Tiffany | Explore & Learn | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Laurelton Hall was Louis Comfort Tiffany's architectural masterpiece. Although he hired a young architect, Robert L. Pryor, to prepare the working drawings, it is clear from the building's eclectic design and exotic decoration that Tiffany had a hand in every stage of the project—inside and out.

Conceived as a summer residence, Laurelton Hall, named for an old resort hotel previously on the site, was situated on six hundred acres on a bluff overlooking Cold Spring Harbor, on the north shore of Long Island. The estate included stables, tennis courts, barns, greenhouses, a gatehouse, and—later—Tiffany's chapel from the World's Columbian Exposition, a studio, and an art gallery. Terraced gardens with fountains and pools descended the hillside, affording magnificent views of the changing scenery. Mindful of the beauty of his natural surroundings, Tiffany planted flower beds and blossoming vines and trees, adding variety and color to the landscape with the touch of a painter. Some of the plants that appear most often in his art—magnolia trees and wisteria vines, for example—were plentiful on the grounds.

The stark concrete-and-stucco structure, with its blue-green patinated copper roof, was Near Eastern in feeling. The eighty-four-room, eight-level building was carefully integrated into the contours of the bluff on which it was constructed. The house was further connected to the landscape by the terraces extending from the ground-floor rooms to the gardens.

At the heart of the complex was an unusual plant-filled, two-story octagonal court, integrating interior with exterior and providing a central axis from which the principal first-floor rooms radiated. Islamic carpets and animal skins covered the marble mosaic floor. Stylized trees copied from an Islamic textile were painted on the walls. The focal point was a remarkable fountain surrounded by an octagonal pool lined with iridescent glass. A three-foot-high Favrile-glass vase of teardrop shape rose from the center. An observer described the water rising through the elongated narrow neck of the vase until it "brimmed over and almost imperceptibly the drops trickled down the outside of the bottle . . . and as the light fell on it the colors glimmered like mother-of-pearl." The water then flowed through a trough in the floor to the outside terrace and gardens.

Tiffany filled the rooms with windows, glassware, pottery, enamels, textiles, and lamps from his own studios as well as his collections of ancient glass, Near Eastern ceramics and tiles, prints, tsuba, armor, and netsuke, and Native American baskets and pottery. Many of his own oils and watercolors were displayed in the second-floor gallery. Black-and-white photographs of the house during its heyday and rare color film footage give some idea of the magical effects Tiffany achieved at this magnificent summer estate.

In 1918 Tiffany established a foundation to which he deeded Laurelton Hall with the aim of establishing a program to nurture young artistic talent. Not intended as a place for technical instruction, Laurelton Hall was a haven for fostering creative freedom. For fifteen summers, until he died, Tiffany enjoyed watching over and giving advice to the next generation of artists and ensuring that his unconventional creation in Cold Spring Harbor gave them inspiration. A little over a decade after his death, however, the foundation deemed Laurelton Hall too expensive to maintain and determined that it weakened the foundation's ability to support artistic talent. The trustees approved the sale of the contents, auctioned in 1946, and the land and house in 1949, for a fraction of their original cost. In 1957 the house was, tragically, destroyed by fire. Some of the original Tiffany decorations were salvaged and are preserved at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida. The four-column entrance loggia, with its vibrant floral capitals and glass-mosaic decorations, is now installed in The Charles Engelhard Court in The American Wing.

Laurelton Hall introduction: 1

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