Newport Villas: The Revival Styles 1885-1935 Review

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(More customer reviews)If you go to Newport, Rhode Island, you can find one of the most dramatic footpaths in the world. Look seaward along the three miles of Cliff Walk and you see the Atlantic Ocean and waves breaking on the rocks. Look landward and you see some of the greatest architectural whimsies of the Gilded Age, the vacation houses erected by the gentry when Newport was a fashionable spot for retreat. Not all the houses are there on Cliff Walk; some fancy ones are inland, and others don't exist any more. You can get an idea of all the finest ones in _Newport Villas: The Revival Styles, 1885 - 1935_ (Norton) by Michael C. Kathrens. The author is an expert in American residential architecture of those years, and having written _The Great Houses of New York_, he now looks at where the residents of those houses summered. This is a big book that is devoted mostly to photographs, typically black and white ones of many decades ago. Some thirty homes all have their own chapters, describing the original builder, the architect, the subsequent owners, and the house's fate. Each chapter has floor plans to go along with the photographs and the description of the interiors and exteriors. The houses were for rich people at play, so they combine playfulness with a historic conservatism. This book is a lovely and loving look at a specialized but extraordinary architectural outpouring.
Newport was the most fashionable of sites for an exodus of urban industrialists. Those who could afford to build rather than rent started building what were called "cottages", but this term must have been jocular, for a cottage might have seventy rooms. A season in Newport might cost such a family $100,000, and there was competitive entertaining just as the houses themselves were competitive architecture. The opulence was not to last. Life sped up and other places became more fashionable, and the great hostesses who had held magnificent domestic entertainments could not live forever. Some of the houses depicted here proved as ephemeral as the Gilded Age social whirl, closed up and simply forgotten, or damaged by vandals, or razed to take advantage of lower tax rates on undeveloped land. When a commercial developer threatened in 1962 to destroy The Elms, preservationists rebelled, and "The Battle of The Elms" reversed the trend toward destruction. Newport remains a showplace.
It is often strange to read how rich people behaved in this environment. James Van Alen eloped with an Astor girl, resulting in a happy but short-lived marriage. She died at age 28, and to console Van Alen, his father gave him a plot of land and instructions to build whatever sort of house he wanted. Wakehurst, a mock-Elizabethan manor, was the result. The magnificent Marble House was a fortieth birthday present for the wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt. The couple had two seasons in the cottage before they acrimoniously divorced in 1895. Miramar was a project of Mrs. George Widener to distract her from tragedy; she had been rescued from the _Titanic_, but her husband and son drowned. At Crossways, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish rebelled at the hours required to eat the typical eight-course meal of the time, and set a record with her meal that was served in less than thirty minutes: "Guests at that meal remembered having to hold the plate down with one hand while eating with the other in order to keep a footman from removing it."
The wonderful photographs here depict the mansions outside and inside. The rich people who built them were conservative and their architects harked back to Europe for inspiration. Frederick Vanderbilt's Rough Point is from the Cotswolds with Arts and Crafts elements. The Harold Brown Villa has the rough, untamed look of Scottish baronial. There are Tudor beams in The Waves. Parts of Marble House look as if they came from Versailles, and the pavilion of Villa Rosa came from Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon there. Only a few of the houses show American historical architecture, like the Colonial Revival style shown at Crossways. _Newport Villas_ is a tribute to all of these fine homes. Its photographs and detailed descriptions are a welcome documentation of a small but glittering part of American architectural and social history.


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