BEAUTY AND THE BIBLIOPHILE

Written by Bridget Williams / Photos by Robert Burge

The beautiful backdrop for countless wedding photos, the opulent library at Oxmoor Farm stands in contrast to the original 1700s part of the house, constructed in a humbler one-and-a-half-story colonial style compared by historians to the Barraud house in Williamsburg, apropos for an area that was still considered a part of the Virginia frontier when the farm was founded. Added in 1928 and housing 10,000 tomes, the 60’ by 28’ library wing represents the largest residential library in the Commonwealth. A portion of William Marshall Bullitt’s collection, including works by Einstein and Archimedes and reflective of his study of mathematics at Princeton, was donated by his widow to the University of Louisville in 1958.

The no-expense-spared build, initiated by William Marshall Bullitt, a Solicitor General in the William Howard Taft administration, was designed by New York architect F. Burrall Hoffman. Among the library’s defining attributes is ornate plaster carving on the ceiling crafted in Italy and shipped to Kentucky in sections. Floor-to-ceiling radius windows at the back of the room look out to the gardens, designed in 1911 by Marian Cruger Coffin, one of the country's first professional female landscape architects. Bibliophilia is a long-established Bullitt family trait, as an 1878 letter from Thomas W. Bullitt to his brother John C. Bullitt as part of the Bullitt Family Papers on deposit at the Filson Historical Society indicates. In it, Thomas writes that Gustave Bittner, a German immigrant who he refers to as a “first-rate workman,” built large walnut bookcases to house their mother’s book collection. Bittners is also credited with the library’s handsome rolling ladder. Today, Bittners, the venerable design firm Gustav founded in 1854 as a cabinet shop, continues its affiliation with the estate via periodic refreshes of the library’s accouterments.