairs—wood themselves, in order to relate to the surroundings—and a customized chandelier.” The flagstone fireplace dominates the space.

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forsakes the rote for the rulebending and the vibrant.

The structure itself, a Canadian barn that was rescued and rebuilt in Connecticut, has elements that go back to the 1850s. In its residential incarnation, as a spec house, it was moved to its present site and finished with fairly standardissue fittings and materials.

The previous owner added a handsome poolhouse and made several improvements to the main building, but it fell to

Groves to “get all the pieces to cohere,” as the husband puts it, and “make the place feel fresh, young and alive.”

As with the city house, the goal was to bring a modern sensibility to a period building. In this case, however, the approach was to be more rustic and informal. Groves began with what he calls “some widespread tweaking.” In the kitchen, he changed the countertops, the lighting and the position of the appliances. In

“In town, we live in a house in Brooklyn Heights,” says the husband. “In the country, we wanted a more open plan, with lots of light and a relaxed atmosphere. Russell understood how we wanted to use and live in the house better than we did ourselves.” Above: A Noguchi floor lamp and side table are next to a pair of woven-leather chairs in a seating area in the guesthouse.

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the great room, he installed new audiovisual and communications systems. There was some clever childproofing, such as the introduction of acrylic panels to a dramatic open staircase and the wrapping of thick rope around splintery columns. But Groves speaks frankly about the intrinsic appeal of the house as he found it: “There are these wonderful beams, mellow floors, dramatic flagstones. The light is spectacular. And the big open room

is a welcome distinction from more compact city living.”

When it came to detailing the interiors, Groves sought, as in the city, to design by setting down different layers of time. The barn’s frame cast an anchor into the 19th century; the couple’s artwork pushed the chronology forward into the 20th and 21st. Groves’s job was to bridge the distance.

He did this, as he likes to, by combining the right kinds of furniture from different mod-

Opposite: The custom walnut four-poster in the master bedroom was designed by Groves. A Bakelite-and-chrome side table is flanked by a pair of rocking chairs, which he produced in collaboration with Connecticut-based furniture maker Ian Ingersoll. Groves’s plan was “to make the house comfortable for the family and also take the design up in quality several notches.”

The structure itself, a Canadian barn that was rebuilt in Connecticut, has elements that go back to the 1850s.

ern moments. In the central room, matched pairs of Arts and Crafts armchairs, Paul McCobb stools and whimsical contemporary children’s rockers are grouped around a low table, while on the other side of a row of rustic pillars, an Edward Wormley daybed and chairs are drawn up to a substantial flagstone fireplace.

“What you find here is a formal arrangement, yes, but it’s made up of more casual pieces,” says the designer, “with fabrics that are durable and child-friendly and a palette that is light enough to brighten the rough timbers and the wood floor.” Punches of color come from pillows and the artwork, which, in addition to the contemporary pictures acquired by the husband, includes a generous selection of vintage movie posters from a large collection assembled by the wife’s father.

Groves’s combining instincts extend to the library nook, where Harvey Probber games chairs are matched to a Dunbar games table; the master bedroom, with its sleek Groves-designed walnut bed and night tables and Shaker rocking chairs; and the poolhouse, where a Noguchi floor lamp shares the space with a glass lamp from Pottery Barn.

What does it take to know how to bring together objects from such disparate sources, new and old, high and low, simple and more polished?

“Our work is all about mixing elements together to create a warm sense of modernism,” Groves said. “When the period is hard to pinpoint, the house seems to have more life. Ideally, it will be timeless, too.” l

Groves also laid out the landscaping around the pool. The architecture of the barn “relates to the landscape and the surrounding structures,” says the husband, but the interiors “make it a modern house with the charm, feeling and materials of something that’s older.”

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Discoveries by Designers

Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, artist James Christian Seagraves was known for his interpretations of Pennsylvania German symbols.

Fryling’s Antiques has a selection of his work, including a redware bird, left, available for $400, signed “JCS” and made between 1985 and 1990. It also bears the initials “VAS,” for his wife, Verna. It is unusual to have both sets of initials on Seagraves’s pieces. Another piece—a bird whistle, $400—is signed “JCS” and is from 1980–85.

Fryling’s Antiques, 1717 Becker Rd. Green Lane, PA 18054; 215-234-0596 www.frylingsantiques.com

Dime Store Detail At Los Angeles’s American Garage (www.americangarageantiques .com; 323-658-8100) is a nearly fiveby-four-foot late-19th-century sign advertising “Ed Farr’s 5 and 10 Cent Store.” Thought to be from the Boston area, it has its original paint.

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Fryling’s Antiques: alec marshall; american garage: courtesy american garage Stark Fabric: courtesy stark fabric; The Splendid PEasant: courtesy the splendid peasant ltd.; adrian morris antiques: courtesy adrian morris antiques

Birds of a Feather

AD’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

Stark Fabric Old World Weavers, from Stark (877-7467699), has new indooroutdoor fabrics in its Elements III Collection. They are, from top to bottom, Shoreline, Catamaran, Marina and Veracruz.

Panel Discussion Mid-20th-century painted wood panels, $2,900 each, are by an artist known only as Lucy from Sikeston, Missouri. They’re now for sale at The Splendid Peasant (www.splen didpeasant.com; 401-396-9255) in Bristol, Rhode Island.

