Design History

James Rundlet wasn't much of a cook. Still, as a forward-thinking man, he outfitted the kitchen of the Federal-style mansion he built in 1807 with the latest technologies. His Portsmouth, New Hampshire, house held one of the most modern kitchens in the country, and certainly the most advanced in town, equipped as it was with a Rumford Roaster and a Rumford Range. Rather than cook in one kettle over a single fire, Rundlet's staff could roast meat in the oven and cook in three separate pots on the stove.

It was a time of horse racing and baronesses, of high society and industry, of grand philanthropic projects and lavish parties. This was the Gilded Age at its height, late nineteenth-century America. And if royalty was measured in gold and silver, the kings and queens of them all may have been the Vanderbilts.

In 1888, William Kissam Vanderbilt threw his energy—and his money—into building “the very best living accommodations that money could buy” on the coast of Newport, Rhode Island.

Chick Austin once commented that the house he built in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1930 was “like me—all facade.” It was a typically self-deprecating remark from the man who in 1927, at just twenty-six years old, had become the head of the venerable Wadsworth Atheneum.

People might be forgiven for taking Austin's comment at face value. First there was the man himself. The only child of a mild-mannered doctor and a socially ambitious mother who fabricated a royal genealogy for herself and her son, Austin was as charming as he was handsome, and liked nothing more than a good party.