Stanford White in Saint James, New York

Samuel G. White

Saint James is part of an area first settled by the English and the Dutch about 1650 and claimed in 1665 by Richard Smythe on the basis of a patent he had received from the early colonist and military engineer Lion Gardiner. Once variation of a local legend has it that by riding over his property on the back of a bull, Smythe obtained the satisfaction of the local Nesequake tribe for his claim, which became the villages of Smithtown, Saint James, and Stony Brook. The most picturesque land overlooked the Nissequogue, a meandering tidal river that leads to Long Island Sound, and Saint James Harbor (also called Stony Brook Harbor), an irregular body of water protected by hills formed during the last Ice Age and separated from the sound by a substantial sand bar.

By the late nineteenth century Saint James was still an agricultural community. With the extension of the Port Jefferson branch of the Long Island Railroad in 1872, it became considerably less remote from New York city, and, with a river, harbor, and beaches that were as attractive as any along Long Island Sound, Saint James eventually acquired a reputation as a minor coast-line retreat. It was never a grand social scene. Daily amusements for the leisure class must have been like the less glamorous moments of a Jane Austen novel, including outdoor sports for men and poetry for women. The development of the weekend, a phenomenon that arose out of the prosperity of the post-Civil War period, would have a significant impact on the life and landscape of Saint James.

The story of Stanford White in Saint James begins with Charles Follen McKim. The two met in the New York City office of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), where White succeeded McKim as Richardsons principal assistant in 1873. McKim had left the firm to set up his own practice, and his new offices at 57 Broadway were just down the hall from Gambrill and Richardson. During this period McKim and his wife Annie Bigelow were living in a small apartment building on Thirteenth Street. The flat next door was occupied by a similar pair of newlyweds, Prescott Hall Butler, an acquaintance of McKim's from Harvard, and his wife, the former Cornelia (Nellie) Smith, who was a descendant of Smithtown's original patentee. As Butler recorded in his diary, the two young couples had much in common, not the least of which was a high turnover in domestic help and the occasional need to do their own cooking in a pinch. Adjacency and compatibility led to lifelong friendship, multiple commissions, and a substantial network of contacts.

A significant turn in the parallel lives of Butler and McKim occurred in 1878. The Butlers began to build a small farmhouse they called Bytharbor [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], designed by McKim on a site that Nellie had admired overlooking Saint James Harbor. That same year Annie McKim abandoned her husband for reasons that have never been explained, and the distraught architect fled to Europe in the restorative company of Stanford White. The trip transformed their friendship into one of America's most famous architectural partnerships.

Not long after White's return from Europe in 1879 and the establishment of McKim, Mead and White, the Butlers began to enlarge Bytharbor. McKim brought White out to Saint James to meet the Butlers, and in 1882, during the course of one of these trips, White met Nellie's younger sister Bessie Springs Smith. On February 7, 1884, after a courtship that tested the patience of her notoriously impulsive suitor, Bessie was married to Stanford White at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City. The Reverend Joseph Bloomfield Wetherill, the husband of a third Smith sister, Kate, assisted at the ceremony

Within a year Bessie and Stanford White had rented a farmhouse [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED] in Saint James, across the road from the Buffers. The Whites eventually bought the property and in 1892 began to enlarge the house, which they called Box Hill. Stanford White's incarnation as the proprietor of a country house was as much a testament to Bessie's family ties as it was to his own determination to live better than his clients. To the extent that the fortunes of his office were inadequate to finance his ambitions, White relied on Bessie's substantial inheritance from her aura Cornelia Clinch Stewart, the widow of the department store magnate A.T. Stewart.

