Monday, October 1, 2012

When 'Farlands' Was For Sale

 A brochure advertising 'Farlands', the Guernsey Curran estate designed by Guy Lowell c. 1918 in Upper Brookville.  Curran was a banker and former president of the Metropolitan Club.  In 1911 an odd tangle of remarriages unfolded when Guernsey married Elise Cook Postley, ex-wife of his brother Ross Ambler Curran.  Postley was the sister of Sterling Postley, owner of 'Framewood' in Upper Brookville (which abutted 'Farlands').  Guernsey's brother Ross remarried Sterling Postley's ex-wife the previous year.  Curran died in 1950 and 'Farlands' was demolished sometime in the following decade.  A number of outbuildings survive including the playhouse seen HERE on bing.  Click HERE for more on 'Farlands' and HERE to see where the estate was on google earth.



Brochure courtesy of SPLIA.

7 comments:

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

Since were in the area - does anyone have insight into this property -

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=40.8512237&lon=-73.5430599&z=16&l=0&m=b&v=8&show=/16565960/Unknown-LIGC

The Down East Dilettante said...

HPHS, when I click your link, it takes me not to the Mill River address, but to a map of the West Bayside area of Portland, Maine, about as non-Gold Coast as it gets

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

Try this - http://binged.it/PGXrwn

The Bing view shows pre-alterations -Google Earth has updated imagery showing a major alteration changing the garden side into entrance with a out-of scale portico. Original view looks Georgian, perhaps a Delano & Aldrich design???

The Down East Dilettante said...

Oh my, you weren't kidding? What is it with all these people buying these houses and completely changing and re-orienting them, and hiring architects with no sense of scale to design vulgar alterations? Can't they find some nice vacant lot for their bad taste (and why on earth would anyone want to enter their house on the south, garden, side? There are some things that Dilettantes just don't understand.

The Down East Dilettante said...

The Curran brothers' marital swaps are one for the record books, btw. The only thing I can offer to top it would be the parents of friends, who swapped spouses with their neighbors, only to then have one of the husbands realize that he was really meant to be a woman, upon which he promptly got a sex change, and yet, somehow, they all lived happily ever after. Things are not always as simple as they appear behind the tidy facades of New Canaan...

Up here in Maine, there is a certain inbred coastal island, where the joke goes "if a husband and wife on (blank) Island, are divorced, are they still brother and sister after the divorce?

Anonymous said...

Saw original property prior to new drives and changes. Center hall axis is north / south and intact. Alterations are sensitive and sensible focusing upon the orderly southern facade and homeowners preserved the footprint. Will inquire about available documentation*.

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

Thanks Anonymous. The most important questions would be who built it and what architect, perhaps year built.