Glorious Days at Chieftans: The Gimbel Estate
"Glorious Days at Chieftans: The Gimbel Estate"
Designer Showhouse Inc. Premier
The Gimbel Estate
Greenwich, Connecticut
Fig. 1 “(Bernard F. Gimbel’s) ‘Chieftans’ Estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, 1932-1934” by Robert Yarnall Richie.
Once upon a time the Rich, the Famous, and the Beautiful amused themselves at Chieftans, the former Greenwich estate of the late Bernard and Alva Gimbel. For one magical evening, Chieftans came alive again at the gala event organized for the Designer Showhouse Premiere where Mrs. J. Stillman Rockefeller served as Honorary Benefit Chairman, and members of the Gimbel family served on the Honorary Committee. Designer Mario Buatta was Showhouse Chairman, and Paula Rice Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of Interiors magazine, served as Chairman of the Selections Committee.
Twenty-two national designers created a sense of splendour that might have been found at Chieftans during its social heyday in Greenwich, the period from the mid-1920s through the 1930s.
"My work, like the work of my colleagues, breathes new beauty into the house," said designer John Robert Moore II, a specialist in 19th century European Continental antiques. In creating a period room, Moore redesigned the former breakfast room into a morning room or garden room. It is off the main ballroom of the Gimbel mansion. "My morning room contains an 'architectural folly' which a London antiques dealer bought from the Rothschild estate," he said. Architectural follies are smaller constructions of larger, and typically, unbuilt architectural fantasies. They were popular in England during the 19th century.
Bernard Gimbel received the title to Chieftans in 1932 as a wedding anniversary gift from his parents, Isaac and Rachel Gimbel of the famed American mercantile family. Isaac Gimbel was chairman of the board of Gimbel Brothers, the retail department store chain. One of the last significant land holdings in Greenwich, the Gimbel Estate is currently owned by the real estate partnership of Peter B. Seaman of G.E.D.C., Ltd. Mr. Seaman purchased the property in 1986. The real estate development group plans to convert the estate into a limited number of single homes. Preiss Breismeister Coats Architects Planners of Stamford is the architect.
Fig. 2 “Bernard Feustmann Gimbel” by Douglas Gorsline, 1945.
The King Street Gimbel house in Greenwich, originally used as a country retreat, was built in the great English manor house tradition. During the Jazz Age of the mid-1920s (when Isaac and Rachel Gimbel owned the manor house), and the following decade of the thirties (when Bernard and Alva Gimbel owned the house), guests vied for an invitation to one of the Gimbels' weekend-long parties. After their wedding in 1932, Bernard and Alva Gimbel set the standard for High Society of their day whereupon Chieftans, their country retreat from nearby New York City, provided the setting for a tableaux of luxuriance and opulence amidst backcountry Greenwich rural life.
Fig. 3 “Alva Gimbel jumping sidesaddle, circa 1930-1935” by Contributed Photo.
Gimbel Père, Isaac Gimbel purchased the 200-acre estate in 1923 from Alfred Whitney Church, grandson and heir of the Borden Dairy Company. Gail Borden, the Borden company founder, originally commissioned New York City architect Augustus D. Shepherd, Jr. to design the estate. It took Shepherd four years to do so beginning about 1911-1914.
The architect built the main house of cedar, shingles, and natural fieldstone. Heroic façades dressed columns styled in the classic Doric order which distinguished the front of the house from the unadorned back of the house. A protective porte-cochère constructed over a walkway separated the small gentleman's library from the main house. A secret staircase within the separate library, designed, perhaps, for mysterious encounters, led to a wine vault in the basement of the main house. Both the porte-cochère and secret staircase, in likelihood, might have, also, been handy during Prohibition.
Inside the main house there was a private elevator and silver storage vaults. Saunas found in the house today are the only remnants of modernization. That is, of course, if one is unaware of the contemporary work of the Manhattan-based architecture and design firm Moore Pennoyer Turino, Inc., one of the national design firm participants whose work appeared in the recent Designer Showhouse.
"Our white minimalist room is clearly not a period room, in a sense, designed like the others," said Peter Pennoyer, an architect and partner in the firm. "Rather, this writers' sitting room is a contemporary reflection of various periods in the history of art that are juxtapositioned with each other." Photographic reproductions of the work of André Kertész, the 19th century Hungarian photographer known for his innovative New York fashion magazine images, frame an 18th century architectural map of antique Rome. Abstract paintings, primitive art, and African art boldly overpower the refined line of a Brno-style tubular steel chair dating to the 1930s.