The Saint James projects illustrate most of the principal phases in McKim, Mead and White's artistic development as architects of country houses, beginning with their earliest work in the shingle style. That style derives its name from the manner in which walls and roofs were finished with wood shingles, enclosing the building with a uniform material, which was then manipulated through the use of patterns and the introduction of a limited number of other decorative elements to create surfaces of considerable richness. The buildings of the shingle style are characterized by strong roof shapes, bold contrasts, and an air of genial informality. In the 1880s the style was a popular and highly picturesque choice for new designs in summer resorts. McKim, Mead and White were among its masters, creating buildings that ranged from the Newport Casino (18791881) in Rhode Island to the Montauk Point Association cottages and clubhouse (18821883) on Long Island.

The Butler house illustrates many of the basic characteristics of the earliest examples of shingle style architecture. To begin with, the style was intentionally and expressively American, and the Yankee directness of Butler's house celebrates the vernacular tradition of the wood-framed buildings of eighteenth-century New England. The architecture of Buffer's house was developed through the organization of the facade into broad horizontal bands and spare decoration, with the minor eccentricities such as porches and projecting towers subordinated to the discipline of the massive gable roof. Because McKim designed Bytharbor before the formation of McKim, Mead and White, its textures and interiors [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED] do not achieve the level of richness that Stanford White was soon to introduce, and which set their collaborations apart from anything done previously.

Bytharbor's growing collection of outbuildings included a great windmill described in Scientific American on April 7, 1894, as the tallest in the world at the time. Constructed at the edge of the harbor almost a mile from the house, it was pictured in the magazine with its fifteen-story wood structure exposed. Buffer eventually had it clad in shingles, a choice that simplified the massing and emphasized the verticality of the tower. The resulting juxtaposition of natural wood shingles with the medieval complexity of the operating machinery suggested the painterly eye of Stanford White. Tragically the structure was destroyed by arson in the 1960s.

The windmill pumped water up to a major new building that Buffer was constructing on his estate, but one with an entirely different architecture. The new structure, which Buffer called a casino, was a combination of playhouse, guesthouse, and garconniere. It contained a swimming pool, a squash court, a large banqueting hall with a stage at one end, and bedrooms upstairs for children and guests. In contrast to the extreme modesty of Butler's original house, the casino reflected his growing prosperity and the importance of recreation in his family life at Saint James. The casino also illustrated many of the principal features of the emerging colonial revival style, including the restrained application of ornament, which replaced the primitive irregularity of the shingle style. The building was realized around a two-story porch whose repetitive elements, including columns, balusters, cornices, and window surrounds, were all drawn from a classical vocabulary. The traditional mantels and paneling inside the casino are characteristic of the academic tendencies that emerged in McKim, Mead and White's interiors after 1890.

At the same time White was expanding Butler's house and grounds, Box Hill was being transformed into a laboratory for architectural ideas. Stanford White began redecorating the old farmhouse as soon as he and Bessie began renting it, but by 1892 he embarked on a scheme for expanding the original clapboard structure. The first campaign added one matching gable to the west and surrounded the enlarged public rooms of the house with a continuous porch [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED]. White continued to enlarge the house, and by 1902 he had expanded the dining room and stair hall and added the third and fourth major gable, which gave Box Hill its distinctive saw-toothed profile [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED]. White developed a more refined set of exterior details than he had used on Buffers casino: fluted Doric columns, bracketed cornices, and an unusually broad frieze, which holds the composition together like a belt.

The exterior was a work in progress during most of Whites lifetime. At one point he proposed to replace the multigabled south facade with a monumental two-story porch supported on twenty-foot Corinthian columns. Bessie is credited with vetoing this unfortunate idea, which can only be ascribed to overexposure to clients who were far grander and infinitely richer than Stanford White even pretended to be. Other interventions were considerably more inspired: for example, after completion of the 1902 expansion, White covered the exterior with pebble dash, a thick coat of (here beach) pebbles pressed into wet stucco.

Box Hill is remarkable for its imaginative interior finishes. White developed the major public spaces around a tawny palette of yellow, brown, and gold, with accents of term cotta and lemon green. The walls of the entrance hall are finished with split bamboo while the walls and ceiling of the living room are covered with cane reeding. The two spaces are connected by elaborately carved doors which the firm had designed for J.P. Morgan's library in New York City, but which Morgan had rejected in favor of versions cast in bronze. The main stair is constructed of green glazed tile [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED], which White commissioned from Rafael Guastavino. Drawing from his own warehouse of decorative furnishings as well as his ability to carry off bold juxtapositions of unusual elements, White furnished these spaces with highly ornamental and gilded pieces salvaged from Italian palaces and Spanish baroque churches, plus Moorish tiles, Turkish lamps, and even a few American colonial antiques.

The dining room [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED] is realized in white and bathed in light, a striking contrast to the rest of the house and a remarkable deviation from the prevailing taste of the period. One entire wall consists of a fireplace finished with one thousand Delft tiles. The opposite wall is a bay window of leaded glass set over a continuous window seat, and the remaining two walls are covered in Lincrusta-Walton, a patented wall covering (here imitating the texture of leather), which the architect painted pure white.

In the gaiety of its furnishings, the generosity of its public rooms, and the expanse of its porches, Box Hill was a perfect house for summer parties. White was an exceptionally gregarious man, and his guest books are filled with the names and snapshots of friends, partners, business associates, clients, and lots of Smiths. Bessie preferred Saint James to the city and spent as much time as possible in the company of her relatives.

The development and appearance of Box Hill's seventy-eight acres reflected the same restless imagination, hospitality, and interest in recreation. The grounds immediately surrounding the porches were arranged as a series of formal gardens and parterres. Stanford White, who is generally credited with the design of America's first golf clubhouse, at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island in 1895, laid out a nine-hole golf course on his own rolling lawns. He also dotted the grounds with classical pavilions, filled the gardens with imported treasures such as Italian wellheads and late Roman sarcophagi, planted walls of Chinese box, and set out potted orange trees that were stored over the winter in an orangerie in the neo-grec style. The original farm buildings were expanded into a highly picturesque composition of staggered roofs and towers. The barns accommodated the usual complement of horses and carriages as well as White's growing passion for the automobile.

McKim, Mead and White's third Saint James project not only extended the firm's portfolio but also the chain of Smith ownership one more property to the east. In 1894 Bessie's sister Kate Wetherill, by then a widow, commissioned a house at the south end of Saint James Harbor. White's design for Head of the Harbor [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED] employed the decorative vocabulary of the colonial revival style to realize a highly unusual octagonal plan. An assured combination of rough glacial boulders, plain shingles, and elegant white painted classical details, the house sits at the top of a steep hill that falls away on all sides. A formal garden is set alongside the entrance court, and a croquet lawn is located at the bottom of the hill, more than one hundred steps below the house. Near the water's edge White created a highly picturesque teahouse with a thatched roof.

Octagonal houses were part of a Yankee tradition of eccentric practicality, and White may have been referring to this tradition when he designed Head of the Harbor for his allegedly parsimonious sister-in-law. It would be hard to think of another plan that worked as well with the site. With the help of oddly shaped closets, most of the rooms are largely rectangular. The principal spaces include the entry hall and the drawing room, with its tiled fireplace and tapestry covered walls. The exquisite stair details [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IIA OMITTED] recall McKim's early interest in the eighteenth-century architecture and decorative arts of Newport, with particular reference to his favorite piece of colonial cabinetwork, the pulpit in the Sabbatarian Meeting House (now part of the Newport Historical Society).

In 1895, while Head of the Harbor was under construction, Stanford White completed a more modest program about a quarter of a mile away for another sister-in-law, Ella, and her husband, Devereux Emmet. The Emmets owned Sherrewogue, the 1688 homestead of Adam Smith, on an inlet along the shore of Saint James Harbor. White rearranged the interior, remodeling the entry, library, dining room, and billiard room, and added a wing containing a living room and a gabled porch at the harbor end of the house [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VIII OMITTED]. All interior woodwork was painted white, and details such as the new library bookshelves were copied from Mount Vernon and similar houses of the colonial period. The new architecture is immensely respectful of the original. The proportions, cornice line, window type, and white painted shingles of the older house were duplicated in the extension, and the genteel air of the ensemble recalls the colonial architecture of northern Virginia.

