As part of our House of Details series, we visit Longue Vue House & Gardens in New Orleans. We are privileged to have the insights of the Assistant Curator of Longue Vue, Lenora Costa. The house and garden is a marvelous example of the remarkable domestic architecture and landscape design created in America in the first half of the twentieth century— with a southern and uniquely New Orleans point of view. Here we leave you to Lenora’s insight on Longue Vue and its gardens.

Longue Vue House and Gardens was designed and built between 1939-1942 for Mr. and Mrs. Edgar B. Stern and their three children by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman and architects William and Geoffrey Platt. Both architects and landscape architect worked together to create a masterpiece of utility and beauty. Mr. Stern was a cotton-broker with business interests in real estate, banking, lumber, oil, publishing, and communication. Mrs. Stern was the daughter of Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, whose interests included education, the arts and politics, most notably voters’ rights.

Consisting of a main house, eight dependencies, five structures, 15 garden areas, and 22 fountains & ponds located on an eight-acre site, Longue Vue House and Gardens is one of the last Country Place Era homes built in the United States and the most complete and continually maintained Shipman garden for which we have been granted National Historic Landmark status.

Edgar Bloom Stern was born in New Orleans in 1886, the son of Maurice Stern and Hanna Bloom Stern. He enjoyed an incredibly active career that spanned over forty years and included a range of diversified business interests. Mr. Stern along with his son, Edgar Jr., started the first television franchise in Louisiana, WDSU-TV.

Edith Rosenwald Stern was born in Chicago in 1895, the third child of Julius Rosenwald and Augusta Nusbaum Rosenwald. In the year of her birth, her father joined the Sears, Roebuck & Company board and by 1909 became chief executive and principal shareholder. It was under his direction that Sears became one of the largest merchandising organizations in the world. Mrs. Stern was raised with philanthropic ideals which she channeled into many areas including education, visual and performing arts, landscape, and political advocacy. After the death of Mr. Stern in 1959, Mrs. Stern lived at Longue Vue until 1978 when she opened the home for tours.

In 1935, the Sterns employed the nationally renowned landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman to work on their garden. House and Garden magazine described her as the “Dean of American Women Landscape Architects” in 1933. Shipman worked with the Sterns for 15 years, until her death in 1950, designing the gardens and the interiors of the home. Her other clients included Fords, Astors, duPonts, and Seiberlings.

Completed in 1942, the home is full of wonderful “gadgets” and various surprises that make the typical unique. Please step onto Longue Vue with me and enjoy just a few of these now.

All facades of the house are based on different classical design aesthetics. The West Façade is Palladian with its matching dependencies connected by colonnades.

The South Façade is based off of the Beauregard-Keyes home in the French Quarter, New Orleans and the East Façade is from the Shadows on the Teche Plantation in New Iberia, LA.

The first of many curved doors, you enter the vestibule through a pair of curved sliding iron doors.

Unheard of in New Orleans due to our high water table, we have a below grade basement which is reached by going through another curved door to a wonderful set of spiral stairs. The stairs lead you to the wine tasting room, wine cellar, photographic dark room, laundry room, two work rooms, kitchen, full bath, elevator equipment, boiler and chiller spaces for the HVAC and sump pumps that keep the basement dry.

In order to bring the beloved gardens inside, the Flower Arranging Room was designed to accommodate the special needs of arranging the flowers that the Sterns placed throughout the home. Unique features include the multi-level sinks and the full length mirror to help see all sides of table centerpieces. Decorative features of the room include a series of wildflower watercolors by Louisiana naturalist Caroline Dormon.

As each room in the home is oriented to allow egress to a different garden space, the rooms at corners can be particularly interesting. The dining room bay window allows access to the Pan Garden on the North at the push of a button. The center portion of the bay can descend into the basement and if desired a screen can be brought up once the window is down. The buttons are accessed by a panel in the wall to the left of the window.

Originally constructed as a porch when the house was built in 1942 and enclosed in 1950, the Art Gallery was re-designed in the 1960’s by William and Geoffrey Platt as a venue to accommodate Mrs. Stern’s growing modern art collection. Among the artists represented are Jaacov Agam, Lillian Florsheim, Naum Gabo, Pablo Picasso, and Victor Vasarely. The Op and Kinetic works are most representative of the time when Mrs. Stern began collecting.

This commemorative chimney piece is made of pine with applied cast composition ornament and would have been painted when it was made circa 1800. It is now stripped and waxed to complement the pickled wood paneling in the rest of the room.

