The Travellers: Albert Hadley and a Sunburst Clock

Photo by Michael Mundy for Parish-Hadley.

In the Horse Country of New Jersey, the area around Peapack where the owners of the beautiful old estates still insist on keeping their roads unpaved, was a very stylish house with a great room, perhaps my favorite of the Parish-Hadley living rooms done before my time there. 

Photo by Michael Mundy for Parish-Hadley.

Ornamented with classical pilasters salvaged from a local historic building, the pale gray walls and the dark-stained wood floor provided a great background for the furnishings in essentially just three fabrics:  a chintz, a silk, and a cotton.  Decorated in 1969, the room remained virtually untouched until the owner decided to scale down to a smaller house forty years later.  Albert Hadley was called back to edit and arrange the furnishings, one of my favorite being the giltwood starburst clock.

Photo by Simon Watson for "House Beautiful".

In the new house, a very simple clapboard Late Georgian dating to 1820, the two front rooms were combined to create a large living room with a fireplace at each end.  The walls were painted off-white again, but this time the wood floor was painted pale gray, a custom mixed color Albert Hadley calls Fog, and again left bare.  The chintz-upholstered Odom chairs were placed flanking the fireplace; the chintz had been discontinued so it was not replaced.   Other seating was slipcovered or recovered, however, with the exception of the great pair of Regency benches which still remained without refreshment of the painted finish.  The wooden urn lamps that had white shades when placed in front of the wallpaper screens in the former house, now have black shades to stand out at the bare windows.


Photo by Simon Watson for "House Beautiful".

This room is an example of decorating small, spare and chic.  And it cannot be said often enough:  buy what you love and it can be used over and over again.
The 1969 decoration appeared in Parish-Hadley, Sixty Years of American Design with photos of this room by Michael Mundy, and the new house with re-used furnishings was featured in the July, 2009, issue of "House Beautiful" magazine with photos by Simon Watson.


The 1995 Christopher Petkanas book PARISH-HADLEY, SIXTY YEARS OF AMERICAN DESIGN is out of print, but used and collectible copies can be purchased through The Devoted Classicist Library in affiliation with Amazon by clicking here.