(Darien, CT) Mark P. Finlay Architects, AIA is a full service architectural firm made up of architects, an in-house interior design t...

The Bishops Palace in Galveston,Tx

A blog only about Old World decor, Victorian interior design style, traditional, and Gothic interior style decor. Vintage decor like sconce lights, crystal chandeliers, big fireplace mantels, stained glass windows, thick ornate frames, the occasional antique, vintage woodwork, and Victorian wallpaper all create the striking and dramatic wow factor I want my guests to feel.

One of the city's oldest structures, it's also one of its most expensive

Hello everyone, I hope you are all enjoying your weekend. I think I mentioned that we were giving our downstair bath a bit of a makeover. So, I have some photos of it today. It srarted with painting the pine floor boards white- which made the creamy white wainscotting look more yellow, so we decided to paint the wainscotting white to freshen it up. Then the wallpaper that was on above it now looked grungy so off it came and a nice grey mistint went on . I think you probably all know how one change seems to lead to several more! We took out the small pedestal sink that was in here to replace it with this yardsale cabinet that I love. We got a new dropin sink that my husband installed himself with the new taps. Some lace & linens to make it pretty. The old cupboard was given to me a few years ago and we took off the old doors and put on these doors with chicken wire-I say we but Andrew did that too! It is great for storing quilts and linens.We also put the feet on it and the little trim at the bottom.. details I changed the curtains to crochet lace valences on the top and white semi sheer on the bottom.The garden statue is waiting until spring to go back to the garden. This doll house from a thrift store in Maine has been a well loved treasure for our little granddaughters. More details. I love the mirror that we bought a few years ago at Cool Breeze- a garden centre. I would like to replace the lights over the sink but waiting until I find the right ones I still have a few little touches to do but mostly it is finished. There is also a glass shower stall on the other side that I didn't photograph. So,it is definitely fresh and clean and we are happy with the new look even if it did involve more then we planned orginally .Anyway, it didn't stop us from giving our small upstair guest bath a new look too-but that is another story! I am joining BNOTP for Metamorphsis Monday. Thank you for your visit, Carolyn

Murphy & Co. Design was commissioned for the design of this stunning French provincial home nestled on a 19-acre property in South Dakota.

