The Collector was impressed. He in turn began to envision an entire house where his fabulous pieces could be displayed to advantage. He enlisted Jayne to redecorate and to help him plan an addition. "We used decoration to bridge his great collection and his family house," says Jayne. "He had all these wonderful things but was living in this, by most definitions, modest house." The trick was to create rooms that suggested, but did not slavishly reproduce, period interiors; this was a house to be lived in as well as admired. Thus, in the refurbished drawing room, the Philadelphia sofa, with its chaste, straight legs, rests on a Persian carpet-an anomaly in an eighteenth-century room-near an easy chair that would normally reside in a Colonial bedroom. A modern sofa is flanked by a generic Pembroke table.
Classical harmony is achieved through symmetry (matched Thomas Tuft chairs flanking a window), color (neutral walls, pink upholstery and draperies), and proportion (a Salem chest-on-chest instead of a Phildelphia case piece, which would be out of scale.) Everywhere are singular objects, including canvases by Copley and Bard and an intricately carved Chippendale chair. Jayne recalls how the collector, walking through the Metropolitan Museum's American wing with
curator Morrison Heckscher, said, "It makes me so happy to be here!"
Heckscher quipped, "you just like coming here because your furniture is
better."
 

A DELICATE GLOW suffuses the new stair hall, this page, designed by Richard Cameron. The Indian sculpture in the niche at left is a ceremonial lingam, representing the male creative force, from the Mathura period.

AT THE FOOT of the stairs, opposite page, beneath an early-19th-century gilt wood mirror, an 18th-century French clock called Tempo d'Amor serves as a material witness to the marriage of love and time.

 

 

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