Living with antiques: Rosemary Lodge in Water Mill, New York

Magazine Antiques, July, 2000 by Mary Anne Hunting

During Thanksgiving of 1888 Rose began work on his daughter Helen's bedroom (Pl. XV), which was north of the Green Room. Painted in white and yellow the room still contains most of the original set of white-painted furniture made in 1889. The objects reflect Rose's knowledge of current decorating ideas in terms of both style and color, in 1886 House Painting and Decoration noted that "white woodwork with a highly-polished surface is gaining in public favor." [26] The furniture took "a great deal of work" to make, observed the Reverend Rose in his diary, and "the final coats were given by an expert" in Lowell. Interestingly, this is the only "expert" mentioned in the diary emphasizing Rose's emotional investment in his daughter's room, with which he was especially satisfied: "A special party came over from the old house," he wrote, and "Helen's room was voted a great success." The Mission style rocking chair visible on the right in Plate XV was added to the furnishings of the room in 1908, a closet was fitted up as a bathroom in 1915, and floral wallpaper was added in 1916.

Late in 1889 Rose began work on his own bedroom, the Red Room (Pl. XIV), which he described as "a man's room, everything very compact and serviceable." It was wallpapered in that year, but in 1901 he recovered the walls with red burlap and painted the ceiling red and the rafters white. The suite of cherry furniture he completed for the room in 1891 included a "novel" combination bureau-washstand with the motto from the Rose coat of arms ("Constant and True") above the mirror, a night table, another small table, a settee (now in the kitchen), and a bedstead carved with the motto "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John/Bless the bed that I lie on." Neither grand nor large, the size of Rose's room suggests he was a humble man; nonetheless it is hard to imagine how the large, heavy pieces of furniture he designed for it could have ever fitted comfortably in the room.

Rose originally intended a cherry fireplace surround for what became the Oak Room on the ground floor (Pl. VII), and he started work on it in 1886. But he apparently changed his mind and took the chimneypiece out and turned it into a sideboard in the dining room (see Pl. X). Between 1894 and 1895 he installed oak wainscoting in the Oak Room (hence its name), carved with mottoes from Shakespeare's As You Like It, such as "He may play the fool nowhere but in his own house." He extended the chimney, faced the fireplace with "pinkish [Roman] tiles from New York City," and made an oak mantel that had "a shelf high up supported by turned posts and carved bases." He also made a corner cupboard with leaded-glass doors, "a task long but rewarding," and widened the doorway into the kitchen. Originally, an eighteen-inch-high frieze along the top of the wall complemented terracotta-colored wallpaper, although neither survives Today. The Reverend Rose considered this room "probably the finest room in the house," but it c ontains the least sophisticated woodwork: the paneling of the ceiling does not align, and the proportions of the mantel are distorted, including the crude Ionic columns. Even the coats of arms of his and Grace's families that he worked into the mantel are awkward. [27] The inventory of about 1918 indicates that the room contained an ebony piano, with a stool Rose made in 1894, along with a table and three chairs, the most exceptional of which was a corner chair of 1889 (see Pl. IV).