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

Magazine Antiques, July, 2000 by Mary Anne Hunting

In 1896 the Reverend Rose transformed the little-used kitchen on the first floor into a dining room (Pls. IX, X). Even before the work was completed, he reported, "Grace is much pleased. It is her favorite room." The inventory described it as "a study in red and blue" with "the compact and cosey appearance of the cabin of a yacht." The ceiling and walls were covered with cherry paneling carved with a profusion of ornament, including thirteen mottoes in German. The original kitchen fireplace remains, retaining its cast-iron cauldron and andirons, but it was refaced during the 1896 renovation with blue tiles purchased from Traitel Brothers, tile suppliers in New York City. [28] The orange-yellow faience vase on the mantel was made between 1882 and 1889 by Burmantofts pottery in Leeds, England, and was probably purchased by the Reverend Rose during one of his trips abroad in 1887 or 1907. [29] On the same side of the room are four double-door lockers decorated with exquisite leaded-glass panes, which contain a number of pieces of utilitarian blue-and-white ceramics, in conformance with the directions of the tastemaker Clarence Cook, who wrote in 1881: "The blue china I am recommending for daily use is the common variety which is now kept in stock as an article of ordinary commerce by certain houses in the China trade." [30] These wares could have been purchased on one of Rose's numerous shopping trips to Boston or New York City where, his diary records, he often frequented Wanamaker's. The cherry furniture Rose made for the room includes two built-in window seats with turned posts that run up to the ceiling to support a carved grill (see Pl. X). He also made a small cherry "shelf table" (at the right in Pl. X) and a large round table, now in storage. Each of the six cherry dining chairs, made in 1900, prominently displays a motto on the back--by Omar Kyayy[acute{a}]m, William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson (see Pl. VIII), or Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The room also contains four s tained-glass windows purchased in July 1896, "as per designs" from the ecclesiastical art workers J. and R. Lamb Studios of New York City. [31] In connection with the new dining room, the Reverend Rose drew "tentative plans without aid of an architect" for a new service wing and hired carpenters to erect the frame in June 1895 (see Fig. 4). It was designed to contain a new kitchen, pantry, back hall and staircase, a "Lamp Room" (see Pl. XI), bathroom, laundry, and storage room on the first floor. [32]

Rose worked on the new kitchen (Pl. XI) intermittently between 1896 and 1899. He installed green tiles that coordinated with the stained "Flemish Green" woodwork, and carved the paneling with mottoes referring to food, such as "Bread is better than the song of birds." The centerpiece of the room is the built-in oak dresser containing a pair of leaded-glass panes above mirrors ordered from the Lamb Studios in 1899. [33] The circle-and-square pattern of the leaded glass, clearly informed by modernist impulses' was in sharp contrast to the floral stained-glass transom window (no longer surviving) that matched the dining room windows installed just three years earlier.