She used tabletops and doors, or any other flat surfaces, as canvases for her paintings.

Take a Village Consisting of 17 buildings, a cardboard village, $475, was a Victorian toy. Available at Adrian Morris Antiques (www.adrianmorrisantiques .com; 716-655-3374) in East Aurora, New York, it has its original map marking the structures’ locations.

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New Jersey

Capturing Traditions georgian details and a collection of americana lend a period feel to a new residence Architecture by Patrick J. Burke/Interior Design by David Guilmet of Bell-Guilmet Associates Text by Penelope Rowlands/Photography by Durston Saylor

For a couple with a wide-ranging collection of American antiques and folk art, architect Patrick J. Burke and interior designer David Guilmet created an 18thcentury-style house on farmland in New Jersey. The fieldstone barn, which serves as the guesthouse, “is supposed to look like an addition to a period house,� says Guilmet, who contributed to the architecture.

“I really love molding and paneling.

I’m crazy about depth; it’s the layers upon layers that make things interesting.”

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ne of his first gifts to the woman he would later marry —she was 16 or 17 at the time—was a Saratoga trunk, “metal, with a dome top,” she recalls. Their romance evolved along with their growing collection of antique objects and furnishings. “We love attending antiques shows,” she says. “For the two of us it’s a hobby.”

How better to memorialize a long and successful union than through a house that showcases this shared passion? Even

its name, Weathervane Farm, refers to a beloved collection.

But it doesn’t stop there: Its residents also collect early American furniture, hooked rugs and folk art.

The pair had lived in this corner of northern New Jersey for decades and had raised their children there. When they wanted a new space in which to live and collect, they turned to a local architect, Patrick J. Burke, and interior designer David Guilmet, of the Solebury, Pennsylvania, firm Bell-Guilmet Associates.

Favoring Americana in their collecting lives, the couple wanted a residence to match.

“They asked for classic early American,” Burke says. He responded with an expansive, 18th-century-style clapboard house and a fieldstone, gambrel-roofed guest barn, which, placed just to the front of the house, “gave it a true farm feeling,” Burke notes.

Together, the two buildings resemble a compound that was built up over time. The illusion of age was important to the clients, who, while desiring a

new residence, also “wanted it to look period,” says the wife.

They took steps to tie the buildings together “to make it a working whole,” Burke says, by, for example, echoing the stone of the barn’s faÇade in a gable end of the residence.

Entering the house is like stepping into a pool of light: A Palladian window on the second floor—copied from a house in Morristown, New Jersey, where George Washington was headquartered during the Revolutionary War—sends the sunlight down to the first

Opposite: A gallery off the entrance hall displays a circa 1840 theorem painting and a circa 1835 portrait. Above: In the living room, as throughout, “paneled walls add period detail,” says Guilmet. He did extensive research into 18th-century American interiors to ensure architectural authenticity. The New Hampshire highboy is 18th century. The painting of the O. M. Pettit is by James Bard. Schumacher sofa and drapery damask, with Scalamandré trim. Brunschwig & Fils wing chair and sofa fabrics. Lee Jofa pillow crewel.

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floor. The entrance hall was conceived with a gallery opening on either side. “You walk in and see arches,” says the wife, who had done years of research into period architecture before embarking on the project. “I really love molding and paneling,” she says. “I’m crazy about depth; it’s the layers upon layers that make things interesting.” To the right, a gracious staircase, shallow-stepped and gracefully wide, seems to float up to the second floor.

Guilmet, who designed the interior architecture as well as several exterior details, also pored over historical plans, then replicated his findings in such elements as the house’s millwork and its classic Colonial front door surround. “We were going for an authentic look,” he says. “I wanted it to have a

sophisticated feel.” The quest extended to the nails. “People often use rosehead nails to get an old-looking floor,” says Guilmet’s partner, Patrick Bell, “but these floors were laid with cut nails that are flush with the wood. They’re not as dramatic visually, but they’re more appropriate historically.”

In the spacious, light-filled living room, a Serapi carpet, from the couple’s impressive rug collection, literally sets the tone; the muted crimson of its background—what the wife calls “a very Colonial red”—is picked up in upholstery fabrics and draperies. Here Guilmet opted for simplicity. “I wanted a harmonious palette with subtle changes. I wanted to keep it quiet and serene but to still give it a sense of color.”

As they have for years, the

“The approach in every room was to provide a backdrop for the antiques and art,” Guilmet says. “Even the palette was kept simple.” Above: A late-19th-century heart-in-hand staff is in the paneled library. Avery Boardman sofa, with Manuel Canovas fabric. Right: The formal dining room has a portrait

by Sturtevant J. Hamblin. Lee Jofa chair fabric. Brunschwig & Fils drapery fabric, with Scalamandré trim.

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“The rest of the house is high-style country,” says Guilmet, who worked closely with the wife on the design, “but the great room is a bit more casual.” The hand-hewn beams are 18th century; the tin chandelier, the bench table and the horse-and-plow weathervane are all mid–19th century. Ralph Lauren Home sofas, with Scalamandré fabric.

“We were going for an authentic look.

