The American Country House

by Clive Aslet

From the Vanderbilts' stupendous Biltmore and the Rockefellers' Kykuit to the Duponts' museum Winterthur and William Randolph Hearst's legendary San Simeon, American country houses evoke the grandeur of a bygone world of wealth and privilege. This magnificent book describes the great country houses built with American industrial fortunes from the end of the Civil War until 1940. Written by Clive Aslet, author of a widely acclaimed study of English country houses of this period, The American Country House draws on the rich and often amusing writings of contemporaries to evoke the lives the buildings served as well as the architectural shapes that they took. According to Aslet, the American country house was in part an attempt to import aristocratic ways from Europe, but it became far more than this, and took specifically American forms to serve specific American needs. More opulent than their European prototypes and technologically more advanced, American country houses exhibited a surprising variety of style and purpose. Aslet notes that many of these houses were inspired by a desire to escape the congested and disease-ridden cities. But life in the country was a daunting prospect for many owners, who therefore chose to establish themselves within striking distance of others of their kind―along the Hudson Valley, on the Philadelphia Main Line, in the Berkshires or the Adirondacks, on Long Island, in Lake Forest, or in the balmy climate of California or Florida. Describing the houses that were built in these areas, Aslet also portrays the rural pursuits followed by the farming (of a gentlemanly kind), hunting on horseback, tennis, golf, sailing, flying, and motor racing. This richly textured and wealthy lifestyle produced architecture of great distinction and provides Aslet with a canvas on which to draw an entertaining and original portrait of the creativity and the conspicuous consumption of American upper classes in their golden age.

Genres: Architecture, History

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 1990

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The “country house” is an archetypal British phenomenon, a result of the strict class system that prevailed until the Great War, but does it have a counterpart in the United States? Aslet, one of the principle editors of C0ountry Life, thinks so, but there are major differences. A very few of the estates in Britain were purpose-built, and all at once, like Blenheim and Chatsworth, but most were accretive, being developed over a period of generations by a titled family, when it had the money (and sometimes when it didn’t). Mansions -- palaces, almost -- like George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore were a self-conscious attempt to bring the English country house to the New World and it required the enormous wealth (usually acquired in a single lifetime) of America’s “Merchant Princes” (or “Robber Barons,” depending on how you saw them) of the late 19th century.

Aslet considers the various attempts at building “ancient” manors, mostly up and down the East Coast, from the Hudson Valley and the Adirondacks to Philadelphia and Delaware and Florida, but also including San Simeon in California. He includes numerous plans and drawings in addition to several hundred color plates, and because the building was always a single project, he has access to architects’ and contractors’ records. He also spends much time on the personalities behind the various approaches to design, of which there were many. There are also chapters on “behind the scenes” in the biggest houses, and their sporting and farming activities (some of the millionaires involved seem to have been trying to recapture a nonexistent idyllic past, now that they had the money), and the tendency to spend almost as much on sprawling gardens as on the house. And, of course, few stately homes in Britain had serious swimming pools. Moreover, because the First World War had a far different effect on the economy and society of the U.S. than it did in Britain, the building of palatial homes continued right up through the 1930s, though at a somewhat smaller scale.

This is a beautiful and well-written book and should be of interest to anyone who has Mark Girouard or Phyllida Barstow, and you don’t have to agree with all of Aslet’s conclusions (to which he sometimes seems predisposed by his own background) to learn quite a lot.