The Architect of Desire by Suzannah Lessard

Author:Suzannah Lessard [Lessard, Suzannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83048-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Sometime in the late eighties, Archie, then in his mid-twenties and moving in New York society, met Stanford White. They became good friends, with Archie looking up to Stanford, who was ten years older. Stanford was invited to Rokeby and was soon friendly with all the young Chanlers. These lovable, wounded socialites with big personalities and a tendency to do as they pleased were perfect for him. He took them all under his wing.

Much was needed at Rokeby, but one of the most obvious needs was for someone to do something about the house itself. There was no central heating. In winter, water in glasses at bedsides would be frozen in the morning. The plumbing consisted of a privy just east of the house, albeit a large privy, with a mansard roof and two sections—one trimmed with pine for the servants, and one trimmed with walnut for the quality folk. Stanford had a basement blasted out underneath the dining room, and put in a furnace, and upstairs he put in bathrooms. He rectified mistakes in taste that the Astors had made, such as replacing wooden mantels of a simple, classical design with fancy Italianate ones of marble (Judge Smith made the same mistake). He tried to make Rokeby efficient by creating a curious confluence of two interfacing second-floor landings—one in the servants’ wing and one in the main house—which he connected by a door, so that servants would be able to have access to the family bedrooms without using the main staircase. He put in a number of other doors where they were needed, and changed many of the first-floor windows to French doors. He also combined two of four drawing rooms into one large one, and covered the walls with a silvery-green patterned silk and the floor with a green carpet to bring the lawn through the French doors and into the room, he said.

All eight of the surviving Chanlers came to accept Stanford as a fixture in their lives. Each of them was in frequent correspondence with him and was involved with him in one way or another, enjoying his willingness to arrange trips and theatre tickets and parties for them, to acquire desired objects and dispense advice and information and even, when necessary, advance cash and not complain when the reimbursement was slow. When the three girls decided that they would like a house in New York, it was Stanford who found them one they could afford. He went on to renovate and decorate it, taking into account the needs of each. He also continued to keep an eye on Rokeby, of which the three girls had become the sole proprietors through an arrangement made by their brothers. The Chanler boys assumed that their sisters, because of various defects (Alida’s crossed eye, a hip disease of Elizabeth’s, and Margaret’s supposed plainness), would never marry.

To the Chanlers it was a matter of the utmost seriousness that they distinguish themselves, to honor their parents and to solidify their identity as a family, though how exactly this was to be done was unclear.

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