Living with antiques: the Vira Hladun-Goldmann house in New York City

Magazine Antiques, April, 2003 by Remi Spriggs

In New York City's Sutton Place neighborhood, a collector of Americana has transformed a neo-Georgian house into a series of period rooms. Vira Hladun-Goldmann has borrowed references from four prominent American historic sites: the Queen Anne Dining Room and Cecil Bedroom at the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware; the parlor at the Wilton House Museum in Richmond, Virginia; a visitor's orientation room in the Governor's Palace at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia; (1) and the Haverhill Room in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Over the past twenty-one years Hladun-Goldmann has been furnishing her house with eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American decorative arts and furniture. Today the house is a showcase for her extensive collection.

The neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan, which is today an elegant residential quarter, was a slum when gentrification began about 1920. The houses now run the gamut of architectural styles from colonial revival and neo-Georgian to English

Renaissance. Hladun-Goldmann's five-story house (Pl. I) was designed by Carl A. Vollmer and built in 1921 and 1922 for Henry H. Sprague. (2) The entrance hail is furnished in the Chippendale style, with furniture and objects of principally American origin (Pl. V). On the right-hand wall, a nineteenth-century Chinese export porcelain bowl of the rose medallion type rests on a mahogany side table made in New York City, 1760-1775. On the wall above is a finely carved English or American pier glass of about 1770. The mahogany banister and staircase are original to the house. The mural on the staircase wall is an imaginary view of the Sutton Place neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century that whimsically includes this twentieth-century house. (3) The Philadelphia double chairback settee at the left dates from the mid- eighteenth century and is simply carved but generously proportioned. Unusual furniture like this settee was generally custom-made for the patron. (4)

Visible at the end of the entrance hail is the dining room (Pl. VI). Here the owner has faithfully duplicated the Queen Anne Dining Room from the Winterthur Museum. In the original room, Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), the collector and creator of Winterthur, installed the paneling from a mid-eighteenth-century house in East Deny, New Hampshire. (5) Painted blue-green, the paneling with crown moldings in the Hladun-Goldmann dining room exactly follows that at Winterthur. (6)

In the center of the room stands a mid-eighteenth-century drop-leaf dining table. Its eight legs terminate in heavy pointed pad feet, which were popular in the New York-New Jersey region. Around the table are four mahogany armchairs that are replicas of those around the table in the Winterthur dining room. (7) Each is covered with resist-dyed cotton of blue-and-white pomegranates similar to mid-eighteenth-century damask designs. The blue-and-white scheme recurs in the English and Dutch tin-glazed earthenwares in the room. Placed on the table is a mid-eighteenth-century English tin-glazed earthenware punch bowl on a silver dish ring. The eighteenth-century brass chandelier is Austrian. Between the windows is a flattop New England high chest of drawers of about 1740 made of maple and pine with traces of blue paint. On top are five blue-and-white tin-glazed earthenware Delft tobacco jars with brass lids, made in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. To the left of the high chest stands a mid-eighteenth-ce ntury mahogany drop-leaf breakfast table from Boston that is a smaller version of the dining table. These breakfast tables required nearly as much labor to make as a dining table, thus limiting their numbers. (8) Today well-crafted examples, such as this one, are coveted for their rarity.

The dining room fireplace (see Pl. VII) is framed with a set of mid-eighteenth-century English or Dutch tin-glazed earthenware tiles painted with Dutch-inspired seascapes, fishing villages, ships at sea, and windmills. The brass and iron andirons, either American or English, date to the mid-eighteenth century. The brass teakettle on stand was likely imported from England in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

The view of the dining room in Plate VIII shows a mid-eighteenth-century walnut side table made in Boston, Side tables for serving food and drink were a new and specialized form in the early eighteenth century, and marble tops contributed to their usefulness in this role. Flanking a mid-eighteenth-century English tin-glazed earthenware dish and bowl is a pair of rococo mahogany knife boxes with silver fittings. A mahogany and gilded overmantel mirror, either American or English, hangs above the side table. The mirror dates from 1750 to 1775. A pair of brass candle sconces is attached on either side of the plate glass. To the left of the side table, a late eighteenth-century English mahogany wig stand holds a late eighteenth-century tin-glazed earthenware bottle and barber's bowl, also English.