A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR: If you're free after work on Tuesday, September 16th, and are so inclined, you can watch me accept a Preservation Award from the American Friends of the Georgian Group at a swell cocktail reception on the roof of the Central Park Armory (64th and Fifth). The venue has views of the park and the zoo most of us never see, and if you're worried about not knowing anybody, well, so am I, but I'm going anyway. A description's on the link below. If you want to attend, email me at [email protected] so I can put you on the list. The ticket costs $45 and you can pay at the door. http://www.americangeorgians.org/calendar.htm NOW, BACK TO BIG OLD HOUSES: This is Stan Hywet Hall, the Akron, OH manse of tire mogul Frank A. Seiberling (1859-1955), a magnificent anachronism from the moment it was built. Last week, we walked around (and around, and around) outside. This week, we're going indoors. Curator Julie Leone is my guide on a challenging tour. How do I document, in my usual exhaustive manner, a 65,000 square foot house and not lose my readers somewhere between the infirmary and the cook's pantry? Answer: by leaving a lot out. Here's the Great Hall at Stan Hywet, photographed in 1916, a year after the house was finished. When planning started in 1912, houses this big still fit into the context of an established world. By the time this one was finished, the First World War, though still ongoing, had already demolished that world. Stan Hywet's site, adjacent to downtown Akron, is hardly that of a country retreat or a villa in some fashionable resort. The site was chosen for convenience to work. Stan Hywet was a full-time family home on a 3000-acre edge-of-town lot. Seiberling, a co-founder with his brother George (1869-1945) of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, was immensely rich. Despite spectacular ups and downs in his career, he managed quite well to live up to this house. The view below shows multiple generations of the Seiberling clan gathered at Christmas to watch one of Grandpa Seiberling's farm horses drag a Yule Log into the Great Hall at Stan Hywet. In 1937, Frank Seiberling (on the right) and his wife Gertrude celebrated their 50th anniversary at Stan Hywet. Seen with brother Charles on the West Porch, they are the apotheosis of period Midwestern American pomp, combining era-specific style and grandeur with "can-do" American achievement. Today, the orientals and the bear skin rug are gone, the furniture has been pushed against the walls, and changing exhibits occupy center stage in the Great Hall. At the time of my visit a scale model of the RMS Lusitania made from 194,000 toothpicks had been tied, tenuously I thought, into a narrative of Seiberling family foreign travel. The arched door in the image below leads to the front stoop. The steps to the left of it lead to the main stair. We'll take a peek at the powder room, then head down the south corridor. You can keep track of our tour with floor plans at the end of this post. I am particularly fond of high class old houses with phone rooms. Immediately south of the Great Hall is a library that overlooks the lawn terrace we explored last week. Things to note: sumptuous overstuffed furniture, fringed lampshades, and a "secret" panel that leads to another which opens by the fireplace in the Great Hall. There's a small reception room across from the library, but it's so full of display stuff I decided to skip it. Instead, we'll proceed to the conservatory, or solarium as they call it, which faces the driveway through a curved wall of windows. Given the running water and the stone floor, I assume it was once a miniature emerald forest. The glory of Stan Hywet, more than the Great Hall, is its 2700 square foot drawing room, or music room as they call it. This is a good place to talk about the Panic of 1920, a financial crisis with which most people today are unfamiliar. The sudden end of wartime inflation brought about an equally sudden deflation in the American economy. The federal government handled the situation poorly. Unemployment jumped from 3% to 10% and more than 100,000 American businesses declared bankruptcy. Assuming wartime government contracts would continue, or peacetime demands for tires and consumer goods would replace them rapidly, Seiberling committed Goodyear to large scale forward contracts for rubber, etc. at inflated prices. Instead, the economy tanked and his company went from a $51 million profit in 1920 to a $5 million loss by mid-1921. Goodyear's board of directors peremptorily voted him and 26,000 company employees out of their jobs, then turned to Wall Street investment banker Clarence Dillon of Dillon, personal Read & Co. to rescue the company from bankruptcy. Making the situation worse, Seiberling had propped Godyear up with his own money during the countdown to disaster, and now all that money was lost. At the end of May, 1921, Frank Seiberling was 62 years old, unemployed, broke, and the owner of this extremely high maintenance house. Amazingly, 6 months later he managed to raise enough capital to start the Seiberling Rubber Company with his brother Charles. By 1927, the new firm had become the world's 7th largest manufacturer of tires. Frank Seiberling's son, Penfield, took over as president in 1938; Frank Seiberling remained chairman of the board until his retirement in 1950 at the age of 90. A musicians' gallery is located directly over an organ, the latter