'
Aberfeldy', the
John Anderson estate designed by
Severance & Shumm c. 1909 in
Lattingtown. Anderson was chairman of the board of
Charles Pfizer & Co. and a director of the Union Dime & Savings Company.
Bradley Delehanty designed alterations c. 1930 for Anderson and along with Frederick Ayer II designed another set of alterations in 1938 for the next owner of the estate, Edward Lane Shea. Click
HERE for more on '
Aberfeldy' and click
HERE to see the estate on google earth and
HERE on bing. The house is currently for sale for $5,250,000, click
HERE to see the listing via Daniel Gale/Sotheby's.
Listing photos from Daniel Gale/Sotheby's.
'Aberfeldy', the John Anderson estate designed by Severance & Shumm c. 1909 in Lattingtown. Anderson was chairman of the board of Charles Pfizer & Co. and a director of the Union Dime & Savings Company. Bradley Delehanty designed alterations c. 1930 for Anderson and along with Frederick Ayer II designed another set of alterations in 1938 for the next owner of the estate, Edward Lane Shea. Click HERE for more on 'Aberfeldy' and click HERE to see the estate on google earth and HERE on bing. The house is currently for sale for $5,250,000, click HERE to see the listing via Daniel Gale/Sotheby's.
Listing photos from Daniel Gale/Sotheby's.
22 comments:
And yes, the listing does incorrectly cite Stanford White as the architect. If it were up to real estate brokers I am fairly certain any house built before 1920 would be credited to White.
The realtors are providing us with an invaluable service by bringing all these posthumous works by Stanford White to our attention. Without their help, we might have gone on thinking so many of these buildings were designed by other architects....
In other news, I am trying to find out if any of Bradley Delahanty's papers and/or office records survive, and the search engines are proving no help in this one. Anybody know anything?
Right you are Zach- Hyper enthusiastic real estate brokers and clueless owners seem to ascribe the architecture of every large house of whatever style and whatever pre 1930 vintage to Stanford White, probably the only architect many of them have ever heard of.
And what, pray tell, is a "Bridal Staircase"? Is the groom meant to go down one side and the bride the other? Leave it to a cornball broker to assume that every "feature" needs a cheesy catch phrase.
My pre- New Year's resolution is to try to curb my occasionally sharp tongue and sharp pen, so the current interiors of this poor, woefully degraded house will pass without comment. Let us hope that it finds a new, sympathetic owner.
Security word of the day: Ressembl: The current interiors of Aberfeldy ressembl... oops, I just remembered my resolution.
forget the resolution please... love your wit Magnus
I am often told when meeting someone with a house that has white columns and shingles that it is a Stanford White house.I always then ask, when was it built? If it's after 1906, I then tell them either the date is wrong or its not one of his houses since Stanford White died in 1906.It's very easy to find out if a house is designed by Stanford White, for most of his commissions are listed in many of the books about him.
The inside is a mess, as magnus says, but I'll bet the little girl liked her room. (Whether she was right to do so is a separate matter.)
P.S. What possesses people to build pools like that? Will the archeologists excavating the site in three thousand years conclude it was used to hold fresh fish?
P.P.S. What do we think: Did the people who did these renovations spend more, in real inflation-adjusted dollars, than the Tysons did on Hamilton House (excluding the gardens)?
I was going to follow Magnus's gentlemanly lead on the interiors, bit vomitous, although I've seen worse---at least there are no fake roccoco ceilings added, or any of those gawd awful fake 17th century limestone mantels everyone has been ripping out better mantels for, and after all taste is subjective (subjective as in 'subjective' to my scrutiny and disdain)...but then I got to the kitchen with the fake brick island...well....
As for the 'bridal staircase', much as I'd like to blame realtors for that nomenclature also, all those cutesy terms (christian doors, good morning staircase, etc) have their origins in the well intentioned garden club ladies of a hundred years ago, romanticizing the architecture of our ancestors (which at least they saved). However, 'Palladium' window, referring to any opening with the least hint of an arch, is a crime that the OED can totally lay at the realtor's feet.
Ancient, good and kind point about the daughter's room. And overwrought curtains can always be pulled down----a badly placed and designed pool (why oh why do people think everything has to be elaborate to look expensive?) is forever. And why does everyone think that swimming pools have to be ten feet from the living room doors? My childhood swimming lessons were in a pool, plain bordered, rectangular, with a little dolphin spitting water at one end, a good 150 feet from the house where it was located. I don't remember that any of us were inconvenienced by having to trek that far, and the pool looked lovely from the house.
The Hamilton House Ancient refers to is an estate here in Maine, sensitively renovated 100 years ago, which I posted about this morning.
And now, I'm taking my longwinded self away from the comments column and back to the article I've been avoiding writing all morning, which is due at the magazine in eight days.
good god, it is as narrow as the pix make it look. talk about misproportioned. they should have dug stanford white up. he would have made it wider and left off about a thousand of those silly dormers. we have a federal house near me that is also only one room wide and it just looks, well WRONG ! ! If they were going to blow this kind of money, why not produce a good looking output. this is what bugs me the most about these houses is that they tear down the nice ones and leave the disasters. maybe the developers can't stop laughing long enough to start the bulldozer.
on the other hand, the interior has such potential. they must have had the Family Circle staff decorator in. the first thing is throw the entire dining set (tablecloth included) into the nearby fireplace. i want a couch, tho from the library. looks like they have plenty. and is the pool with the leaves in it the one everyone is whining about. i hope not. i thinks its "charming" possibly even "quaint". i like the staircase.
security word def - "hicused" - a legal term meaning not having to show up for your DUI hearing because you are drunk.
SPLIA has the house as Summerhill"?
Take it for what its worth, per the Realtor - "Stanford White WAS the original designer of this home in 1906 as well a few others on Long Island and Connecticut. Upon his untimely death, the plans for this home were shelved until a new architectural firm found Stanford's original plans and proceeded forward. The home was built and completed in 1913 with credit going to the latter firm.
The home owners are avid historians and have researched it, have collected a tremendous file of literature to the history of this home. Only few people know the real origin of this home."
DED - Delehanty designed home next door to Estate of the Day -
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=40.8824769&lon=-73.6023796&z=18&l=0&m=b&v=8&show=/3760426/LIGC-Estate-of-George-Hepburn
Have you seen this for material on Delehanty? Scroll down to the "D's".
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/avery/da/collections.html
Here's a question for Old (Former) Long Islander or anyone else who might recognize this LIGC indoor pool house - http://www.fabernett.com/cgi-bin/fab455/44742.html?id=ipkdXypZ
Link is to a limited edition book on the work of construction firm EW Howell, notable builder of many Gold Coast mansions.
I find myself a bit cynical about the Stanford White connection, n'est-ce pas? People will sometimes go to any lengths in research to make the answers fit their thesis. Just sayin'
Half & Half, thanks so much for steering me toward the Columbia Data base. Duh. Stupid me for not thinking of it.
Oh my sweet baby Jesus; what a hot mess. White must have been heavily into his cups at the time it was purportedly designed –– even allowing for the optical distortion the sales photos convey, the proportions are all wrong and certainly not what one would expect from a White design.
As for the interior, well... from the unfortunate flooring in the foyer to the ominously Pepto-Bismol-themed dining room, tear it all out to the studs & then see if there are any good bones beneath worth salvaging.
I will no longer have any trouble picturing what someone means when they use the phrase riot of color...
Security word - tednes: that ineffable quality of being "Ted-like."
Not related to Aberfeldy, but has anyone seen this monstrous Petit Trianon-on-crack disaster:
http://search.danielgale.com/IDXDetail.aspx?mlsnum=2329338&city=Centre-Island&page=1&mlstableid=LIBORMLSDGALEOFFICERES&sp=y&segmentid=2682685&uid=65331&htmlfile=765474.html&origurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.danielgale.com
Wasn't the property where "Shoremond" once stood?
I meant to say wasn't this the property where Shoremond once stood?
HPHS,
It could be OHEKA's, but I'm not sure. OHEKA has an indoor pool under the entrance court, but at ground level with east lawn and with east facing windows. And, it's certainly big enough to fit the bill. Howell might have added it to the house if it were not original to the property. I saw some time ago, but could not find today, pictures of OHEKA's pool and it looked similar.
OFLI
Definitely NOT the Oheka pool, although I can't attach it to an estate either. Damn the bookseller for not captioning the photo.
So when is someone going to do the Long Island Playhouse story?
Kevin, not only is it a disaster, but it has a suitably shady past too, as I recall. I seem to remember rumors of ill-gotten gains, a dentist, a fire & subsequent abandonment of the project, which I believe was entirely of ego-propping reinforced concrete.
For those who love Centre Island, it's like a zit on the nose of the prom queen... so to speak.
;-)
Security word - finsaw: what the Scandinavian maid espied.
The pool is from the Harrison Williams estate, Oak Point that was located in Bayville. Go to Google books and look up " The Architecture of Delano & Aldrich by Peter Pennoyer & Anne Walker. On page 39 you can see the playhouse with the tennis house and the pool house to the right.The arched window is in the center with the two smaller windows on each side. I have seen the E.W. Howell book and have a copy of the image.Unfortunately the entire estate is no longer, being totally subdivided. Across the street is the Village Hall which occupies the former stables/garage and they have a nice collection of memorabilia and photos of the property.
Yes Kevin, That house is on the Shoremond estate. It is located west of the main house site. If you look at an aerial of the property you will see a walled garden with a fountain and a newer house above a terrace. One wing remained of the Shoremond house and in the 1980s, it was added on to, unearthing the fallen columns of the sound side portico and remains of the foundation. If you look at the modern pool to this house,it is on axis with the center of the original house. When the mansion was torn down, it was pushed over the edge of the cliff and in the 1980s, when I visited the site with a friend who lived on the property he showed me where at the cliffs bottom, many of the fragments of the house were being eroded away by the water. Also as the erosion was eating away at the cliff, a carved marble newel post from the main staircase was becoming exposed.
Also take a look at Zach's previous posts on Shoremond under Oyster Bay.
Ah, Stamford White as a catch all architect. It reminds me of the joke with art during WWII: "Van Gogh painted a total of 476 canvases," and, "481 of them are hanging in Switzerland—the rest are in German hands."
Oddly few realty agents will boast (with their marketing vagueness) of a house by Charles McKim or William Rutherford Mead, yet their skills were remarkable too.
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