An extraordinary Massachusetts house sympathetically decorated by Max Rollitt
Perched on a hilltop by the sea in the Massachusetts countryside, this is a house unmistakably of its time. Built for a soap magnate in 1912 to replace a humbler existing house on the site, its design suggests a solemn fairytale castle drawn from a child’s imagination, though it was in fact based on a 19th-century wing of a French chateau. Known as American Renaissance style, its architecture comprises a mixture of Romanesque, Renaissance and French neoclassical elements. Both interior and exterior are highly intricate; it took 24 Italian stonemasons four years to complete the elaborate carvings that adorn its walls. “To someone of an English sensibility,” says Max Rollitt, who was called in to decorate the house for its latest owners, “it’s really quite jarring.”
Max’s work on the project came as part of a full renovation, undertaken for its new owners by a team that also included the architect Peter Pennoyer. The house’s structure had been untouched in the century since it was built, and as Max explains, “it’s an exquisite job. Every detail is amazing, down to the pointing between the bricks, which is like sugar icing.” But, as is perhaps unsurprising in a house of such stateliness, it has become rather dusty. “What Peter and I succeeded in doing was preserving the architecture and its essence, but freshening the whole feel.”
On the main floors, where the formal entertaining rooms and the main bedrooms live, the work mainly consisted of decoration and detailing. The most significant architectural interventions came in the basement and top floor, areas which, having originally been the domain of servants, had not been made as liveable as the rest. “We entirely rearranged and rebuilt these floors and elevated the architecture there,” explains Peter. “In the basement, we gave the kitchen and related rooms more open connections, and upstairs, where the bedrooms had been imperfectly shaped, we completed the geometry, adding an angle to complete symmetry in one and adding a curved wall in another to make the form of the room whole.”
It is the relative informality of these floors that makes them feel like the most modern parts of the house. A higgledy-piggledy warren of service rooms in the basement has now been replaced by a generous kitchen and dining room, with the original cast iron range cleverly integrated into the wall that now also houses the new cooker. The scrubbed sycamore dining table is a favourite piece of Max’s, providing ‘something friendly in a house of such formality.” The top floor is now home to airy, whitewashed rooms for the children, decorated in a relaxed New England style.
Both Peter and Max are well known for their sensitivity to historic houses, but there was a certain difficulty involved in unifying such a disparate set of styles in the more formal rooms, where the centuries might seem to pass as you move between spaces. There are plenty of these spaces too, with three dining rooms and as many sitting rooms on the ground floor alone. The clients had originally tried introducing modern furniture, but had quickly realised they were fighting a losing battle. On the other hand, “we knew we didn’t want to go back to the full aspidistra effect of the Edwardian style of the house’s actual date, filled with cut velvets and Aesthetic movement furniture,” notes Max. “My point of reference was the original source of the architecture; French and English neoclassical for those rooms and more Renaissance styles for those rooms.”
While the innate heaviness of some of the rooms, like the drawing room and ‘winter room’ on the ground floor, cannot ultimately be resisted, Max’s lightness of touch with fabrics and colours has a welcome effect. The beauty of the individual pieces also draws you in; a red lacquer table in the midst of a dressing room papered in de Gournay chinoiserie is a particular highlight. As the project spread itself over five years, Max had time to wait for exactly the right pieces to come along. “With many of the things we found or made for the project, like the octagonal table in the downstairs dining area, or the ships in bottles on the top floor, the object was to make the house human,” Max explains. “It’s all very well living with this level of formal architecture, but you have to make it feel normal somehow.”
The team certainly seems to have succeeded in that aim. As Max reports, “the client says they use every single room, which is amazing for a house of that scale and a family of four.” What is more, they take pleasure in the history of the house–not only its intrinsic history but the elements Max has built into its interiors. “They are constantly finding new elements,” he says. “They absorb the history by osmosis and they discover things all the time.” In the end a house that was once designed to wow visitors with the first views of its remarkable architecture has become something much more: an ever-evolving interior that gives its occupants more pleasure the longer they live in it.
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Simon Upton1/24A heavily carved door opens into the entrance hall.
Simon Upton2/24The floor in the hall is entirely mosaic, an original feature. Max designed the round centre table especially for the space and had it made from antique timber. The Wing Armchair is from Max’s Bespoke range. Beyond the curtained doorway is the main dining room.
Simon Upton3/24The drawing room is “probably the most traditional” in its decoration, as Max notes. The oak panelling and knotwork ceiling, along with the heavily carved Renaissance fire surround, lend it a sense of grandeur. An antique Knole sofa takes centre stage, accompanied by a pair of late-18th century Spanish armchairs to the right. An Italian Renaissance cassone sits behind the sofa, while a matched pair of Kangxi vases stand in the alcoves over the fireplace.
Simon Upton4/24The Winter Room occupies one of the house's octagonal wings.
Simon Upton5/24The sofas in the Winter Room are Max’s ‘Crosby’ design. Curtains in a red gaufrage velvet adorn the windows, and velvet mohair squab cushions top a pair of English cane-seated ebonised stools, circa 1690.
Simon Upton6/24A William IV dining table is surrounded by bespoke-made chairs in the most formal of the dining rooms. The curtains are Pierre Frey Le Manach.
Simon Upton7/24In the Music Room, Max restored one of the client’s existing table and a set of chairs, adding purple silk squab cushions to complement the golden silk curtains.
Simon Upton8/24A glazed sliding door separates the Music Room from this sitting room, but the spaces are unified by the use of the same Claremont silk for the curtains. A set of fauteuils clad in Watts of Westminster (front) and Pierre Frey (back) fabrics surround a George III mahogany breakfast table.
Simon Upton9/24In the basement, the kitchen units are painted a deep green shade mixed especially by Max and the woodwork is Farrow and Ball's ‘India Yellow’. The white tiles were made to match the original glazed brickwork in the nearby cold room.
Simon Upton10/24Max made the marble-topped island from antique oak where possible, with the whole then coloured and polished to match the antique timber.
Simon Upton11/24Another octagonal room comes off the kitchen, with the woodwork painted in the same ‘India Yellow’ by Farrow & Ball.
Simon Upton12/24Max designed an octagonal table for the room, as well the chairs, which are based on a Lutyens original. The floor is laid with reclaimed French limestone.
Simon Upton13/24The landing on the first floor, with elegantly swagged curtains in Pierre Frey's ‘Dandy laine’ with a Samuel & Sons tassel fringe.
Simon Upton14/24In the master bedroom, a Regency mahogany day bed, circa 1810, is finished with suspended silk drapes. The late-18th century walnut fauteuils are upholstered in a bespoke-dyed antique linen.
Simon Upton15/24The master dressing room has walls papered in a de Gournay Chinoiserie design, which wraps around the doors to the closets. The ormolu candelabra is circa 1890.
Simon Upton16/24A Chinese export red lacquer tripod table stands in the centre of the dressing room, with a Max Rollitt Bespoke Bamboo Ottoman in the window.
Simon Upton17/24This bedroom boasts a Max Rollitt Bespoke Chamberlayne Bed that incorporates antique bed posts.
Simon Upton18/24The walls and floor of the master en-suite are clad in Carrara marble.
Simon Upton19/24The hallway of the top floor, where Max has hung ships in bottles on the wall.
Simon Upton20/24A children’s bedroom on the top floor, where the style shifts to be more typically ‘New England’.
Simon Upton21/24A Max Rollitt Bespoke Walwyn Sofa is accompanied by a New Howard Chair in the study.
Simon Upton22/24The landscape around the house was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also laid out Central Park in Manhattan.
Simon Upton23/24A colonnade runs along one side of the house.
Simon Upton24/24The house's imposing main entrance with its intricately carved stonework.