being a more or less obligatory feature of big houses of the era. The door below on the north wall of the drawing room leads to the West Porch, where the 50th Anniversary portrait was shot. The Great Hall is located at Stan Hywet's approximate mid-point. We've looked at main rooms to the south. Let's now explore those to the north starting with the dining room, whose entrance is under the left side of the hanging tapestry. If you went straight ahead instead, you'd wind up on the long arcade that leads to the garden in last week's post. I've seen Chaucer's Canterbury Tales more than once on a dining room frieze. It's driving me nuts that I can't remember where. The screen below would originally have better obscured the door to the serving pantry, seen behind the rope on the right. First stop on the rear hall is the kitchen, located through that door on the left. I could have posted 20 pictures of Stan Hywet's fantastic and totally intact old kitchen, but...we gotta move on. The service corridor (not to be confused with the rear hall) starts at the north end of the kitchen and leads to the cook's pantry and servants' dining hall seen below. We glimpsed the vista below, down the garden-bound arcade, from the main hall. The cook's pantry and assorted storage areas are behind the wall on the left; we're headed for the breakfast room behind us on the right; adjacent to the breakfast room is a vintage serving pantry. Stan Hywet's main stair is in the square tower next to the front door; the Great Hall is behind the camera; a billiard room and Mr. Seiberling's office are located beyond the arch on the first landing. It is a curious love that proclaims itself in the form of taxidermy. Her name is - sorry, was - Sophie, the beloved pet of a long forgotten Goodyear exec. She spent many motionless years in his office before being moved to the now defunct Goodyear World of Rubber Museum. A former Stan Hywet curator with an odd sense of humor plopped her down on Frank Seiberling's office rug. If Frank could see her now, he'd be more surprised than anyone. Time to go upstairs. Sleeping arrangements at Stan Hywet are typical of upper class households with children of both sexes. From Ipswich to Greenwich, I've seen the bedrooms of daughters and parents clustered in adjacent suites at one end of the house, while sons and guests are billeted at the other. Long hallways, purposeless lobbies or in this case, an open sided catwalk over the Great Hall, form a psychological barrier between them. The ornate timbered ceiling, by the way, is a stage set enclosed within the outer structure of the house. Irene and Virginia shared a pair of room with a bath in between. Their parents' room is located directly above the library. The library has a secret door to the Great Hall; the bedroom has a leaded window overlooking it. Mrs. Seibering's dressing room adjoins her bathroom, which is almost too divine for words. A corner sleeping porch connects to Mrs. Seiberling's and Mr. Seiberling's baths. Across the hall from Mr. S's bath is a so-called morning room. In another house, this might have been Mrs. S's boudoir or, just as easily, Mr. S's bedroom. The entrance to the musicians' gallery, oddly enough, required musical help to wiggle up a tortuous hidden stair from the music room, then cross the south end of the Seiberlings' private bedroom corridor. North of the Great Hall, sons Franklin, Penn and Willard shared bedrooms named Red and Blue with guests in other rooms named William and Mary, Colonial and Adam. By the time the house was built, brother Fred was already married and in the military. A housekeeper and four maids occupied spacious and much better than usual servants' rooms at the north end of the second floor. We saw this stair outside the kitchen on the floor below. Above it on 3 are more service, guest and storage rooms. Also on the 3rd floor is the curiously labeled "serving room." It's now full of stored junk but looks to have been intended for visiting grandchildren. This skinny corridor connects the north and south ends of the third floor. If we peek through an access door to the attic over the Great Hall, we can see how the Great Hall ceiling is supported. The south end of the house is used today for archival storage, but was designed as two large dormitories. But wait, there's more. Four floors up, at the top of the tower over the main stair, is an infirmary. I'm not leaving this place without a look at the basement where, among other things, there is a remarkable vintage laundry room. There is also an antique spa, complete with antique sauna... ...and an antique plunge. Truth be told, as fabulous as it is, I don't really like to swim indoors. Not an issue here, since this one hasn't had water in it for generations. Seiberling Rubber was eventually absorbed by Firestone Tire and Rubber. Seiberling tires are still marketed overseas, but have been reduced to "budget" status. Subdivision of the Stan Hywet estate began in the early 1920s after the Goodyear debacle. Frank Seiberling's death in 1955 forced the family to sell 900 more acres in order to keep the place going until they could donate it to a non-profit foundation. Until that foundation obtained tax exempt status, still more acres were sold and more ranch houses built, until the original 3000 were reduced to today's 70. Reduced or not, the house and its gardens maintain a gratifying integrity of site and are wonderful places to visit. The link is www.stanhywet.org.

