Wednesday, December 8, 2010

'Beaupre' Interiors

The accompanying interiors (1941) to yesterday's post on 'Beaupre', the Thomas S. Tailer Jr. estate designed by Walker & Gillette c. 1932 in Lattingtown. Click HERE for more on 'Beaupre'.





Pictures from the Library of Congress.

4 comments:

John J Tackett said...

The interior does not dissapoint! What a lovely example of how gracious proportions hold there own, with additional decoration or not.

The Down East Dilettante said...

Okay, now I'm officially in love. Wonderfully restrained, yet imaginative, distilled down to the simplest elegance (is that staircase good, or what?), and knowingly decorated---notice the perfect absence of anything over the simple dining room fireplace---the curved walls, arched niches, and bolection molding around the fireplace are enough...

Turner Pack Rats said...

oh please DED - restrained?! i think they've fallen on hard times. that place is bare. sure, probably those comfy chairs and sofa in front of the fireplace would have bought you a real new car but the rest of that collection looks like a yard sale waiting to happen. i love the stairway in the round tower (which i'm also ga-ga about) but i think they could do better than that. the stuff under the stairs looks like an afterthought. perfect abscence is a little too perfect for me. if they weren't going to spend the money on furniture, they should have spent it buying all the land around the house and turning it into a wildlife sanctuary so the place wouldn't be surrounded by jds' and built-in vandals.
still, i do love the outside and wish the inside weren't so bland.

security word def: "mastsi" - what you say in Cancun when they ask you whats sticking out of the middle of your boat.

magnaverde said...

I'm with the Dilettante: I think the stripped-down, unemphatic look is entirely intentional, not an evidence of a budget stretched thin, although that may have been true, too, since, by 1932, even people who had survived the crash were hurting. I've been reading old House & Gardens and Vogue magazines of the period, and in our time of forced economies, the brave faces put up by society women making do with only two maids and a cook are quite inspiring. But I still think the Bare Look is a choice, not a necessity.

Here's how "Decorative Art"--the yearbook of the The Studio Magazine--sums up the very next year: "We are getting so near to ruling out all that is decorative that the alleged art which is left is becoming indistinguishable from mere utility...My belief is that in 1933, we touched bottom in the matter of decorative art. If we were to level everything down to the extreme points reached last year, and leave matters there, decorative art would cease to be."

At any rate, whoever the decorator was, he or she is clearly riffing on Eleanor McMillen's oval dining room of a few years before, right down to the niches' plaster figures by Wheeler Williams. I don't think those were cheap.