History Becomes a Berkshires "Hangout House"

By Jane Holtz Kay

Ogden Codman Jr. was no sorcerer's apprentice. He didn't want to work magic. "The architect and decorator are often aware that they are regarded by their clients as the possessors of some strange craft like black magic or astrology," Codman opined. Heaven forbid this "fatalistic attitude," the prince of rationality declared. The "fastidious eye" need only glimpse the chamber to "penetrate the mystery of house-furnishing...to notice wherein its charm lies," he observed.

And, 204 pages later, the reader of his classic "The Decoration of Houses," penned with Edith Wharton, would have solved the puzzle. The taste-making book's formulas on harmonies and proportions, on the "accessibility of the windows, the arrangement of the furniture, the privacy of the room and," --above all, it sometimes seemed to this rebel against Victorian excess-- "the absence of the superfluous," would dispense any "occult" notions generated by other decorators.

With his late l9th century classic, the Boston patrician set the standard. He also set up the dwellings that demonstrated his design gifts. "Cottage" was the diminutive name for the estates of the period. But the commodious elegance, the rationality, the details, the were on the grand scale for a clientele who lived at equally aristocratic dimensions.

Though the gates of Brookhurst, one of the more opulent classical dwellings designed as a country retreat at the turn-of-the-century, came the elite of the era to visit the affluent New York family of Gouvernor Morris, first cousin to the novelist Edith Wharton who recommended her co-author/architect. Codman's round forecourt placed before the brick and marble mansion at the crest of the driveway atop the rolling landscape of the Berkshires in Lenox, Massachusetts, greeted the weekending gentry prepared to unload a preposterously large quantity of luggage and sweep into the symmetrical and spacious quarters outlined by the prestigious designer in l9l0.

Codman was not to be alone in defining Brookhurst's Georgian delights, however. For all the ease and rationality of the language articulating his theory, and for all the triumph of his art in its three-dimensional form, Codman's decisiveness had an imperious quality that lead to his dismissal. The friendship of Codman and Wharton, their relationship was "testy." Building an estate then, as now, could be a tempestuous affair. And an expensive one. ("Where space is not restricted there should in fact be four rooms, preceded by an antechamber separating the suite from the main corridor of the house,," "The Decoration of Houses" described the French bedroom.) Wharton's Morris cousins, soon had enough of the free-spending Codman. The exorbitant architect was fired in favor of his more everyday (and, critics concede) inferior heir. As "The Decoration of Houses" had a co-author, the designer of Brookhurst would have a second or co-architect, Francis L. V. Hoppin.

Francis L.V. Hoppin, the New York second-tier designer who organized and decorated the interior of Brookhurst , though less known, was no slouch. The leading draughtsman for Classical Revival masters McKim, Mead and White, Hoppin designed the old police headquarters in New York along with other Newport and Berkshire cottages had his own certainties. "The architect is the general of all the forces," he told an interviewer in l903. "His is the supreme command." Given Codman's overall layout--that approach through a courtyard and the axial arrangement of the interior--Hoppins proceeded to apply his own art to the embellishment.

The successor architect shaped Brookhurst's endless rooms, ornamented their interiors, and packed the premises with French furniture by the boat load. He scanned the centuries for their crowning moments, and did well enough in emptying purses in the pursuit of perfection. The result was a period piece of elegance and amplitude. The vast mansion boasted three floors fitted out to the last detail with ornamented woodwork, carved marble fireplaces, sweeping staircase, paneled walls and well-appointed baths. Through the reception hall larger than most rooms, the guests could plunge down the central axis of the drawingroom, illuminated by views on four sides, to the terrace before the becolumned rear facade that overlooked the trimmed sunken gardens and a pool to a vista of the Berkshire hills. Pace by pace, the elegant entourage passed the period furniture, the painted panels of the walls, the French paintings that bespoke the Old World decor that Hoppins plucked from European stores.

The grandeur outlasted the first generation. The furnishings lingered. But the way of life to maintain the heyday of the great estates vanished. With the plush pre-Depression purses went the bankroll for their upkeep. By the time the house left the confines of the original family, the third floor with its 20 maids rooms had come down to reduce the excess space. By the '80's, the financial burden showed in lack of maintenance--and the roster of those prepared to live in thrall to the turn-of-the-century style of l0-course consumption had dwindled still more.

Not surprisingly, what the Abelows, a New York couple seeking out a weekend home in the Berkshires, wanted from the refurbishment of this l3,000-square-foot formal dwelling, was something quite otherwise than Edith Wharton who ran a house like a salon with iced champagne greeting wilted guests after their long train trip from Manhattan. A "hangout house," was what they wanted; a "comfortable house?" Something l990s, not the century before. They wanted, for instance, the superscale tv screen that now slides down before the elegant marble fireplace of the library, the updated kitchen, the patio enclosed with glass for a breakfast sun room. They sought, understandably, the kind of house that New York designer Kevin McNamara has now provided them.