Pair of Wall light sconces French style with mermaid sculptures solid bronze by Sergio Merlin. Dimensions Total Height: 20 inches Back plates height: 14 inches Back plates width: 4.5 inches An on/off switch can be added to the back plate upon request at no extra cost. Wired using UL approved materials.

Choosing Tile For a Queen Anne Home can be a bit of a challenge. I want something historically correct, but also classic, timeless, light & bright.

MailOnline Travel has toilet-hopped around the world to find the most Instagram-worthy lavatories. Our tour includes pit stops in New York, Chicago and London.

Explore I like's 5390 photos on Flickr!

27 Victorian bathroom ideas that are perfect for those wishing to preserve period authenticity, and those who want to bring a touch of modernity.

There's a great temptation to wallow in superlatives when describing Westbury House, the perfectly exquisite (there I go) Long Island country place completed in 1906 for John ('Jay') Shaffer Phipps (1874-1958) and his wife, the former Margarita ('Dita') Grace (1876-1957). The mists and melting snow on the day of my visit lent an appealing air of otherworldliness to a scholarly mansion and elaborate gardens usually photographed in the blazing sun. The main gate to Old Westbury Gardens, as the place is called today, originally graced some swell 18th century estate in the English countryside. It is now the ceremonial entrance to the bit-under-200 remaining acres (about 400 in the mid-1930s) of an estate famous for extravagant gardens, temples and pergolas, small romantic lakes and a half-mile long Grand Allee on axis with the mansion itself. These gardens - Walled, Pinetum, Rose, Ghost, Lilac, Primrose, Cottage, Answer, not forgetting the Bluebell Walk - are not just heart-stoppingly beautiful in the soft heat of a Long Island June, but captivating in quite a different way, cloaked in end of winter mists. The gate in the image below bisects the aforementioned allee. The house lies directly north, hidden in the mist. In 1911, society architect Horace Trumbauer (1868-1938) added a large service wing, seen below, extending east from the original house. Westbury House, including its superb gardens, was designed by a socially well connected British aesthete, artist and tastemaker named George Crawley (1864-1926). In 1903, young Jay Phipps, recently married to British shipping heiress Dita Grace, visited his father, Carnegie partner Henry Phipps, at a rented Scottish castle. One assumes they were shooting. Among the party was Mr. Crawley, whom Phipps the elder had recently hired to tweak designs for his new Fifth Avenue house. Crawley and Jay apparently got on like the proverbial house afire, and before you could say "Homestead strike," Crawley agreed to design Jay & Dita's new country place on Long Island. Westbury House is described as being "in the manner" of Charles II, that high living British monarch who, upon the death of sober-sided Oliver Cromwell, gave 17th century England a needed dose of Restoration glamour. You wanna talk glamour? Here's Jay Phipps astride one of his polo ponies, probably at Westbury, looking every inch the Long Island gentleman. When not playing polo, racing horses or shooting at his Plains, Virginia plantation, Phipps was a lawyer, businessman and director of U.S. Steel, Hanover Bank and W.R. Grace & Co. Dita Phipps was the daughter of Michael Grace, co-founder with brothers Russel and William, of W.R. Grace & Co., arguably the world's foremost oceangoing passenger and freight line. In 1854 the Grace boys, then still in their twenties, made a killing shipping guano from Peru to North America. By the time Dita married Jay Phipps in 1903, the Graces had become one of the richest families in the world. Uncle William was a two-time mayor of New York, the first Roman Catholic to win that post, and the man who accepted the Statue of Liberty from France. His niece Dita is seen below outside the ballroom at Westbury House, and further below with her son Michael, first as a boy, later as a grown man who followed his father onto the polo fields of Long Island. The aerial view below was taken in the 1920s, after the Quaker farms of Old Westbury had been transformed into grand estates, but before those estates had been invaded by the aesthetically challenged architecture of Long Island today. Happily, none of the latter is visible from the grounds of the Phipps estate. During its salad days, Old Westbury and towns adjacent contained half a dozen estates belonging to assorted Phippses, Graces and Guests, elegant families interrelated by blood and marriage. Preservation Director Lorraine Gilligan is at the front door, waiting to take me around. Interestingly, George Crawley was not a professional architect. In lieu of plans, he produced a set of beautiful pictures which then had to be converted into something a builder could follow. Enter Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956), an architect of choice for early 20th century country house customers - and, incidentally, the designer of Forest Hills Gardens. Crawley didn't get along too well with Trowbridge and Livingston, the outfit that designed Phipps' father's house in Manhattan. Similar conflicts characterized the job at Westbury House, but you wouldn't guess it from the finished product. The floor plan below, while helpful, is proportionately inaccurate, especially in Trumbauer's 1911 dining room and service suite addition. The prep pantry, for example, is four times the size of the silver room, the corridor to the servants' quarters is a third as wide as it looks, etc., etc. Crawley had a stable of first class painters and artisans whose work can be seen all over the house. The high style Georgian entrance hall, seen below, is full of beautiful carving by sculptor Derwent Wood and a perspective ceiling (complete with Curious George) by painter A. Duncan Carse. A short corridor at the western end of the entrance hall, after passing the gents' en route, leads to a library with fine painted paneling. Westbury House was decorated by Sir Charles Carrick Allom (1865-1947), proprietor of the famous firm of White Allom & Company. Clients included Henry Clay Frick, W.R. Hearst, the owners of the new (1931) Waldorf Astoria and the King of England. Ardrossan, the subject of last week's column, was a White Allom job. The portrait above the fireplace is Mrs. Phipps, painted in 1942. A door on the south wall of the library leads to the drawing room, full of good art, good curtains, a good rug, good sconces, comfortable furniture, a scattering of antiques, a noble fireplace