Pietre dure for an American palace: a dining table for Mar-A-Lago

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Rachel Layton Elwes

After Marjorie Merriweather Post (see p. 82, P1. D died in 1973, Topridge, her camp in the Adirondacks, was given to New York State; and Mar-A-Lago, her estate in Palm Beach, Florida (P1. I), was sold, with the proceeds reverting to the foundation that administers Hillwood. The next owner of Mar-A-Lago, Donald J. Trump, sold part of its contents at Christie's in New York City in 1995 and transformed the property into a spa hotel. (1) One object that was not included in the sale was the magnificent dining table with a top of Italian hard-stone mosaic, also known as pietre dure, that had served as the centerpiece of the elaborate revivalist decorative scheme devised for Mar-A-Lago by the Viennese designer and architect Joseph Urban in the 1920s. (2) Post later commented, "this table was probably the most important thing in the entire house [Mar-A-Lago]." (3) She stipulated in her will that it he moved to Hillwood after her death.

Like other extravagant early twentieth-century interiors that reflected the aspirations of wealthy Americans, Mar-A-Lago combined a melange of historical styles and trends, here loosely arranged around the overall architectural style known as Hispano-Moresque. Fortunately, many of the interiors with their painted and tiled schemes still survive, and there is copious source material that provides excellent descriptive sketches of the key rooms. (4)

Post was an inveterate hostess who required that her house serve as a backdrop for a constant stream of glamorous events, including extraordinary costume balls and lavish dinner parties. The first such event at Mar-A-Lago took place in March 1927 with the house only barely finished. Post and her then-husband Edward Francis Hutton held a fabulous dinner party in anticipation of the Everglades Costume Ball, an annual fixture in the Palm Beach social season. A great lover of costume dress, Post adorned herself (see Fig. 2) and her husband in clothes in the style of eighteenth-century France, her favorite historical period. She wore an "ensemble of green taffeta fashioned with a loose fitting bodice and bouffant skirt," and her husband were a matching court outfit. (5)

Urban was well equipped to contribute to Mar-A-Lago's eclectic scheme and Post's dramatic flair. He had immigrated to the United States in 1911 to design sets for the Boston Opera and was brought to New York City by Flo Ziegfeld (1869-1932) to create sets and productions for the Ziegfe]d Follies and the Metropolitan Opera. In Palm Beach he was hired to design the Bath and Tennis Club (built in 1926) as well as Mar-A-Lago. First and foremost a theater designer, however, Urban lacked the requisite skills for organizinga massive domestic project. His tendency to be impractical as well as profligate must have caused much frustration. Indeed, Marion Sims Wyeth (18891982), Post's architect for her previous Palm Beach property, Hogarcito (built in 1921), was recalled to Mar-A-Lago to balance Urban's shortcomings. In 1925 Wyeth wrote to Post outlining the additional costs Urban's ideas would bring to the construction. These included using Genoese stone costing thirty-five thousand dollars before any carving, rather than domestic artificial stone, and marble columns instead of artificial stone, which added approximately ten thousand dollars. Wyeth also noted the extensive use of wrought iron and terrazzo and marble floors in Urban's design, observing that he wanted Post to "be aware of what financial bearing these decisions will have on the total cost of the work." (6)

Urban modeled the dining room after a midseventeenth-century room in the Chigi Palace on the Piazza Celonna in Rome. (7) How he gained access to the palace remains a mystery, for it had been purchased by the Italian government in 1917 and was used by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) at the time Urban would have been studying the interior. Agostino Chigi (1634-1705) purchased the former Palazzo Aldobrandini in 1659 and in 1665 commissioned the Austrian artist Johann Paul Schor (1615-1674) to decorate the interior with frescoes. However, the paintings in the dining room at Mar-A-Lago were probably those purchased from Richard W. Lehne (d. 1944), a New York art dealer, whose invoice describes an "old Flemish painted room of 9 panels in landscape and pastoral decoration, by E. Van Paemel, dated 1780, from Castel Paw near Amsterdam." (8)

Fittingly the centerpiece of the room was to be a

The table was ordered through the New York interior design firm of Nicholas and Hughes, which was responsible for much of the work at Mar-A-Lago, including ordering and upholstering furniture and providing accoutrements for nearly every inch of the new property.

Special Italian Dining-room Table, 24 feet long by 45 inches, table includes 14 gilt legs and two disappearing legs... Altogether seating 24 people. The lower part of this table to be gilded, the top to be done to Mr Urban's direction ... $4,800. (9)

Nicholas and Hughes appear to have subcontracted the base of the table to a firm referred to as Lavezzo and Brother and the top to H. A. Cousins Incorporated of New York City, (10) which specialized in scagliola, a technique that uses colored plaster to imitate Florentine mosaic, and so-called art marble, another substitute for stone. Perhaps feeling the design and coloring could be more closely controlled using these techniques, it seems that Nicholas and Hughes and Post opted for what was essentially a trompe l'oeil top in art marble, rather than a true mosaic top. However, she complained bitterly about the table in a cable to Alice Nicholas in February 1927: "Finish extremely poor [,] portion wrong and it does not work at all. Extension part binds." (11) Several days later she reiterated in a second cable to Nicholas, "the painting of the table is not the only complaint. It is out of scale with the room and its extension arrangement is very inferior, so as I said it is a complete failure." (12) A few days later Nicholas and Hughes wrote to Cousins, questioning their bill for twenty-four hundred dollars. Cousins's reply suggests that the choice of art marble for the tabletop had not been theirs. The manager wrote: