The Historic Houses of Richard H. Jenrette, Part II: The Interiors and Furnishings

One individual who played an especially prominent role in the decoration and furnishing of the houses discussed in this article was Jenrette’s best friend and partner of forty-eight years, William L. Thompson. He researched the history of the properties and helped to locate original furnishings and portraits. Antiquing was also a favorite pastime for Jenrette and Thompson and a source for many of the objects used to furnish the homes.  For some of the later properties, Thompson even designed bed hangings, carpets, and window treatments.

Born in Brooklyn in 1904, Zenke had studied interior design at the Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design and began his career at B. Altman & Co.  After establishing himself as a designer, Zenke had moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1937, where he worked as chief decorator for the Morrison-Neese Furniture Company. In 1950, he opened Otto Zenke, Inc., in partnership with his brother Henry Zenke. The firm eventually expanded to eventually include offices in Palm Beach, Florida, and London, England.  When Jenrette moved to Europe for two years while he worked to establish DLJ’s continental presence, he rented a Belgian farmhouse near and hired Zenke to decorate and furnish it.

In 1968, Jenrette purchased Roper House, a ca. 1838 house on Charleston’s High Battery.  While not his first piece of Charleston real estate, it would be the house that he would restore and enjoy for the rest of his life.  He later wrote that it was his purchase of Roper House that enhanced his “appreciation of the value and importance of historic preservation,” which in turn led him to create Classical American Homes Preservation Trust in 1993.  In addition to its builders, Robert William Roper and his wife Martha Rutledge Laurens Roper, previous owners included members of the prominent Allston, Ravenel, and Siegling families, as well the modern art collector and businessman, Solomon R. Guggenheim.

As part of Jenrette’s purchase agreement of Roper House, the previous owner’s widowed mother was given a life tenancy of the second floor. Jenrette and Thompson occupied the third floor and added a roof-top deck that offered a prime location for sunset cocktails.  For the decoration of these third-floor spaces, Jenrette hired San Francisco designer Anthony Hail (1924-2006), whom he had met thought a Harvard Business School classmate.  Hail, whose design career spanned nearly fifty years, was named by Architectural Digest’s Mitchell Owens as one of “The 25 Most Influential Interior Designers of the 20th Century.”  In addition to Roper House, Hail also served as interior designer of the Mills House Hotel, the reconstruction of the iconic Charleston hotel led by Jenrette that opened in 1970.

Jenrette later wrote that Anthony Hail, “got me out of the rut of thinking that everything had to be late-eighteenth century English Georgian.” At Hail’s suggestion, Jenrette began acquiring French mantels, 18^th and 19^th century Scandinavian furniture, antique Russian chandeliers, and Chinese porcelain.

Surviving images of the third-floor spaces at Roper House during this era show rooms that were furnished with antique British mahogany furniture and Asian decorative arts, including a large japanned twelve-panel Coromandel screen which served as the focal point of Jenrette’s third floor sitting room.

While Roper served primarily as a weekend house, Jenrette also acquired a ca. 1840 Greek Revival townhouse in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1969 to serve as his principal residence. Jenrette only occupied the first floor but enjoyed the large windows and fourteen-foot ceilings. Anthony Hail was again hired as decorator. Extant invoices and correspondence from the designer in CAHPT’s archives suggest that the house was furnished with an eclectic variety of décor, including bamboo chairs, a pair of standing brass lamps, a painting by the 18^th century French painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and antique Chinese lacquer tables.

With his partner Richard Barker, Cultra spent three years restoring Teviotdale, his 18^th century Livingston family house in the Hudson River Valley. Cultra also gained recognition for his work on the inaugural Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse in 1973. In his 1983 New York Times obituary, the editor of Architectural Digest, Paige Rense, remarked that Cultra was “traditional, with great style,” and that he “knew antiques very well, but his color palette was very cheerful.”

The Cultra-Fairholme partnership lasted just three years, from 1971 to 1974. In addition to Jenrette, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a client.  They worked at her Peapack, New Jersey, equestrian retreat and her Manhattan apartment. The library that the pair decorated in Onassis’s Manhattan residence was photographed by Horst P. Horst and featured in the June 1973 issue of Vogue.  Following the dissolution of the partnership, Fairholme remained in New York City, opening her own firm with a client list that included Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon as well as Mr. and Mrs. John Hay “Jock” Whitney.  In 1986, Architectural Digest called Fairholme the “doyenne of English Country Style.”

Jenrette heeded the advice and directed his collecting energy toward American decorative arts,  focusing on classical New York furniture made between 1800 and 1840.

He later wrote that he was attracted to the furniture of this period by cabinetmakers including Duncan Phyfe, Charles-Honore Lannnuier, Michael Allison, and Joseph Meeks because it represented “an amalgam of English, French, and other European tastes” unlike earlier 18^th century American furniture that was largely copied from British examples.  To Jenrette, furniture of this period also represented “the final flowering of hand-carved furniture, before machine-made furniture took over as we moved into the Industrial Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century.”

In 1970, Jones collaborated with Berry Tracy on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 19^th Century period rooms as part of the museum’s landmark centennial exhibition, “Nineteenth Century America.” Jones subsequently assisted with the restoration of the public rooms of The White House during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations.  He also worked with Clement Conger on the creation of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, a project that transformed two floors of the State Department’ bland mid-20^th century Washington, D.C. office building into a venue where the Secretary of State could receive diplomats, dignitaries, and foreign heads of state in grand spaces furnished with 18^th and 19^th century American decorative arts and fine art.

Edward Vason Jones designed the carpet used for the Charlton Street double parlor, copying a motif from an early 19^th century Aubusson carpet Jenrette owned that was too fragile to use.  Window treatments were created by one of Jones’ frequent collaborators, designer David Richmond Byers III (1921-1998). Byers was an Atlanta decorator who had worked with Jones on both Washington, D.C., projects. Born in Baltimore, Byers had studied architecture at the University of Virginia and began his career at the Atlanta firm W.E. Browne Decorating Company in 1945. After starting his own design business, his projects included decorating the Georgia Governor’s Mansion as well as future projects for Jenrette at Edgewater, Roper House, and Ayr Mount.

In 1985, Blaylock received The Institute for Classical Architecture and Art’s Arthur Ross Award in the field of artisanship.  Other craftsmen from Jones’s team included carver Herbert Millard and plasterer David Flaharty.

In describing the restoration of 37 Charlton Street in the February 1982 issue of The Connoisseur, Charles Lockwood wrote that “Jenrette’s townhouse still evokes a feeling of a comfortable private home, not a series of showcase museum rooms.”  In a 1982 New York Times article, reporter John Duke praised the project and said that it represented “a high-water mark in meticulous private restoration.” Duke also described the restored double parlor at 37 Charlton Street as “a comforting blend of warmth and history.”

Following his conversion to Americana, Jenrette redecorated and refurnished Edgewater in a manner that better reflected its previous appearance under its19^th-century owners, Mr. and Mrs. Lowndes Brown and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Donaldson. Walls were re-painted, and antique European carpets were removed in favor of new wall-to-wall carpeting in classical motifs.  Using historic documents, including Robert Donaldson’s 1872 estate inventory, Jenrette and Thompson began to furnish the house with New York furniture with regional histories. After learning that Donaldson had displayed a set of Hudson River Portfolio aquatints at Edgewater, they assembled the full series of twenty images depicting scenes along the Hudson River printed between 1821 and 1825.

In 1973, Harrison Cultra alerted Jenrette to a Magazine Antiques article on artist George Cooke featuring his 1832 portrait of Robert Donaldson’s wife, Susan, in the Brooklyn Museum collection. When Jenrette visited the Brooklyn Museum to see the portrait that had previously hung at Edgewater, he discovered that three original pieces of Donaldson furniture commissioned from New York cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe in the 1820s, were also in the collection. Eager but unable to acquire these objects from the Brooklyn Museum, Jenrette was allowed to have them on long-term loan and display them at Edgewater, returning important original objects to the house.

As she had no heirs and was impressed with Jenrette’s passion for restoring her family’s ancestral property, Mrs. Allison bequeathed the collection to him.  Upon her death in 1976, these important objects returned to Edgewater nearly 100 years after they had left. The Magazine Antiques featured Edgewater on the cover of its June 1982 issue with images of the interior spaces re-furnished with Jenrette’s growing collection of American decorative arts, including many of those original Donaldson objects that he received from Mrs. Allison.

