Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Furniture & Decorative Arts”
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Largely unheralded, this Kansas City masterwork of modernism deserves its place in the pantheon of great American houses. Fig. 1. View of the entrance hall from the main stair in a 1937 photograph by R. B. Churchill. Except as noted, the photographs and renderings illustrated are in the Kem Weber Archive, Architecture and …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | People don’t like hocus-pocus,” Richard Hampton Jenrette tells me. A fit eighty-two, the former lion of Wall Street seems a model of sanity in an insane world. Take his views on finance: “Wall Street has been high-jacked by speculators.” Or industry: “We are foolish to have outsourced our manufacturing.” Fig. 1. Edgewater, as …
By Tom Christopher left to right: Elizabeth Vose Frey, Carey L. Vose, Abbot W. “Bill” Vose, Marcia L. Vose. Vose Galleries of Boston is that rarest of survivors: now completing its 170th year in business and still under the direction of the founding family, the firm itself predates many of the paintings that it buys and sells. Yet it …
Down a paved road lined with double rows of Black Heart cherry trees stands Gunston Hall, the elegant yet practical residence built by the celebrated statesman and fourth-generation Virginian George Mason (1725-1792). Completed in 1759 after four years of construction, the estate’s Georgian façade and animated interiors were designed and executed by two highly skilled English indentured servants, architect William …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | Called the last of the Georgians by the architect Robert A. M. Stern, Mott B. Schmidt dared to be unfashionable, stubbornly designing traditional houses for town and country long after they were in favor.* Schmidt’s houses in the American Georgian manner usually relied on a restrained combination of red brick, dark shutters, and …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2011 | “I was a good student up through 6th grade but then my priorities became play, friends, and girls. Mother kept a beautiful home. Dad was prosperous in carving out his career which interested me not at all.” Card table, John and Thomas Seymour. Boston, c. 1794. Courtesy of the Brant Foundation, Inc. Sideboard, …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2011 | The brick exterior of the house appears virtually identical to others on its street and to much of the neighborhood of Wandsworth in southwest London. Built in the 1840s by a philanthropic charity as part of a subsidized housing project for uniformed workers (mostly from the nearby railway but also policemen and soldiers), …
It is rare when objects of a similar age but widely different origins arrive in an unfamiliar location and settle in happily together. It isperhaps even more unexpected to find an intercontinental mix of furnishings from mid-eighteenth-century Ireland, England, and the United States in Natchez, Mississippi. Although it has been ruled under five international flags, Natchez is most closely associated …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2010. Houston has been called a wholesale city—a great place to do business and buy big. It feels as though it is lounging flat out, like some huge deflated blimp. The very notion of commercial/residential zoning remained problematic until rather recently, and less than a generation ago smallish escort service motels sat cheek-by-jowl near great …
Monticello A lot has been happening recently at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia, making a visit more worth while than ever. For starters, based on extensive archaeological and documentary evidence, the upper chamber of the South Pavilion has been newly furnished to reflect its many purposes as a bed and sitting room when Jefferson brought his bride to Monticello …