and a pair of very fine Waterford chandeliers - very Charles Allom, all in all. One of the chandeliers is real, the other a reproduction and, short of lowering both and examining them with a spectrograph, I doubt anyone (certainly not me) could tell the difference. The drawing room and library are connected to a large west facing porch. It must be heaven out here in the summer, when the retractable glass walls have disappeared into the floor and the room is filled with potted palms, floral covered wicker and summer breezes. People with ballrooms didn't usually leave them empty in between dances. The Red Ballroom at Westbury would have been furnished much like the drawing room next door. Adjoining the ballroom on the east is Mr. Phipps' study. Before the Trumbauer enlargement this was the dining room. No sooner was it finished than Mr. & Mrs. Phipps began tinkering with their country house, and didn't stop for a quarter of a century. The porch on the west was pushed out and enclosed; the south wall of the enlarged ballroom was crowded onto a former porch. The earliest and biggest change, however, was Trumbauer's dining room and service wing on the east. The dining room we see today is not what Trumbauer, or probably Allom, designed in 1911. To the contrary, it is a reconfigured version of Jay Phipps' father's dining room in New York, designed by George Crawley in 1901 and salvaged prior to the 1927 demolition of Henry Phipps' townhouse at 1063 Fifth Avenue. Jay Phipps' sister Amy Guest saved Crawley's marble staircase from the same house, inserting it, to the dismay of architect Thomas Hastings, into Templeton, her Carrere & Hastings designed house four miles north of her brother's. If you're a regular reader of my column, you've seen that staircase already. Lorraine is explaining to me how what they call the light court, behind her in the image below, was originally an open porch. The door on the left leads to the new dining room; the one on the right goes to the old dining room, now the study. I'll bet George Crawley intended this vanished porch to balance, at least when seen from certain angles, the one at the other end of the house. Speaking of intentions, I'll also bet Crawley's original plan had the reception room (there is none at present) where the library is, the library in today's drawing room and a drawing room on a reduced footprint on the site of today's ballroom. Admittedly I'm just guessing, but this would be a much more usual arrangement. What's labeled "children's dining room" on the plan does not speak to the strengths of rejiggered floor plans. The name memorializes the thirty English children who refugeed to Westbury during the blitz. Before Trumbauer built the big addition, a part of this room was undoubtedly a serving pantry. Afterwards, it became part of an oddly inelegant approach route to the dining room. The door to the right of the fireplace leads to offices, pantries, servants' rooms (on this floor and the one above) and a fabulously preserved kitchen in the basement. The corridor in the image below leads to servants' bedrooms on this floor, and a back stair that connects more servants' rooms on the floor above to a servant hall in the basement below. Let's head down to the basement kitchen, connected by twin glass doored dumbwaiters to a prep pantry on the main floor. That in turn is connected to a very small serving pantry at the eastern end of the dining room. The basement level is largely below grade. The kitchen and the servant hall, however, have full size windows overlooking a service courtyard. The former servant hall is now offices; the two-story brick building on the other side of the kitchen court was a laundry house, probably with additional quarters for help. Time to go upstairs, admire the exceptional wood carving, and consider the second floor plan. I am told that Mr. P's dressing room and the guestroom to the east of it were originally nurseries. This seems highly unlikely to me. Squalling babies right next door? Nannies on another floor? Guests asked to tiptoe after 8:00? Well, what do I know; I wasn't there. The floor as presently arranged makes more sense. Mrs. P's delicious little boudoir shares a bath with a corner guestroom called, for obvious reasons, the Adam Room. The "owners' bedroom" was presumably Mrs. Phipps', whose wonderful en suite bathroom sports silver plated fixtures. I assume her husband slept in "Mr. P's dressing room," the normal arrangement of things in a house like this. The remaining guestrooms are predictably grand, and the one bath I managed to see was gratifyingly antique. Here's another reason I love writing this column: "You want to see the roof, John?" That would be a yes. The first view below shows the Trumbauer wing looking east. That little penthouse in the distance contains third floor servants' rooms accessed by the back stair. The laundry house is visible on the other side of the kitchen courtyard. Now we're looking west towards the balustraded dining room. The little brick dogleg in the center of the frame is the serving pantry, connecting the prep pantry beneath my feet to the dining room. The third floor appears to be little changed, but was so crammed with storage and afflicted with inevitable leaks that I bowed to my hostess' request and kept photos to a minimum. And with that, I have finished yet another house. We're back almost to where we started, at the Grand Allee, but this time looking away from the house. You wouldn't know it, although unfortunately you can hear it, but at the end of this mysterious line of ancient trees are six lanes of roaring traffic on the Jericho Turnpike. Fifteen hundred feet beyond them, past a dozen suburban houses on a subdivision street called Evergreen Drive, are six more lanes on the Northern State Parkway. How close is the nearest subdivision to the left side of the allee? Don't ask. That something this wonderful could have evaded Long Island's cruel history of postwar suburbanization is a miracle wrought by Mr. & Mrs. Phipps' children. Instead of cashing in, they chose to protect, endow and establish Old Westbury Gardens to maintain their parents' house and grounds for future generations. This extraordinary place is also a venue for paid college internships. Students from around the world study things like plant propagation practices, herbaceous border management, woody plant management and historic landscape preservation for credit towards bachelor's degrees. Old Westbury Gardens is open every weekend from early April until the end of October; the link is www.oldwestburygardens.org.

An incredible Gents.