May 2010 » book review

Blue Bloods in Summertime

Peabody & Stearns: Country Houses and

Seaside Cottages
by Annie Robinson
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2010
247 pages; 18 color and 250 b/w illustrations; $65
ISBN 978-0-393-73218-4

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Were all the major American architectural patrons in the Gilded Age related to each other by marriage? So you might conclude from Annie Robinson’s intense scrutiny of residential estates designed by Peabody & Stearns.

Robinson, an architectural historian and preservationist based in Maine, has spent more than 12 years tracking down the Boston firm’s underappreciated work. Between 1870 and 1917, she writes, the partnership and satellite offices in New York and St. Louis “secured over one thousand commissions.” The partners, Robert Swain Peabody and John Goddard Stearns, Jr., both came from comfortable families and trained at Harvard. After graduation, Peabody studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and he and Stearns also put in a few years as dues-paying draftsmen at London and Boston practices (the two men met while working for prolific fellow Harvardians, William Ware and Henry Van Brunt).

Harvard connections emboldened Peabody and Stearns early on; by 1870, they had set up shop near Faneuil Hall and started designing a polychrome stone agricultural college in suburban Boston. The client was, of course, Harvard. Wealthy Harvardians kept hiring Peabody & Stearns throughout their career, and the long-lived partnership seems to have been conflict-free. Peabody was in charge of coming up with thumbnail sketches for underlings to develop, and then “Stearns was responsible for the on-time and on-budget execution of Peabody’s designs,” Robinson writes.

Peabody seems to have been a lifelong dreamer: architecture requires “higher qualities like dignity, simplicity, breadth, harmony, or that nameless something which makes all men recognize genius in the artist,” he rhapsodized in an 1890 issue of Harvard Monthly. Stearns, meanwhile, once warned his partner that “men of money think you must be a great Architect if all their accounts are kept in good order and you are still a greater Architect if you can build for them within the estimates given them.” We don’t know much else about the partners, except that they never lived far apart and died within a week of each other at their respective summer homes on the Massachusetts seashore.

Without much biographical evidence to rely on, Robinson has focused instead on the built works and clients’ lives. She analyzes about 80 houses in a dozen states, plus a hotel, a casino, and a few churches, boathouses and bathhouses. She organized the book by region, and then chronologically within each geographical cluster. So there’s frustratingly little sense of how the firm marched through style phases. You have to flip between chapters to grasp how their 1870s Stick Style gave way to Shingle, Norman, Georgian, Mediterranean, Elizabethan and Tudor. For most structures, though, Robinson does describe precedents, massing, landscape layouts (often designed by the Olmsteds), outbuildings, floor plans, ornament, materials and current status.

We learn, for instance, that a Vanderbilt married to a Sloane department store heir often expanded their Shingle/Colonial Revival/Tudor hybrid house in Lenox, MA, which “topped out at ninety-four rooms in 1900.” It had two dozen bedrooms, white marble foundations even on the barn, a carved brownstone fireplace in the main hall, leather wallcoverings and quarter-sawn oak trim. The Olmsteds sculpted its 900 acres, and its 23 greenhouses nurtured nearly 1,000 roses and carnations a week. Now a B&B in family hands, it took up three episodes of Bob Vila’s “Home Again” show in 2004.

The media in Peabody & Stearns’ day covered their every move. Robinson has stocked the book with entertaining newspaper quotes, scoffing at a Colorado turret’s “squatty appearance” or praising a Newport façade for avoiding “excessive use of ornaments which becomes wearisome.” And so Robinson goes from house to house, explaining how a Biddle, Duke, Drexel, Morgan or Havemeyer retired young and spent earnings and inheritances on amenities like andirons that literally weighed a ton. She only occasionally profiles a middle-class family house, including a neat 33-ft. cube that Stearns’ sister Lizzie commissioned on Jamestown Island near Newport.

Robinson’s text can bog down in hard-to-visualize or excessive details: “the second level was comprised of six large chambers and the third had three chambers and several smaller rooms.” Compounding that flaw is the book’s lack of images. A handful of color plates at the front are appetizing rather than satisfying, and they are not cross-referenced in the text. Some houses, even those that still stand, are shown only in drawings or fuzzy black and white photos, or are puzzlingly not illustrated at all.

In a few cases, the lack of pictures is due to uncertainty. That is, Robinson found sketches in the Boston Public Library’s Peabody & Stearns collection that may or may not depict built work. She has not determined whether the architects realized their proposals for a hip-roof log boathouse on an Iowa lakefront, or some shingled summer cottages on the suburban Boston coastline with generous porches and planes of windows. It’s a tribute to Robinson’s dogged research that she included these unsolved mysteries of Peabody & Stearns, along with mansions that left long archival trails.  

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