Chapter 3: Country Houses

In 1923 Schmidt repeated the clapboard idiom for banker and former townhouse client Clarence Dillon. In this sprawling summer house in Dark Harbor, Maine, he masterfully assembled a series of cottage-like elements in an offset, interlocking block along the shore of the island (Figure 26). Since he was building in an established summer colony, near the clapboard, Colonial-Revival Isleboro Inn (Edmund Evans, 1917), Schmidt might have felt compelled to use the local vernacular. And, as he was building a rather large house, keeping to the modest New England cottage idiom was hardly easy. Yet the shingled Dillon house achieved the informality and seaside spirit of a summer cottage while fulfilling the needs of a large household. It is Schmidt's most successful rustic house and can be compared with the nearby Antoine Devereux house (1917) by Mellor, Meigs and Howe (Figure 27). The Philadelphia firm treated this clapboard house in a manner indebted to the English Arts & Crafts - much like one of their stone houses on the Main Line. Schmidt was far more faithful to the nuances of the Maine vernacular, if one discounts the odd stair tower on the north side.

Schmidt seemed to hit his stride in country house work by the mid 1920s. His first masterly design was the Serge Obolensky house, called Marienruh (Figure 28); executed for Vincent Astor's sister on his estate in Rhinebeck, New York. For the first time he turned directly to grand 18th century American country houses for inspiration, basing his design primarily on the Matthias Hammond House (1770) by William Buckland in Annapolis, and Montpelier (1751) (Figure 29) in Prince George County, Maryland. The plan of the Obolensky house was a pragmatic adaptation of the model whose "double pile" diagram was compromised for reasons of comfortable circulation and room placement. Schmidt was never adverse to distorting the symmetry within a block to accommodate a stair, powder room or pantry. Unlike his Beaux-Arts-trained predecessors, he placed convenience before formal issues. Still, the Obolensky house has the aura of a great colonial house. Its proportions recall those of the Hammond house, as do the pedimented facades of the center block and the dependencies on the garden side, which are rectangular rather than octagonal (which Schmidt did try in an earlier scheme). The Obolensky house is executed in random ashlar stone rather than brick, and thus acquires a different surface character with different demands in articulation. Schmidt's cornices and door surrounds are more robust than Buckland's, as they must be to complement the rougher surface of the stone. His soft pencil renderings capture the effects of light falling on these variegated surfaces (Figure 30).

Academic interest in Colonial and Federal architecture reached its highest levels during the 1920s and 1930s. A survey taken in 1925 by Architectural Record affirmed the popularity of the movement: 231 out of 571 houses published in their annual country house editions from 1923-25 were in some American Colonial idiom. After World War I the handful of great firms following the school of McKim, Mead and White were augmented by smaller firms and individual architects like Schmidt who took an even more active interest in American building traditions as inspiration for new work. Research tools for these architects included archaeological and historical studies such as Fiske Kimball's Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and the Early Republic of 1922.

During the 1930s Kimball, along with other noted architects such as William Lawrence Bottomley, John Mead Howells and Dwight James Baum, were instrumental in forming the Architects' Emergen­cy Committee which documented outstanding colonial houses. (Schmidt subscribed to this series and had an extensive collection of measured drawings of colonial houses in his office.) Architectural journals regularly ran articles with titles like "The Early Architecture of Pennsylvania;" which recorded and analyzed the styles of the various colonial regions. Another serialization which had a profound effect on the dissemination of American precedents was the popular White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs, published under the auspices of a group of lumber manufacturers from 1915 to 1940. (Like most architects of his generation, Schmidt would have been a subscriber.) These were joined by books of measured drawings and details, many of which could be found on the drafting tables of architects like Schmidt. The movement toward Colonial authenticity culminated in the Rockefeller-financed restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia, between the years of 1927 and 1935.

Mott Schmidt may well have been in attendance when Fiske Kimball gave his lectures on American Colonial domestic architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1920. In his country house work, the architect consistently used the most popular models appearing in these sources on early American architecture. Schmidt's first large houses were designed in the "New England Colonial" vein, recalling clapboard farmhouses published in the 1918-19 issues of the White Pine series. The H.H. Anderson and Mrs. F.C. Havemeyer (Figure 23) houses of 1923, both in Roslyn, Long Island, are simple essays in the white clapboard, dark shuttered saltbox type which had long since become part of the rural vernacular. They demonstrate Schmidt's cautious striving for an authentic colonial simplicity.