I wanted it to have a very sophisticated feel.”

couple worked with Bell, an antiques dealer, to acquire period art and furnishings for the residence. Such pursuits are in the wife’s blood: “My parents collected antiques, and they took me around to dealers,” she says. The couple favor painted surfaces, and some of the living room’s more important pieces, including an 18th-century tea table and a pair of circa 1800 Windsor bowback chairs, with their original white paint, fall into this category.

The dining room is centered around a mahogany Federal table—a piece said to have once belonged to Benjamin Lincoln,

a general in the Revolutionary War—that, along with a sideboard and six of the mahogany dining chairs, had long been in the family’s possession. Guilmet had the chairs copied, increasing their number to a dozen, and claims that even he can’t tell the new from the old.

The twin chandeliers, redolent of 18th-century New England, are among the few other reproductions to be found.

An evocative circa 1845 portrait of Sarah North, by Sturtevant Hamblin, is one of a number of folk paintings in the residence. On the same wall, a circa 1850 banner

weathervane seems to point out the window, past a pristine parterre with boxwood borders and brick walkways, by English-born landscape architect Peter Cummin, to the countryside beyond.

The house remains a work in progress—as, perhaps, any antiques lover’s residence must be. “It’s an evolving project to put together a collection of this caliber,” Guilmet says. “You have to have people who are willing to spend time looking for the right pieces.” Happily, for this couple, waiting for perfection poses no problem at all. l

The wallcovering in the master bedroom “makes it feel cozy without making it dark.” The cherry corner cabinet, circa 1820, holds a collection of mid-19th-century Pennsylvanian tinware.

The New England hooked rug on the wall is also 19th century.

Schumacher sofa, bed hanging and drapery fabrics. Ralph Lauren Home bed ticking. Brunschwig & Fils plaid. Above: The pool pavilion is a copy of an outbuilding in Williamsburg, Virginia.

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Wyoming

One Foot in the Present

reshaping the ranch Aesthetic at the base of the Grand Teton

Architecture by Celeste Robbins, aia/Interior Design by Berta Shapiro Text by Jeff Turrentine/Photography by Steve Hall/Hedrich Blessing

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rchitect Celeste Robbins had plenty of experience renovating homes.

She had just never built one, that’s all.

For comfort’s sake, she might have started out on more familiar turf—maybe in Winnetka, Illinois, where her office is located and where she’s completely fluent in the local architectural vernacular; or in nearby Chicago, a city that offers endless opportuni-

ties for an architect to test out big ideas on tiny lots.

But you don’t always get to choose your own destiny. And for Robbins, destiny came in the form of a rather daunting commission: a 9,000-square-foot vacation residence in a place where the only skyscrapers to be found are actual mountains and where the moose outnumber the taxis 20 to one: Jackson, Wyoming.

She realized just how far away she was from the big city

when she and one of the clients took an early trip to view the land on which she would build.

The snow was packed so high that snowshoes were in order; as they approached the fence that surrounded the property, there was no need to unlock any gate. “We just walked right over it,” she recalls.

The site, with its views of the majestic Tetons in nearly all directions, was inspiring— but also, Robbins says, a little intimidating. “I was mainly

concerned with what the vocabulary would be. My background is as a modernist, and I wasn’t sure how this house would turn out. You don’t find a lot of classically modern houses in the Jackson area.

Most people here are looking to build homes with a more obvious western theme.” What’s more, the site “was really flat, and there were very few trees.

Putting any new home in the middle of ranchland like that, with no trees and no topo-

Celeste Robbins designed a 9,000-square-foot ranch-inspired residence with modern lines (above) for a family of four in Wyoming’s Grand Teton valley. “It’s a challenge to fit a house into a context and make it look like it’s always been there,” notes the Winnetka, Illinois–based architect, who collaborated on the project with interior designer Berta Shapiro. Opposite: A seating area in the great room. Following Pages: “The clients entertain a lot and wanted a casual open area, and that sort of drove the architecture,” Robbins says of the 52-foot-long great room. Odegard rug. Lounge chair, Sutherland.

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graphical grade change, can be challenging. It’s just right there; you can see it from the road, far away.”

The clients, with whom Robbins had worked before, shared the architect’s modern sensibility but were sensitive to the context. A log cabin, or anything else too self-consciously western, was out of the question. Better to have the house just blend in to the landscape as much as possible. “They wanted something that was quiet and timeless,” she says.

Quickly a plan came into focus: two buildings, a main house and a guesthouse, framed in rich, dark cedar, with a roofline that cleverly references the modern and the traditional.

Gables honor past architectural styles that have retained their currency in this quadrant of the American West; but they share their duty with modern, flat roofs extending into dra-

Opposite: Many of the public spaces, including the dining area, have views of the Teton Range. Sentimento lamp. Right: The kitchen. Larsen fabric on Borge Mögensen chairs.

Barstools, BDDW. Sub-Zero refrigerator and Wolf range, at Abt.com.

Rocky Mountain hardware. Below: The main-floor plan. A separate guesthouse has an attached garage.

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10 11

courtesy robbins architecture inc.

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1 entrance Hall 2 library 3 great room 4 kitchen 5 playroom 6 wine room

7 master bedroom 8 master bath 9 gym 10 guesthouse 11 motor court

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matic eaves that nod to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style.

Robbins also likes how the gabled/flat dichotomy mirrors the relationship between the surrounding Teton mountains and the broad, flat valley in which the house sits.