In 2010, designer Thomas Jayne included Edgewater’s Octagon Library, in his book, The Finest Rooms in America.  Jayne wrote that the architecture of the space was “enhanced with the historically informed decoration of Bill Thompson.” Thompson’s design for the “grandly scaled classical carpet,” manufactured by Scalamandre for that space, was patterned on the ceiling of a Roman building in Pompeii.

In their 1990 Magazine Antiques article on Roper House, Kenneth and Martha Severens called Roper’s impressive Double Parlor the “climax of the formal sequence of rooms” and described how the walls had been “marbleized in illusionistic panels” during Jenrette’s renovation. In addition to the faux marbling, the wooden floors were embellished with stenciling and painted marquetry patterns. Window treatments of blue silk with elaborate gold fringe designed by Byers framed the eleven-foot-tall triple-hung windows of the Double Parlor that provide sweeping views of Charleston’s harbor. The carpet was designed by Bill Thompson and copied from one in the Senate chamber of the Old State Capitol Building in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In 1987, Jenrette purchased the 1930 Delano & Aldrich designed George F. Baker house in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill neighborhood so he could live in closer proximity to his offices at the Equitable’s headquarters. He owned the townhouse for only two years before selling it and purchasing its next-door neighbor, 69 East 93^rd.  Also designed by Delano & Aldrich and built in 1929, the adjoining house had originally served as a garage and servant quarters for Baker’s Park Avenue mansion that was located across the courtyard. In the 1940s, George F. Baker Jr.’s widow, Edith Brevoort Kane Baker, had #69 renovated and transformed the upper floors into a pied-a-terre for her use in the city since her primary residence was a Long Island estate.  The carriage house was still owned by the Baker Family in 1989 when they sold it to Jenrette.

Jenrette and Thompson lived in #69 for seven years. The living spaces, atop a spacious garage that could hold five automobiles, were located on the third and fourth floors.  Its most impressive feature was the monumental portico on the east façade with massive Ionic columns and huge windows that flooded the house with light. Jenrette considered it to be, “one of the most handsome facades in Manhattan.”  The Drawing Room, with paired floor-to-ceiling bookcases flanking the fireplace, was furnished with Phyfe furniture as well as modern upholstered seating furniture.  Jenrette added an early 19^th century Adam-style mantel by Philadelphia carver and composition ornament maker Robert Wellford to serve as the focal point of the room. His fourth-floor master bedroom featured a delft-tiled fireplace surround flanked by built-in bookcases, comfortable seating furniture, and a Caribbean mahogany bed.

Jenrette’s Master Bedroom incorporated his favorite “Carolina blue” bed hangings on a Duncan Phyfe tall-post bed and another Bill Thompson-designed carpet. The fourth floor Guest Bedroom featured peach-colored walls and yellow bed hangings and window treatments that were “inspired by Nancy Lancaster’s decorating in England,” Jenrette noted.  After completing the project, he wrote that “doing the decorating myself this time also may have been more satisfying” and that he found Baker House his “favorite residence of the many residences I have had in New York.”

Jenrette purchased his final historic property, Millford, in 1992.  The three-hundred-acre Sumter County, South Carolina house, built in the 1840s by John Laurence Manning and his wife Susan Hampton Manning boasted a mansion that is considered to be the preeminent example of Greek Revival residential architecture in the United States.

Millford retained nearly all its original interior details, including window and door architraves that were directly copied from plates in Minard LaFever’s Beauties of Modern Architecture (1835). Original marble mantels from Philadelphia, silvered door hardware from New York City, and lighting sourced from a Charleston silversmith at the time of Millford’s construction remained in the house.  Several pieces of original furniture commissioned by the Mannings from Duncan Phyfe & Son of New York had also remained in the house, and additional pieces were found in storage in the attic.

Jenrette and Thompson also sought and acquired additional examples of original Millford furniture, Manning and Richardson family portraits, silver, ephemera, and other objects that were dispersed following the 1902 sale of the property by the heirs of John Laurence Manning. Millford was, as Jenrette recalled, “my dream house with big columns on the hill, down south, overlooking acres of green lawn and moss-draped live oak trees.”

The forthcoming final portion of this series, Part III, will examine Jenrette’s efforts to restore and reinterpret the landscape at each of these properties.