Most clients, however, wanted something a little more preten­tious than a frame farmhouse, something more classical. Two other early Schmidt houses, for A. K. Wampole in Guilford, Maryland (c. 1919), and Ormsby Mitchell in Rye, New York (c. 1920), experimented with a brick Georgian vocabulary (Figures 24 & 25) derived from the famous Virginia river plantations. The Mitchell house is also heavily influenced by the work of Charles Platt, especially his Maxwell Court in Rockville, Connecticut (1901-03), and The Moorings for Russell Alger in Detroit (1908-10). Both houses treat the center pediment and fenestration in the same way, but Platt's designs are a good deal more resolved in proportion and detail. With these early commissions, Schmidt established the paradigms which he would generally follow in his larger houses.

Although Mott Schmidt's most familiar works are no doubt his townhouses, the building type which increasingly sustained his practice during and after the 1930s was the country house. Between 1923 and 1970 Schmidt built over 50 large houses, mostly in the New York area. His work is prominent in such fashionable country enclaves as Far Hills, New Jersey; Greenwich, Connecticut; the northern reaches of Westchester County, New York; and on the shores of Long Island. Though only remnants of the "country" places of the Gatsby era remain today, these areas were once the bucolic leisure grounds of the New York society figures. Often a city patron would acquire a ten- to one-hundred-acre tract adjoining a country club, hunt club, or picturesque harbor. It would be carefully planted, groomed by one of the talented landscape architects of the eclectic school, and need only a smart Georgian house to provide the perfect setting for country life in the English mode; Mott Schmidt was one New York architect who could design such a house.

Schmidt helped to transform the American country house type from the grandiose and ostentatious stately homes associated with Newport or Long Island during the Gilded Age into a smaller and more comfortable domicile. Rich Americans of the post-war years wanted to live more simply than their parents, and seemed to have less need for the opulent trappings of the robber baron generation. In contrast to the sprawling, additive quality of picturesque houses of the 1880s and 1890s, or the grand symmetries and vast enfilades of Beaux Arts houses from the years before World War I, the new country houses were more compact and densely planned. As a formal type, they were apt to comprise sets of gabled boxes flanked by one or two service wings or porches. This greater simplicity and efficiency was realized in the Spanish Colonial style on the West Coast, English Cottage style in Philadelphia, and Dutch Colonial near New York, as well as in the streamlined Georgian houses which Schmidt favored. Changes in room use and plan arrangement included the introduction of garages, modern kitchens, streamlined service quarters, the powder room, and the consolidation of various drawing rooms into a single living room and library. Models could be found in compendiums like Architectural Forum's country house issue of 1928, which contains not only plans and technical data, but construction costs. With a scarcity of domestic servants and a steep increase in the cost of building a home (construction costs doubled between 1914 and 1920), Americans of means were more or less forced to accept smaller and more efficient country houses. Mott Schmidt, who had developed compact service wings for his townhouses, was well prepared to design analogous accom­modations in the country.

Architectural journalists during the 1920s remarked on these typological changes in the country house and praised the increased refinement of taste in clients, especially their desire for a degree of restraint. As G. H. Edgell noted, "Romanticism in architecture began to disappear, or rather ... came to be associated with our own Colonial style. The result was a purification of the work and an in­crease of simplicity and chastity in American taste." At the same time, a polarization occurred in the arts in the United States between this chastening in taste among the more conservative population and those advocating Modernism. The gentry tended to be of the former group. They wanted to preserve their legacy (in the face of massive southern and eastern European immigration) and hired architects to design classical or medieval houses which reminded them of their Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Houses such as Delano's Oak Spring (1940) in Upperville, Virginia, and Schmidt's Douglas Dillon house in Far Hills (1936) were meant to evoke the modest and steadfast spirit of Colonial America, rather than the grandeur of Europe or the unknown territories of Modernism (Figure 22). No longer was "free imitation" the watchword among eclectic architects. The search for cultural authenticity caused architects and patrons to turn with ever-greater academic interest toward their own past.

Schmidt's country houses explore the same themes and demonstrate the same strengths as his urban buildings. In them we find a characteristic fascination with elements selected from American and English Georgian houses, and a rigorous theme and variations process in which the model is adapted, restudied and refined. In the transformation of eighteenth-century manor house plans, Schmidt was required to make room for live-in servants, cars, household machines and modern mechanical systems, often within a very small and rigorously proportioned envelope. Schmidt's plans worked flawlessly from both owners' and servants' point of view, making the daily routines of country life function smoothly in a graceful environment. As Arthur Holden wrote of the problems in planning a country house in 1930: "No house is well-planned unless the unavoidable daily tasks may be carried out in it with the least possible irritation and monotony. But the well-planned house should be more than a tool to make life easy. It should stimulate those human faculties which make for cultural and racial progress. Thus, we might say in a few words that the ideal home is one where the vexations that make the human spirit mean and ugly are reduced to a minimum, and those influences which make the human spirit large and beautiful are increased." As Schmidt's clients would affirm, his houses epitomized this ideal.

Several of Schmidt's most distinguished country estates were designed in the years around the Great Crash. Rabbit Hill, his William S. Lambie house (1929) in Scarborough, New York, initiated a series of excellent variations on a theme. The Bernard Peyton house (1931) in Princeton, New Jersey, (Figure 34) and Richard W. Woolworth house (1934) in Salem Center, New York, were inspired by English Georgian models, notably Honington Hall in Warwickshire. By cleverly adapting the hipped-roof H-plan, Schmidt was able to pro­vide distinctly different entry and garden facades. Schmidt's house for Clarence's son, C. Douglas Dillon, Dunwalke Farm (1936) in Far Hills, New Jersey (Figure 35), explores themes begun at Pook's Hill. This exquisitely formal brick Georgian is one of Schmidt's finest country houses. Here he seemed to find the formula for a minimum of articulation which produced maximum effect. The only flourishes in an otherwise rigid grid of windows are the two classical door sur­rounds. As evidence of Schmidt's maturity, this series of houses is analogous to the confident, crisp and minimalist townhouses he designed during the twenties.

Though Depression brought Schmidt a few commissions for public and commercial buildings, including the Mount Kisco Town Hall and Post Office (1932-33) (Figure 36) and the Elizabeth Arden stores at 669 Fifth Avenue and Connecticut Avenue in Washington, residential commissions continued to be his mainstay. As the lean decade wore on Schmidt designed more modest and compact houses, but still utilized one of the three basic plan types he favored: the three-part block, the five-part block with dependencies, and the articulated block or H-plan. The clapboard Thomas H. Mclnnerney house in Greenwich (1937), and the brick Jeremiah Clarke house on Long Island (1933) (Figure 37) demonstrate his talents as a superbly efficient planner. These houses were generally simple gabled boxes with small wings, forcing the architect to squeeze both formal and service rooms, with their accompanying circulation systems and stairs, into the main block. The plan of the Clarke house (Figure 38) shows how deftly he handled this problem, accommodating both oval and circular stairs while still providing spacious entertainment rooms. Outside, the building looks a bit like a miniature of Pook's Hill or the Douglas Dillon house.

In 1926 the architect took advantage of his new-found prosperity to build a substantial country house for himself in Bedford, Westchester County, New York (Figure 31). Bearing the whimsical name Pook's Hill, it won a national award for distin­guished design of a brick residence in a competition sponsored by The Architectural Forum. Like many architects, Schmidt used his own house as a laboratory, testing solutions for later works. Again, the architect based his design on the eighteenth-century block with dependencies. Also known as the Maryland 5-part type, Schmidt's flanking wings were more prominent-the entire right wing was given over to the living room. The stair was removed from the entry hall and assigned its own room-a Showcase for a beautiful, intricately carved balustrade. In later houses he was to adopt this solution almost exclusively, generally utilizing the floating curved staircases which had become his trademark in his townhouses. Initially, he built the staircases out of wood stringers, much as they had been constructed in the eighteenth-century. Later, in keeping with new technologies, he experimented with concrete construc­tion, which was concealed with woodwork. This offered greater freedom in design, and allowed him to make the stringers as light and graceful as possible.

The typically understated exterior of Pook's Hill is carried almost to a fault-there is very little ornament to relieve the long brick facades. The massing is somewhat ungainly, but this is offset by deft sitting and well planned gardens. Following the English tradition of country house design, the mansion is revealed in stages rather than all at first glance. It is approached through a spectacular allee of trees which leads to a garden gazebo. Nearby are a service court and stables, and off to the right a grassy plateau lines up with the house. The grounds also include an orchard and a picturesque garden in the rear where the dense planting gives a sense of enclosure in con­trast with the openness of the formal front

Though Pook's Hill derives from an eighteenth-century model, more direct precedents are to be found in the work of Charles Platt, William Adams Delano and especially John Russell Pope, who designed the first pared-down Georgian houses in the years before and after the war. From Platt, Schmidt learned the integration of house and garden elements, and the careful balancing of focal points with neutral areas of facade. Pope, a master of classical proportion and architectural understatement, provided the paradigm for "stripped" Georgian houses (Figure 32). Schmidt also studied Pope's plans to good effect, especially the five-part Thomas Frothingham house in Far Hills, New Jersey, built just after the war. Delano set the standard for Georgian brick and stone detailing, and further abstracted the style in a number of his houses-- particularly the well-­published James A. Burden estate (Figure 33), Woodside, of 1916, in Syosset, New York. Thus, Schmidt followed a continuous set of precedents in his work, not only from early American houses but from modern ones.