An open-plan interior, naturally, would reinforce the idea of this house as a spot for family vacations and entertaining.

And since there was really no such thing as a bad view on any side of the house, windows would be everywhere, facing all directions. Robbins enlisted Chicago-based lighting designer Anne Kustner Haser and the Jackson-based landscape architectural firm Hershberger De-

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“When a residence is as open to the landscape as this one is, you have to be thinking about the outside as much as the inside.�

Opposite: French doors open to the master bedroom. Blanche Lazelle’s 1935 watercolor Vase of Flowers hangs above a 1930s terra-cotta figure and a 1950s Finn Juhl armchair. Drapery fabric, Rogers & Goffigon. Stark carpet. Above: A wraparound sandstone terrace. Banquette cushion fabric, Perennials.

sign to help fill out her vision. (“There aren’t as many contractors to choose from in Jackson as there are in Chicago,” she says, “but the quality of their work is remarkable.”) Interior designer Berta Shapiro, who had worked with Robbins on the clients’ house back in Illinois, was again called into service.

On that first snowy recon-

naissance mission, Robbins and her client agreed that the house’s great room would have to look out onto Grand Teton.

The glass in this room is 10 feet high and 40 feet long, framing the peak like an IMAX screen in an unusually luxurious theater.

Shapiro placed identical sofas back to back in order to give the clients two separate seating

areas, in addition to a dining area at one end; she knew that this room, more than any other in the house, would be where the family and their guests would spend most of their waking hours.

“When a residence is as open to the landscape as this one is, you have to be thinking

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Discoveries by Designers

Prior’s Restraint Austin T. Miller American Antiques (www.usfolkart.com; 614-2250506) features a rare signed 1849 portrait of a boy, $150,000, by William Matthew Prior. Also at the Columbus, Ohio, gallery is an 1860– 80 New England quilt, $30,000.

Going for the Goat A circa 1890 life-size goat, $22,000, at Hill lodge outside South Bend, Indiana. During the ceremony, a potential member sat blindfolded on the goat. The wheels are not perfectly round, resulting in a bumpy ride; the rider had to trust his fellows in order to stay on.

Hill Gallery, 407 W. Brown St. Birmingham, MI 48009; 248-540-9288 www.hillgallery.com

In a Nutshell Adrian Sassoon (www.adriansassoon .com; 44-20-7581-9888) is a London dealer renowned for both his collection of 18th-century Sèvres porcelain and his range of contemporary ceramics, such as a stoneware walnut, $13,000, by Kate Malone.

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For her whimsical ceramic pieces, Kate Malone is inspired by forms found in nature—be it in the sea or on the land.

hill gallery: jesse hill/courtesy hill gallery; austin t. miller american antiques: courtesy austin t. miller american antiques inc. adrian sassoon: james mortimer; brunschwig & Fils: billy cunningham

Gallery was made for the initiation rites of a

AD’s Editors Present Designers’ Sources

Brunschwig & Fils Inspired by Suzanni designs, Dzhambul, a cotton-and-linen blend at Brunschwig & Fils (800-538-1880), is in six new color combinations, including coral and green (shown). l

Rhode Island Ellen Denisevich-Grickis found an 18th-century barn in Ontario, Canada, and had it relocated to a four-acre plot in Rhode Island, where she renovated it for use as a summer house for herself and her husband, Bill Grickis, and their two daughters. These Pages: A vast wildflower meadow precedes the 3,000-square-foot residence’s entrance.

Proud Heritage

a 200 -year- old barn is born again as a designer’s own coastal retreat

Architectural and Interior Design by Ellen Denisevich-Grickis Text by Steven M. L. Aronson Photography by Richard Mandelkorn

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fter a quarter of a century’s worth of renting in coastal Rhode Island for the summer, designer Ellen Denisevich-Grickis and her husband, corporate lawyer Bill Grickis, took the plunge and bought. The property—four arcadian acres bordered by conservation land and romantically strewn with the remnants of rude stone walls—was just a short, lyrical bike ride from the beach.

Theirs being still very much a farming community, the couple wanted a house that was an earnest of the agricultural life—in other words, a barn. “A barn, with its implicit integrity and economy, is a proud silhouette of the past— its proportions and materials command respect, even reverence,” Denisevich-Grickis states. For all that, she sees it less as an antiquated throwback than as an abiding symbol of “shelter, harvest, warmth and honest effort.” Having made a thorough and loving study of neighboring barns, she did a drawing of the barn of her heart’s desire and then set out to reify it.

The “barn scouts” she consulted pointed her all the way to northern Ontario, promising that barns in Canada were generally of higher quality and

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Above: Part of the barn’s transformation included sheathing the façade in stone—an homage to local farm buildings. Below: The designer’s aim for the living area was to “expose the monumental wood skeleton, keeping it simple yet powerful.” On the wall behind the leather sofa, from Natuzzi, is a 2004 oil by Theodore Tihansky. Chandeliers, Studio Steel.

in better shape. “It was the dead of winter, and we drove over frozen tundra,” she recalls, “and then finally we saw it— this wonderful steep-roofed barn that had been built into a hillside. It was 200-plus years old and in near-perfect condition—the massive hand-hewn oak beams, posts and purlins were all mortised, tenoned and pegged!” And as if that weren’t enough, dimensionwise it conformed practically to the inch to what she had imagined and drawn. “It felt almost foreordained,” she says.

The dismantled barn frame was soon wending its cumbersome way south to Rhode Island, where it was set down and reconstructed in the Grickises’ ravishing wildflower meadow.

The couple then proceeded to make it more compatible with the other old barns in the area by adding a façade of local

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Although the installation of a fireplace in the dining area required some rearranging of the barn’s structural supports, “most of the posts and beams were left in their original position,” DenisevichGrickis says. The plank walls were finished with a white milk paint— one of the interior’s many “green” design features.

stone. A cupola was also added, to bring light into the open, soaring interior, and topped off with a weathervane of a bronze stylized mermaid created by Denisevich-Grickis.

The designer was determined to employ as many “green” materials as possible: Unmilled oak trees were used to fashion the outdoor dining room’s arbor, handmade nontoxic milk paint for the vertical-plank interior walls, and energy-efficient concrete

for the floors on the first story.

Denisevich-Grickis “personalized” the freshly poured concrete with pounds of sea glass and abalone shell that she had collected herself, as well as with chips of mirror and motherof-pearl. “I had on hip boots, and I was standing on wooden planks hand-broadcasting the materials—over a three-day period, no less—throwing them all in very carefully, because it makes a real difference how you throw them. It was

one gigantic art project, I can tell you.”

There are precious few materials in the barn that are runof-the-mill. The draperies for the big windowed barn doors were run up out of burlap and tailored like fine fabric, after which they were hand-sewn with more than 1,000 Capiz shells, edged with feathers and equipped with shell-bracelet rings. “I wanted something rough, rustic and natural that went with the barn,” she points

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Top: The upper level’s haylofts were turned into a sitting room and bedrooms, with an iron-framed bridge in the middle to link them. What wood is not original to the barn was reclaimed from historical sources. Above: Floral motifs and vibrant color brighten the master bedroom. Left: Interconnected with the living and dining areas, the modern kitchen has floors of concrete mixed with chips of mirror, mother-of-pearl, abalone shell and sea glass. Hanging above the Shaker-style island is a Murano glass chandelier. Viking dishwasher, range and hood, at Abt.com.

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out. The transom and interior windows were made of handblown glass; and the floor of the downstairs powder room is all striped stones (“I call them lucky stones”) that DenisevichGrickis garnered from her favorite local beach over long years and individually placed.

The barn is particularly rich in architectural elements and fragments—18th-centuryPennsylvania-barn pine doors with cutouts in them called hex signs (they were believed to ward off evil spirits); assorted other 18th-century doors all with their original blue paint and hardware; wooden arms, fragments of Mexican santos, wired for use as sconces; and an antique iron gate pressed into

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service as the outdoor dining table. Both the frame and stone floor of the covered side terrace were once part of a nearby 18th-century structure that the couple bought (DenisevichGrickis painted the frame of its big round window, which had originated in a church, a nontoxic—that is, a green— red inside).

A cavernous space 30 feet high triples as living area, dining area and kitchen. The master suite nestles behind the

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Above: A log arbor—soon to be enveloped in flowering vines—spans nearly the width of the shingled rear façade, providing shelter for an outdoor dining room. Right: The designer and her dog, Hope.

Outside the kitchen is a large covered terrace, the frame of which was taken from an 18th-century house. DenisevichGrickis chose an antique church window for the gable end. Locally made Adirondack chairs sit by the fireplace.

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A field house in upstate New York was imagined, in a collaborative effort, by architect Paul F. Shurtleff, interior designer Thad Hayes and landscape architect Douglas Reed.

The lawn, terraced by a stone wall, echoes the divisions of the building’s living and pool areas.

New York

Farmhouse Abstraction A recreational outbuilding mirrors its bucolic setting

Architecture by Paul F. Shurtleff, aia/Interior Design by Thad Hayes/Landscape Architecture by Reed Hilderbrand Text by Joseph Giovannini/Photography by Scott Frances

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ook again: Can you be absolutely sure this little farm building wasn’t already there, and that instead of designing it, the architect just signed it?

Freud said the ego didn’t believe in its own birth, and it’s hard to believe that the modest

structure that landscape architect Douglas Reed, architect Paul F. Shurtleff and interior designer Thad Hayes invented together in upstate New York hasn’t stood forever in its quiet state of bucolic grace. With a slight bend in it, the shed roof of the light gray outbuilding slopes down with the terraced

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yard, a seamless fit with the vernacular farmhouses of the area and the network of fieldstone walls lacing the landscape.

A house doesn’t always have to exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright’s fingerprints to look organic. If the building the three designers conceived on the footprint of a demolished stable seems

to grow out of terraced meadows, it’s because the designers first shaped the landscape, and the house followed naturally, taking its cue from an existing tartan of fieldstone walls and hedgerows. “We were inspired by the traditional elements of the farmstead,” says Douglas Reed, of the Boston-area

landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand.

The three had collaborated here before, designing the main house on this rural property back in 1994 (see Architectural Digest, June 1998).

The architecture itself was inspired by local farmhouses, but, importantly, the landscape

architect terraced the grounds so that the tennis court, motor court, outdoor pool and lawns all occupied their own levels within the surrounding meadows. Like a stone dropped in a pond, the house’s footprint created a ripple of rectangles in the grounds around it, rooting the house in the land.

In 2001 the owners, a New York couple with two children, acquired a nearly three-acre property next door, and they asked their three designing tenors back for an encore.

Following the lead of the landscape architect, the trio decided to visually connect the new property with the old by reca-

The media room has exposed trusses of “forest salvage” Douglas fir and oversize French doors. Early-19th-century Italian oak worktable and triangular stools, Amy Perlin Antiques. Lee Jofa drapery and plaid club chair fabrics. Edelman leather on sofas and ottomans.

Striped fabric on sofa seats from Fonthill. Newel bench, foreground.

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Above: A circa 1910 iron chandelier hangs in the kitchen. Backsplash tile, Ann Sacks. Waterworks sink and fixtures. Refrigerator, range and hood at Abt.com. Above Right: The pool area “recalls a traditional agricultural shed,” notes Shurtleff. Halophane lighting, Urban Archaeology. Barlow Tyrie tables and chaise longues, with Perennials fabric.

Though the field house is a short walk from the main residence, the challenge, says Hayes, was to make it “a dynamic and interesting space for the clients to go to.” Right: The entrance hall. Bench from Amy Perlin Antiques. Drapery sheer, Stark.

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The wall leading up to the house actually runs through it, splitting the floor into two levels.

pitulating the fieldstone walls in the new phase. “We drew a major landscape wall across the yard to extend the pattern and join the two properties within the larger system of retaining walls,” says Reed. “The house straddles the wall.”

The program started modestly: The clients—she works in film—wanted a screening room where family and friends could hole up with popcorn during weekends in the country. The husband, an executive, likes to swim— as does the whole family, for that matter—so an indoor pool soon followed. The pool suggested a gym, and the gym, a

spa. Then came a guest studio.

At the end of the whole wish list, the clients and architects were looking at a recreational field house that had grown to 5,000 square feet, and the size demanded that the designers tamp down the scale so that the outbuilding didn’t wag the main house and dominate the new property. If Shurtleff, who worked as lead architect for Jaquelin T. Robertson on the original project, was going to retain any sense of authenticity, he couldn’t allow the structure to balloon: Old farmhouses were built small to retain heat, and inflated scale gives away the newness of a build-

ing, despite traditional forms.

“As soon as you’re dealing with a split-level floor plan, you have an issue of roof form, which led me to the idea of a simple shed roof, like a tractor shed tucked in against the side wall of a barn,” says Shurtleff.

“The issue was how to make it feel like an agrarian building.

It had to feel part of a historic past, without being historicist or rustic.” The architect did not design down to the principle by applying sentimental detailing and materials, like logs. Instead he abstracted from tradition, creating a straightforward building with clean surfaces and elemental lines within a

form that hybridizes the notions of farmhouse and barn.

The stone wall that cuts through the property leads to the south façade of the outbuilding, where big, generous, barnlike doors open onto a great, gabled room focused on a fieldstone fireplace worthy of a lodge. A catering kitchen facilitates entertaining. On the downslope side, the wall leading up to the house actually runs through it, splitting the floor into two levels. The lap pool is sited with the hot tub on the lower level, which opens onto a terrace and lawn leading back to the main building. The

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The building is clad in cedar siding.

Large doors, which slide open to reveal the media room, continue the farmstead theme. “The main house has a formality,” notes Hayes.

“This one needed to feel more outdoorsy.” Twig stools, Newel.

invoking an ideal continued from page 138

entrance hall with a black-and-white checkerboard marble floor leads straight onto a library centered on a dignified escutcheon of white molding celebrating the view through a tall window. To the left lies the master suite and to the right the living room, with the dining room beyond. All the public rooms, along with the master suite, are on the first floor.

The other three bedrooms are on the second floor. When the couple have no guests, it’s basically a one-bedroom house on the first floor.

“In every job I do, I try to think of three adjectives to describe my intentions, and here they were stylish, comfortable and au-

The couple keep the doors of the house wide open 10 months of the year. thentic,” says O’Leary. She stressed comfort and informality because the couple keep the doors wide open 10 months of the year, and the free-range dogs drop by on casual visits and roam through the house. In this historical context of Virginia, you have to look twice to realize that the designer cuts the edge with contemporary pieces, such as the dining table with a plaster top and a patinatedsteel base. Despite the traditional chairs, the lines overall are clean and softly up to date, eased by natural materials.

O’Leary characterizes the style as “warm modern,” and her palette—pumpkin in the living room, Clydesdale brown in the library and eucalyptus in the dining room—indeed warms the interior.

“Once we realized the outside was going to have columns, that it’d be a white house with black trim, I knew we’d have a lot of color inside,” she explains. “I was interested in the contrast.”

In addition to the multiple architectural personalities, there were the multiple design voices working in concert from the beginning. “We picked our focal points and tried not to have too many things to look at,” adds O’Leary. “I asked Joel whether he designed from the outside in or the inside out, and he said that it all came up together. That’s how we did the whole house. The exterior, interior and the décor all came up together.” l

deer cabin reverie continued from page 145

body had lived in it for 30 years.” The following summer London applied her down-home skills to the grounds surrounding the cabin. “I can’t help it,” says the designer. “When I’m at a campsite, I want to play with it. When you go horse camping, you carry your belongings in a mantee, which is a tarplike thing the size of a bale of hay. So I made some mantees out of some old pillows they had and some canvas, and that’s what their ‘sofas’ are around the fire pit.”

