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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. The team certainly seems to have succeeded in that aim. “It’s all very well living with this level of formal architecture, but you have to make it feel normal somehow.” “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. As the project spread itself over five years, Max had time to wait for exactly the right pieces to come along. 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. 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. “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.”

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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. The clients had originally tried introducing modern furniture, but had quickly realised they were fighting a losing battle. There are plenty of these spaces too, with three dining rooms and as many sitting rooms on the ground floor alone. 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.īoth 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. A higgledy-piggledy warren of service rooms in the basement has now been replaced by a generous kitchen and dining room, with the original cast iron range cleverly integrated into the wall that now also houses the new cooker. It is the relative informality of these floors that makes them feel like the most modern parts of the house. “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.” “We entirely rearranged and rebuilt these floors and elevated the architecture there,” explains Peter. 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. On the main floors, where the formal entertaining rooms and the main bedrooms live, the work mainly consisted of decoration and detailing. “What Peter and I succeeded in doing was preserving the architecture and its essence, but freshening the whole feel.” 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. The house’s structure had been untouched in the century since it was built, and as Max explains, “it’s an exquisite job. 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. “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.” Both interior and exterior are highly intricate it took 24 Italian stonemasons four years to complete the elaborate carvings that adorn its walls. Known as American Renaissance style, its architecture comprises a mixture of Romanesque, Renaissance and French neoclassical elements. 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. Perched on a hilltop by the sea in the Massachusetts countryside, this is a house unmistakably of its time.

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