White also designed new Georgian entry gates for Sherrewogue, consisting of pairs of square white piers surmounted by urns and connected by a short section of doweled fence. The project included the creation of a formal garden to complement the picturesque landscape and to complete the image of country life at its most welcoming and serene. In its combination of decorative restraint, unabashed reference to early American landmarks, and harmonious dialogue between landscape and architecture, Sherrewogue is characteristic of the mature work of Stanford White and his partners.

As a prominent figure in what remained a small community, White had other opportunities to design projects in the area. In 1889 he donated his design services for a new country church in Stony Brook Saint James Chapel (now All Souls Episcopal Church), a shingled box set under a steeply gabled roof, combines traditional iconography and vernacular building techniques with a few unusual touches [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED]. The ceiling of the nave is unfinished, while the ceiling of the chancel is painted deep blue with a thousand painted gold stars. In 1895 White designed a simple neoclassical schoolhouse, a gift to the Saint James community from Nellie Butler. White also designed stained-glass windows and memorials at Saint James Episcopal Church, including a small stele in high Attic style for his first son, Richard Grant White, who died in infancy in 1885. After White's death in June 1906, his office created a larger, matching stele to mark the grave of the architect of America's own golden age.

Just as it began, the story of Stanford White in Saint James ends with Charles Follen McKim. Prescott Hall Butler had died in 1901, but McKim stayed close to Bessie White and Nellie Butler. When his health began to fail in earnest, he moved out to a cottage in Saint James, where he died in 1909. At that time Stanford White's last designs, including New York houses for Payne Whitney and Percy R. Pyne, were just being completed; McKim's Pennsylvania Station was also well underway; and McKim, Mead and White was widely acknowledged to be the most famous architectural office in the world.

Today the harbor that first attracted Nellie Butler remains remarkably unspoiled, and McKim, Mead and White's Saint James legacy is substantially intact. Only the windmill and a few outbuildings have been lost, while the schoolhouse has been converted to residential use. Bytharbor, Head of the Harbor, and Sherrewogue remain in private hands. Box Hill, which Stanford White once predicted would be filled with children, became the home of his son Lawrence Grant White (1887-1956) and his eight children. It is one of two McKim, Mead and White houses still occupied by the family for which it was originally designed.

I am grateful to the following for their generous assistance: Madge Cooper, Peter White, the staff of the Smithtown Historical Society, Barbara van Liew, and Elizabeth White.

An exhibition entitled Stanford White on Long Island is on view at the Museums at Stony Brook, in Stony Brook, New York, from July 4 to November 1.

Any discussion of the architecture of McKim, Mead and white is inevitably based on Leland M. Roth's monograph, McKim, Mead and White, Architects (Harper and Row, New York, 1983); and his Architecture of McKim Mead and White, 1870-1920: A Building List (Garland, New York, 1978), a transcription of the firm's billing records housed at the New-York Historical Society in New York City. McKim, Mead and White's contributions to the shingle style are examined in Vincent J. Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style (1955; Yale University Press, New Haven, 1971). The career and personal life of Stanford White are covered in Charles C. Baldwin, Stanford White (1931; Da Capo Press, New York, 1971); Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded tile of Stanford White (Free Press, New York, 1989); and David Garrard Lowe, Stanford White's New York (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1992).

SAMUEL G. WHITE is an architect and a partner in Buttrick White and Burtis, a New York firm recognized for its work in historic renovation and adaptive reuse. The great-grandson of Stanford White, he is the author of The Houses of McKim, Mead & White, to be published next month by Rizzoli.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning