The Charles S. Robertson estate designed by Mott Schmidt c. 1938 in Lloyd Harbor. Robertson's wife Marie was an heir to the A&P Supermarket fortune. Click HERE to see the estate on google earth and HERE on bing. The estate is currently owned by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and functions as the Banbury Center.
Pictures from the Library of Congress.
8 comments:
now this is an impressive house even tho it is "new". great balance and very elegant.
but...............
next door - wassup with that. have you ever done a post on Shorelands and what's the building with the big tower?
security word def - "larier" - word perfectly describing a certain annoying comedian
Check out Schmidt's 'Deramore' c. 1933. He certainly was consistent.
http://www.oldlongisland.com/2009/04/deramore.html
Consistent he was. He kept designing basically the same country house, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, with slight variation in the details, over and over and over for that segment of the WASP crowd that likes everything to be safe and the same.
Not that they aren't lovely houses, they are, but, they constitute over half of his country house work. A friend once showed me a home movie from the thirties of Rabbit Hill, the Sleepy Hollow (another variation on this design), NY house by Schmidt where she grew up. Very lovely. It's lost now, and her children have no idea where. I wish I'd urged her to donate it to Columbia.
Here's yet another take on the design: http://www.mottschmidt.com/buildings/view/types/country-houses/c-douglas-dillon-country-house
FYI: The 'Putting a Face to an Estate' series will continue on the weekends until I run out of pictures.
that segment of the WASP crowd that likes everything to be safe and the same...
Mott got the Deramore commission because he had previously designed a house for the same people on E. 79th Street many years before.
That would be exactly my point. Schmidt designed elegant, well planned, nicely detailed houses, but they made no waves. Elegant and safe, and not too chic or showy.
A great example of Mott Schmidt's creativity is the Dillon house in Maine. A great work and really "out of the box" for this architect. Also, An Aethete's Lament covered another great work by Mott, the Alice Astor house in Rhinebeck, NY. Delano & Aldrich also show remarkable skill when you view Cloverly Manor (Vincent Astor house/Long Island) and the Morrow House at North Haven. This is a great blog and I enjoy The Down East Delettante and An Aesthete's Lament. Thank you.
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