Made by Robert Wellford, the tablet in the frieze of this mantelpiece honors George Washington. The central tablet bears two seated female mourning figures leaning on a Neoclassical urn surmounted by an eagle set with weeping willows at each side. The frieze is flanked by applied reliefs of classical Muses. The urn is inscribed “R. Wellford / OB Dec 14 1799 Age 63 years / GW”

Ellen Shipman found this piece while traveling through the Carolinas. She had car trouble and stopped at a mechanic who, after discovering she designed gardens and houses, suggested she look in his barn to see if there anything of interest. She purchased the mantlepiece only due to its height thinking it would be proportional to the drawing room’s 14’ 6” ceiling. It was only after the piece was stripped of its paint that the wording was identifiable. The Sterns felt they were very lucky in this particular find as they were both avidly interested in American History.

The Upper Hall on the second floor is the only entirely interior main room of the house. In order to allow a feel for the outside there is a beautiful panoramic wallpaper, Les Vues de Lyon (1823) by Felix Sauvinet, France, and a skylight. Due to World War II blackouts, shortly after completion the skylight was covered and sixty light bulbs placed around the interior skylight to help light the hall.

Edgar’s Study is part of the five room master suite. Oak paneling of the French Regency period was adapted for this room by turning casement windows into display cabinets for a collection of pastille burners, nightlights, money banks and flat-back mantel decorations.

Scales are built into all five of the family bathrooms. You stand upon the cork in the floor and the workings move within the wall and connect to the face of the scale on the wall at eye level. Shown is Edgar Stern’s bathroom with faux marbleized walls and a Fornasetti magazine rack.

Designed with three Murphy beds suitable for napping, The Sleeping Porch was painted with stencil decoration from Ward and Rome, New York, by Mrs. Shipman’s employee, Euphane Mallison.

We are able to maintain the home the way in which Shipman designed it due to the wonderful archival holdings we have that contain furniture plans, photographs and letters. The most wonderful item however is a series of to scale watercolor maquettes.

The south gardens are called the Spanish Court designed by William Platt, 1964-1967, who based his design after the 14th century Generalife Gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. The garden walks on either side of the greensward are paved with French tiles accented by polished Mexican pebbles embedded on edge in patterns taken from Barcelona, Spain.

Inspired by monochromatic gardens visited by the Sterns on their travels in England, our Pan Garden on the North is designed with pink and purple blooms where our Yellow Garden to the South blooms in Mrs. Stern’s favorite color, yellow.

Planted with native plants of the Gulf South, the Wild Garden has three serpentine paths where you can walk beside wildflowers, camellias or irises depending on the season. Shipman worked with Caroline Dormon, a pioneer educator on the importance of native plants and conservation of land and natural resources, to supply the correct plants for this garden. Seen here is our current display of irises.

Explore more of Longue Vue’s interiors at their website.

Jean-Joseph de Saint-Germain, clock ornament, figure of a child with feather headdress. French, mid-18th century, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906.

Since ancient times, students of design have studied bits and pieces of antique sculpture and architecture and have considered how these fragments can inform our knowledge of the past and further contemporary design. For example, the Romans valued elements from ancient Greece; collectors during the Renaissance gathered parts of the Roman Empire; and in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, museums that were dedicated to collections of fragments were formed, notably the Sir John Soane Museum in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt, now known as the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Fragments have been especially on my mind with the opening of Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art at The Bard Graduate Center (on view through August 11th).

For myself, as a decorator, they offer clues of what a whole building or sculpture or decorative object might have looked like and how it was crafted. More importantly, by their incremental nature, they are abstract elements of design that can be interpolated into new creations. To borrow a term from today’s music, they can be “sampled” into a larger design.

The exhibition is based on the collection of Georges Hoentschel, Director of Maison Leys, a high-end French decorating firm which operated during the Belle Epoque period and catered to the newly moneyed bourgeois class.

In 1906, J. Pierpoint Morgan visited Hoentschel’s extensive display of fragments of decorative arts and architecture. Recognizing its significance, he purchased the collection outright. As president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he donated the group of more than 3,000 objects, leading to the creation of a wing dedicated to the decorative arts in 1910.

Devoted largely to the eighteenth century, these fragments epitomize the refinement accomplished in a golden age of the decorative arts. The majority were removed from permanent display in the 1950’s when the museum reconsidered its encyclopedic displays in favor of period rooms. Bard’s exhibit highlights the creator, Georges Hoentschel, and his collection, including a recreation of parts of his Parisian gallery and examples of furniture and ceramics he designed as well.

Here are few of the treasures from Hoentschel’s collection that are on display at Bard.

Furniture mount, French, 1785-90, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpoint Morgan, 1906

Interior of 58 Boulevard Flandrin, Paris, 1906. The Thomas J. Watson Library. Presented by J. Pierpoint Morgan.

Panel from the top of a mirror with a mask of Flora, French, ca. 1725, carved oak. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpoint Morgan, 1906

Window bolt (espagnolette), French, 1780–85, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

Crest of a mirror. French, 1715–30. Carved and gilded walnut. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906 

Eagle head ornament, French 1790-1810, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

Basket of flowers, French, 1765–75, carved and gilded walnut and oak. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

Lion’s paw furniture mount, French, late 17th–early 18th century, gilt bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906

A plate from The Decorator’s Portfolio (1885) shows the whimsy and somewhat illogical taste of the late 19th century, featuring everything from a Japanese fan to Medieval weaponry.

“Nice people have curtains,” was often mentioned in my first days of decorating at Parish-Hadley, followed by, “nice people do not have draperies”. Furthermore, the term “drapes” was deemed déclassé.  

At Parish-Hadley we were also required to trim curtains with a complement of tapes and fringes so that they would be properly weighted, and hence fall more beautifully, along with eliminating any rough edges. In short, the rule was, and remains in our sphere that, “No curtains should be delivered untrimmed.”

This advice from Parish-Hadley reflects the role of Sister Parish and Albert Hadley as decorators working at the end of the golden age of curtains in interior decoration. Their imparted wisdom resonates with me and predisposes my admiration for a new book by Gail Caskey Winkler, Capricious Fancy: Draping and Curtaining the Historic Interior, 1800-1930.

Well illustrated with images from antique sources, it is a visual delight and extremely informative. Her thesis is that curtains evolved through the technological advances made during the Industrial Revolution. Mass production allowed for a more affordable and wider range of fabrics, while an increasing number of print sources, especially those able to render images in color, disseminated the ever changing fashions in draping windows, beds, rooms, etc. She also writes that Paris, the traditional  epicenter of luxury goods, was the source or influence of almost every curtain design throughout this period.  

Today, at Jayne Design Studio, we usually make simpler curtain panels that offer little evidence of the grand designs that preceded ours. Only occasionally do we make elaborate pelmets, or valances, with swags and jabots.  The curtains we made at Drumlin Hall were based on a design from a book that, in fact, Winkler illustrated other plates from. These curtains are some of the handsomest we have ever conceived.

The drawing room curtains at Drumlin Hall are shown, right. Left, the source image from which these curtains were adapted. 

The stenciled window shade was also adapted for these windows by artist Lucretia Moroni’s studio, Fatto a Mano.

A more expansive view of the drawing room at Drumlin Hall

Our more typical curtain designs resemble these which were created for a Pennsylvania bedroom. However, be assured, we maintain, as much as taste and circumstance will bear, the rich tradition Capricious Fancy records and almost all of our curtains are trimmed.

Simple (but trimmed) curtains in the bedroom of a Pennsylvania house

The following is a link with further information on Gail’s great book from the University of Pennsylvania Press website. Bear in mind that the few plates shown below cannot fully convey the book’s beauty and I suggest you also use the link to buy this grand piece of scholarship now.

And, here is a selection of plates from the book.

Percier and Fontaine’s bed design for “Mme. M” published in Recueil de décorations intérieures (1801) was highly influential throughout the 19th century.

Le Mésangère’s diluted copy of Percier and Fontaine’s design, as published in Meubles et Objets de Goût (1804), made it a more accessible commodity.

An exuberant French Empire bed with an asymmetrical arrangement of curtains and giltwood elements as published by Hallavant and Osmont (circa 1810-1815).

An American design for “continued curtains“ after a French prototype from The Repository (September, 1815)

Designs from The Cabinet-Maker & Upholsterer’s Guide, 1826

Examples of geometric valances from The Upholsterer’s Pocket Collection of Fashionable Designs, c. 1835

A plate from Desire Guilmard’s Le Garde-Meuble ancien et moderne, 1850. Illustrating Winkler’s thesis about the dissemination of French prototypes, this design was copied in black and white and published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in October, 1851.

Two examples of elaborately draped fireplaces from the Album de la tenture (circa 1850) define mid-19th century French taste.

Clarisse Courdert, wife of Conde Nast, in a Fortuny Delphos gown published in Women as Decoration by Emily Burbank, 1917. 

Read more about the show from the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute website, and enjoy these further examples of Fortuny’s work from the show.

Designs for allegorical bronze and marble mantel clocks, the one on the left representing Music, and on the right, the Genius of Art.

 

A client who collects Americana has a Washington clock displayed in his dining room.