Grand Houses, Changing Uses

Grand Houses, Changing Uses New Listings on the National Register

Connecticut residents of means have often erected impressive houses to impress their neighbors, express their refinement, or provide fine architectural settings for their lives. Recent listings on the National Register of Historic Places include four such houses from the coastal areas of Fairfield and New Haven counties. In addition, three of these houses have been significantly remodeled or put to different uses, examples of further growth and development that allowed them to continue to be useful and appreciated. Perhaps a similar future awaits the fourth house as well--like the first three, it richly deserves to continue to be a landmark of Connecticut’s heritage.

Lauralton Hall, in Milford, is a Catholic girls’ school located on a former private estate. Its centerpiece is an eclectic Second Empire/Queen Anne mansion built as a summer home for New York hardware merchant Charles Hobby Pond in 1864 and remodeled in 1889 for Henry A. Taylor, a banker and railroad financier.

After Taylor’s death, his heirs sold the property to the Religious Sisters of Mercy, a religious order that served women, children, and the poor through health care and education.

The sisters opened the Academy of Our Lady of Mercy in 1905 as a boarding and day school. The school was distinctive for its goal of educating middle class girls and young women in addition to the poorer classes, as was common in most parochial schools, and for its emphasis on advanced and professional study.

In addition to the mansion and its outbuildings, which continue to serve the school, two academic buildings were added in the early 20th century. The St. Joseph Building (1906), contained classrooms, chapel, dining hall, and an auditorium/gymnasium; a larger gymnasium was added to the building in 1930. The Administration Building (1917), originally called the Sacred Heart Building, contained classrooms, dormitories, a large auditorium and an ornate chapel. Both employ the neo-Gothic style associated both with educational and religious institutions at the time.

The Verneur Pratt historic district, in Norwalk, recognizes the contributions of Verneur Pratt (1891-1966) to applying a scientific approach to the direct-mail business, and then to developing and popularizing microfilm cameras and reading equipment.

In the 1920s Pratt ran a publishing company that produced trade magazines and conceived and marketed the “Sales Audit,” a system of series of marketing and advertising charts intended to put the direct mail business on a more scientific basis.

Pratt’s direct sales activities collapsed in the Great Depression and in 1937 he moved to an 18th-century farmhouse in the Silvermine area. Converting the barn to a laboratory and machine shop, he worked on refining microfilm, a technology for recording documents on film to save storage space.

Pratt patented the Optigraph microfilm reading device in 1936 and then developed the Flofilm line of microfilm cameras in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. The success of his inventions and, to a large degree, the popularity of microfilm in general can be attributed as much to Pratt’s aggressive marketing campaign as to his innovative designs.

Pratt’s house, originally built in about 1788 for Isaac Camp, represents a country version of Georgian architecture, with Colonial Revival additions from the 20th century. These additions, along with the conversion of the barn, probably built about 1800, to a work space and then a residence, are good examples of the reshaping of the Connecticut countryside in the 20th century.

Norwalk’s Gallaher Estate (now Cranbury Park) was home to another inventor, Edward Beach Gallaher (1873-1953), whose projects included experimental electrical and hydrocarbon engines, marine engines, trolley roads, and electrical power plants. He also founded the Clover Manufacturing Company, which produced industrial abrasives. The Clover Business Letter, the company’s house organ, served as an outlet for Gallaher’s political views, and is often cited as example of the conservative response to perceived communist and socialist threats during World War II and the Cold War.

Gallaher began buying land in northern Norwalk in 1917 and in 1929 built a Tudor-style mansion. He employed architect Percy L. Fowler, best known for his church designs, including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the Norwalk Green, and contractor William R. Matthews, who specialized in country estates and institutional buildings, including the chapel and academic buildings at Princeton University.

The Gallaher mansion’s stone construction, carved ornament, leaded-glass windows, and elaborate interior woodwork were all intended to create the appearance of a 16th-century English manor house. At the same time, the garage, basement game room, and up-to-date services all served a lavish 20th-century lifestyle. Among the house’s most distinctive features are murals by Mildred Cleora Tuttle, an artist trained at Yale.

Gallaher left the estate to his alma mater, Stevens Institute of Technology, which sold the property to the City of Norwalk for use as a public park.

The Graham house, built in 1968-1969 on the crest of a rocky outcropping in the Stamford woods, is one of the most dramatic and sculptural houses designed by Eliot Noyes (1910-1977), a master Modernist architect and industrial designer and a highly influential member of New Canaan’s famed Harvard Five. Although the house is less than fifty years old, the usual age requirement for the National Register, it was listed because of its exceptional importance as a work by Noyes and particularly as the culmination of a series of related designs by Noyes.

The series began with Noyes’ own house, built in 1954 with living spaces and a courtyard sandwiched between two massive stone walls (see CPN, November/December 2008). In the following years, the architect created several other variations on the wall-house idea, but they were not built. Finally, Robin Graham, owner of a Manhattan art gallery, provided an opportunity to construct the fully-developed version of the idea, a house with two walls close together forming a wide hallway, and the rooms hung outside the walls.

With its rugged fieldstone-and-concrete walls, stone pavement, and numerous skylights, the central space is more like a street than a hallway--in fact, Noyes sometimes referred to the space as a street. In contrast, the living spaces are lightly framed and cantilevered out from the stone walls so that they float over the landscape, with views defined by carefully placed windows.

This article originally appeared in the November/December, 2011, issue of Connecticut Preservation News.

PHOTOGRAPH Credits: Lauralton Hall, Milford: G. Farmer; Verneur Pratt’s workshop, converted from a barn:P. S. Esser; Gallaher estate, the game room mural: H. Cuzzone; Graham house, Stamford: H. McGrath.