Deer Cabin, as the Stones call it, has answered its multiple purposes—and then some. For one thing, the place seems to tap into widespread Little House on the Prairie fantasies. “Every man, including my husband, who walks in says, ‘What more do you need?’ ” relates Connie Stone. “Even people you wouldn’t think would respond to it want to be there washing the dishes and heating the water and all that.” With its primitive charms, the cabin has also served as something of a petri dish for the rest of the project. For instance, the other buildings—the lake house (a master suite for the couple with a bedroom, kitchenette and offices); the tree house (a three-bedroom guesthouse); and the barn (a lodgelike structure with

“Mimi’s talent is that she creates an intimate and nurturing environment instinctively,” says Connie Stone. a big family kitchen, dining room and living room)—have all been designed with screened sleeping porches and outdoor showers.

If all goes according to schedule, the last of these structures should be completed this month. Which raises the question of what purpose the cabin will serve in the future. “Everyone still wants to spend the night there,” maintains Connie Stone.

“I’m just not sure I’m going to want to share it that much. You know how when you meditate they tell you to go to a safe place in your mind? I hate to sound woowoo, but I think no matter how amazing the rest of the property is, Deer Cabin is always going to be my safe place.” l

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in the present continued from page 187

about the outside as much as the inside,” says Shapiro. “You’re dealing with so much sky, so much land—and all of it accompanied by coloration that’s constantly changing from dawn until there’s no light left in the day.” (Robbins, who says she can “feel the muscles in my shoulders relax every time I touch down on the airport in Jackson,” was delighted to learn that the architecture offered views she hadn’t even counted on. “There were some that I wasn’t expecting,” she says. “When you’re in the guesthouse and you sit down, you can actually see over the main house to the peaks of the mountains.”)

Shapiro took her palette cues from this protean natural canvas, emphasizing the blues, greens and earth colors that predominate in the vistas. Because the clients and their family “wanted to live comfortably, not preciously” in their house, she chose fabrics “that were durable but refined: linen, leather, velvet, good wool rugs.”

And so was born an undeniably western house that doesn’t have to rely on Navajo rugs or cowboy-themed statuary to prove its regional bona fides. (No framed sets of antlers here, though there is a striking charcoal rendering of a moose in the entrance hall.) Instead, Robbins and Shapiro have been able to translate the urbane re-

She likes how the gabled/ flat dichotomy mirrors the relationship between the surrounding Tetons and the broad, flat valley in which the house sits. finement that they and their clients have always prized into a stylistic language that’s easily absorbed into the rugged mountain vernacular.

If Celeste Robbins—who celebrated, if that’s the right word, her 40th birthday dealing with the project’s contractors— was wondering whether she truly knocked it out of the park her first time at bat, the clients’ reaction put any questions to rest.

“They had intended for this to be a second home,” she notes. “But they ended up moving out here full time.”

Not bad for a beginner. l

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proud heritage continued from page 196

living area. Stairs—made out of the surplus timbers, with a handrail contrived of twigs gathered on the property—lead to a sitting room. From there a bridge, which offers a bird’s-eye view of the barn’s impressive wooden skeleton, connects to the two teenage daughters’ bedrooms.

“With the decorating, I wanted to go modern—I didn’t want that hokey barn wagon-wheel look on the inside,” Denisevich-Grickis says. The farm spirit is vestigially manifest in an antique applepicking ladder and an antique milking

“I had on hip boots, and I was standing on wooden planks handbroadcasting the materials.

It was one gigantic art project, I can tell you.” bench—both, naturally, with their original paint. But much of the rest of what’s there is a pleasant variety, the designer having taken care that nothing disrupt the fittingness of things. A contemporary Italian leather sofa and a Murano chandelier that “speaks to some of the other quirky things in the house” are at home with an antique grain-painted blanket chest and an old English oak turned-leg drop-leaf dining table. The paintings and sculpture, for their part, are contemporary—all done

by Theodore Tihansky, of Monhegan island, Maine, whom Bill Grickis describes as a “pure, unvarnished, diamond-in-therough kind of artist.”

The couple collect Oriental rugs, and there are a handful of these upstairs, clothing the old wide-plank pine floorboards, lending warmth and color. “When you look at an antique Oriental carpet,” Grickis observes, “you always see something you hadn’t noticed before, and it’s the same story with the barn—the light that filters through the windows and pours down from the cupola illuminates the queen posts and purlins and other elements of the barn’s superstructure in all different ways, depending on the time of day.” l For more features on renovated barns, go to ArchitecturalDigest.com.

farmhouse continued from page 203

sloping shed roof, as though appended to a small barn, allowed the designers to build down rather than up, hunkering the volume into the land. “We knitted the functions together into a compact volume so the building wouldn’t dominate the site,” says the architect.

To keep the large house looking small, Shurtleff practiced a little deception, noting, “If you pump up the scale of the components, you bring the scale down in size.”

He increased the size of the barn doors on the leading façade, along with the windows and fireplace inside.