Such ostensible simplicity didn't come quickly or easily, however. Five years of interior re-do, from faux marble walls to recovered furniture, from the modernized kitchen to the updated bathrooms have made the house and its surroundings attractive and livable. "By and large, it was a decorating job," says McNamara. "But we tried very hard to go on with the original architecture. In some cases it was decoration but it was really a restoration that we did there. We spent a lot of time putting things back to rights. Some things were crumbling; some were falling apart. It had really been neglected. It was a huge house."

Friendly and cordial, Angela Abelow, and Herbert Abelow, in the investment business, take you through a house that now reflects an informal yet cordial manner that, like the house itself, reflects but doesn't emulate the hospitality of another era. It is a spiritual, spirited restoration where the dog snoozes before the fireplace, and the wood-paneled library holds 5000 books assembled afresh in the l980s but chosen in the spirit of the library past--"What we would be interested in reading if we got stuck in our old age," Angela Abelow laughs as she tours the house. "Herb's toy," she says with another laugh as she presses the button and that supersized tv screen drops down in the library. "Our nod to the 20th century."

"Evoke" is the operative word in our walk through the airy rooms of the two-story weekend house where the Abelows retreat from their Manhattan apartment. The soft tones that prevail--"all muted pastel shades" from pale aqua to almond green, says their designer--are based on Codman principals. The rose and green pallet of the drawing room features "colors of the period," selected to evoke the kind of scheme advocated by Wharton and Codman and favored by the client and the designer, one of many latterday enthusiasts of "The Decoration of Houses."

Happily, many Morris furnishings still remain. The objects that fill in the rooms--some contemporary reproductions (chandeliers, fabrics, rugs); some antiques (candelabra, bronze sculptures, mirrors)--were not literal reconstructions but reminiscences, based on the early century look of then-contemporary French furniture but accommodating to artifacts on today's market. If, for instance, the Abelow's furnishings substitute American for French furniture, they retain the first owners' mix of mahogany and gilt-market.

So, too, the arches of the west wing, now enclosed in glass blend old and new. They turn this once-open loggia into a sun-strewn morningroom by the kitchen, a "garden room" in McNamara's termminology, with rattan furniture beneath the ceiling fan. The relaxed indoor space serves this Sunday-paper-on-the-patio generation, yet overlooks the garden and pool-- the same sweeping vista south to the hills that charmed the equally well-known descendants, the old New York family of park commissioner Newbold Morris and painter George L.K. Morris.

To the designer, as to the owners, Angela and Herbert Abelow, as (one suspects) to Codman or Hoppin, such claims of contemporary life count mightily. To Codman as to his heirs, the house was not a museum but a setting. Victorian clutter was out. Practicality mattered. The past was not an impediment but an inspiration. "The chief point here is to make the house cheerful and interesting," Hoppin put it. No purists these early century architects.

Where the l9th century Morrises greeted visitors in formal chambers, the 20th century Abelows accommodate their guests or visiting children now in their 20s upstairs in soft-toned rooms with swagged windows and four poster beds. If 24 people no longer sit down for dinner, if "they enjoy themselves and they don't put their guests through the tortures of the way the house was," as McNamara puts it, this easygoing attitude didn't dull their interest in the restoration. "It's a surprise to many people and slightly ambitious because it's a lot of work," McNamara describes the couples' concern with the project from scraping walls to restoring the grounds. On the exterior alone, the work on the gardens and drive included resetting the marble, realigning roads and putting in ponds and trees and orchards, he says. "They certainly didn't set out to buy a house as a major project but when they came upon it, they became tremendously involved."

The designer and his clients were, in McNamara's words, "not died in the wool restoration people," but they reincarnate old attitudes. "To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rules of grammar," Codman wrote two generations ago when he shaped the gravel-strewn courtyard for the parade of carriages of his day and provided a full floor and segregated kitchen for the servants.

What, then, would be the original architects' response to the fixup? A positive one, say the parties involved in what historian Thomas Jayne calls "an aesthetic restoration" of the grandiloquent Georgian country house. "It was not a literal restoration," says the consulting historian; "not done in an archaeologizing spirit," in his words. Yet it deferred to the past. The cars may come up the driveway now and the kids eat in the kitchen but "in a lot of ways Kevin is of that epoch," historian Jayne observes. "A lot of it was instinctual; his instincts were very much like Codman's would have been. There wasn't that conflict of historian and architect; it's simpatico," says the historian. "If Codman walked into the house he wouldn't be shocked," says Jayne.

"Modern civilization has been called a varnished barbarism," Codman noted in his witty period primer, "a definition that might well be applied to the superficial graces of much modern decoration," he declared. Still, Codman concluded the work: "There is no absolute perfection, there is no communicable ideal; but much that is empiric, much that is confused and extravagant, will give way before the application of principles based on common sense and regulated by the laws of harmony and proportion." Much indeed.

Originally published in the Architectural Digest, circa mid-Œ90s

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