Thad Hayes also practiced some adroit deception by scaling up the apparently modest furniture, and he kept it simple, with several pieces of the same size that he repeats. As in many of his interiors, the furniture layout is geometric and structured, cued by the axial geometries of the building. The consistent horizon line of the sofas and chairs orders an interior already calmed by geometry. “Our clients were very easygoing, but the one requirement was that the room accommodate a mix of uses,” says Hayes. “It needed to look like a living room part of the time, and for

The size demanded that the designers tamp down the scale so the outbuilding didn’t wag the main house. screening movies, the furniture—which is oriented to the view out the barn doors and to the fireplace—can be reoriented toward the screen,” he says. What feels like a lodge becomes transformed into a home theater.

“It’s not so much a summer room, because it’s used when it’s cooler, in the fall, winter and spring,” says Hayes. He employs a warm palette of darker, richer materials and colors, appropriate for the seasonal use. A blue plaid on the chairs plays off the leather sofas, which have seat cushions in fabric panels—a two-tone mix that recalls 1930s and ’40s automobile seating.

“I designed it so they could just build a fire, watch a movie and eat popcorn without worrying that buttery fingers would ruin the décor,” summarizes Hayes.

“There’s nothing precious about it.” l

Directory A listing of the designers, architects and hotels featured in this issue

invoking an ideal Pages 131–139 Ike Kligerman Barkley Architects PC 330 West 42nd Street New York, New York 10036 212-268-0128

Renée O’Leary Interiors 1815 East Green Springs Road Louisa, Virginia 23093 540-967-9242 oldraptorfarm@gmail.com deer cabin reverie Pages 140 –147 Mimi London London Boone Incorporated Design 8687 Melrose Avenue Suite G-168 Los Angeles, California 90069 310-855-2567 www.mimilondon.com

an anthology of folk Pages 42–48 Malcolm Robertson Robertson & Landers Architects 59 Grove Street, Suite 2D New Canaan Connecticut 06840 203-966-2617 www.robertsonandlanders.com

JamesHyatt Studio 1530 16th Street, Third Floor Denver, Colorado 80202 303-825-2010

san ysidro ranch Pages 70 –76 San Ysidro Ranch 900 San Ysidro Lane Santa Barbara, California 93108 800-368-6788 www.sanysidroranch.com

Sally Paul Design 2516 Midvale Avenue Los Angeles, California 90064 310-475-2885

Marc Appleton Appleton & Associates, Inc. 1556 17th Street Santa Monica, California 90404 310-828-0430 117 West Micheltorena Street Santa Barbara, California 93101 805-965-0304 www.appleton-architects.com

Laurie Lewis Design 3935 Lyceum Avenue Los Angeles, California 90066 310-827-4892 www.laurielewisdesign.com

a winning design for oscar® Pages 90–92 Carleton Varney Dorothy Draper & Company, Inc. 60 East 56th Street New York, New York 10022 212-758-2810 www.dorothydraper.com

TED TURNER Pages 118–130 Chris Carson Ford Powell & Carson Architects and Planners, Inc. 1138 East Commerce Street San Antonio, Texas 78205 210-226-1246 www.fpcarch.com

Laura Hunt 30 Highland Park Village Suite 210 Dallas, Texas 75205 214-526-4868 www.laurahunt.com Jennifer Bear Confluence Designs 1401 Old Santa Fe Trail, Suite G Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505-603-4565 www.confluencedesigns.com

seaside sanctuary Pages 150 –157 Joseph W. Dick— Architecture—Inc. 17 Summer Street Yarmouthport Massachusetts 02675 508-362-1309 www.josephwdick.com inner directed Pages 158 –167 S. Russell Groves 210 11th Avenue, Suite 502 New York, New York 10001 212-929-5221 www.srussellgroves.com capturing traditions Pages 170 –179 Patrick James Burke Architect P.O. Box 264 New Vernon, New Jersey 07976 973-539-4777 pburkearchitect@aol.com

David Guilmet Patrick Bell Bell-Guilmet Associates P.O. Box 38 Solebury, Pennsylvania 18963 215-297-8977 www.bellguilmet.com

Peter Cummin Cummin Associates, Inc. 114 Water Street Stonington, Connecticut 06378 860-535-4224 www.cumminassociates.com one foot in the present Pages 180 –187 Celeste Robbins Robbins Architecture Inc. 894 Green Bay Road, Suite 8 Winnetka, Illinois 60093 847- 446-8001 www.robbins-architecture.com

Berta Shapiro 925 West Huron Street Suite 101 Chicago, Illinois 60622 312- 492-9700 Hershberger Design 560 South Glenwood Street Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001 307-739-1001 www.hershbergerdesign.com Proud heritage Pages 190 –197 Ellen Denisevich-Grickis 185 Carmel Hill Road Bethlehem, Connecticut 06751 203-266-7857 ellengrickis@charter.net farmhouse abstraction Pages 198–204 Paul Francis Shurtleff AIA Architect 88 North Hillside Place Ridgewood, New Jersey 07450 201- 445-8283

Thad Hayes, Inc. 80 West 40th Street New York, New York 10018 212-571-1234 www.thadhayes.com Douglas Reed Reed Hilderbrand Associates Inc. 741 Mount Auburn Street Watertown Massachusetts 02472 617-923-2422 www.reedhilderbrand.com l

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