What might Shepherd, the original architect of the Gimbel Estate, think about all this jazz? Shepherd's design for Chieftans indicates his belief in the American “work ethic” supported by the integral positioning of the outbuildings in the design scheme of the estate. And, as for the Gimbels, the outbuildings played a vital supportive role in the management of the main house and its grounds in keeping with the history of Greenwich, originally a Colonial settlement consisting of dispersements of small farms. This farmstead heritage extended to the structures designed for the daily functioning of the Gimbels' estate to include a dairy barn, a brood house, stables, a multi-car garage, and storage barns.
The Gimbels actually made full use of these outbuilding structures and their estate was a self-sufficient working farm up through the early 1950s. And, rather than proclaim, in the misattributed manner of speaking, "Let them eat cake," the Gimbels donated the surplus of their farm's production to charity in keeping with the little known 18th century royal tradition at Le Petit Trianon, the neoclassical palace on the grounds of Versailles (started 1762; completed by 1768), designed by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV as a sweethearts' getaway for Madame de Pompadour, and later gifted by Louis XVI to his wife Marie-Antoinette thusly becoming the Queen's refuge -- and working farm (upon her retreat from daily life at the French royal palace court).
At the Gimbel Estate, the American architect Shepherd, also, built separate living quarters on the property where the Gimbel family set aside these quarters as residences for their staff. It seemed as if Mrs. Gimbel Sr., however, as much as Chieftans, also, required the services of a full and dedicated staff. There were grooms, three chauffeurs, and pantry maids. In addition, there was a cook and cook's helpers, plus personal ladies' maids for Mrs. Gimbel. And, of course, there was a majordomo.
Yet for all the, seemingly, luxurious flourishments by the American standard of the day, Rachel Gimbel still focused her attention and energy on her family. Cleverly, Rachel had the foresight to readapt the plans for the second floor bedrooms into separate sleeping and living quarters. As a result, three generations of the Gimbel family, at one point, lived together at Chieftans: Isaac and Rachel; their son, Bernard, and his wife, Alva; and Bernard's and Alva's five children. Talk about family togetherness.
For the Designer Showhouse, former Greenwich resident Lucy Bolch Sprunger, of the design firm Thimbelina & Jean Charles Sprunger of Amagansett, Long Island, a participating national designer, created two traditional womens' rooms: a type of sitting room and a sewing room, both located on the second floor of Chieftans. "In one room, a woman did her designing," Bolch Sprunger said. "In the other, she did her sewing. Both rooms share access to a main hallway."
Fig. 4 “Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook with Mrs. Alva B. Gimbel” by Photographer Unknown, N.d.
Chieftans was the center of the universe to the Gimbels, and to their prestigious circle of friends on the Palm Beach-New York-Greenwich social circuit who retreated to the relative tranquility of Greenwich, and for the anticipated yearly celebratory summer galas hosted by Bernard and Alva Gimbel at Chieftans beginning in the 1930s. The country house was the setting of an annual benefit party for disabled patients at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York, the world's first and largest university-affiliated medical center devoted entirely to patient care, research, and rehabilitation training. The brainchild of Mrs. Bernard Gimbel, the Rusk Institute was her favorite charity. Civic minded Alva Gimbel was, also, a founder of the women's auxiliary of the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University Medical Center, as well as a board member of the Lighthouse-New York Association for the Blind. Alva Gimbel, also, served as a board member on the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art and helped found the Dance Theatre of Harlem.
Sashaying through the thirty-three rooms of the Gimbel country retreat, a guest might casually encounter Wallace Simpson (at the time, she was the Duchess of Windsor) and her husband, the Duke of Windsor; swashbuckler Errol Flynn or leading man Clark Gable, both motion picture idols of the Silver Screen; Robert Wagner, mayor of New York; and financier Bernard Baruch who all might have been seen in various nonchalant vignettes in the company of assorted millionaires, heiresses and any given number of debutantes and the like who were all welcomed into the mix.
As time progressed, the high life faded at Chieftans. That is, until Designer Showhouse, Inc. revitalized the Gimbel Estate with the Designer Showhouse Premier gala event. The Gimbel Estate has since been subdivided into ten-acre minimum plots apiece with eighty of the original acres having been donated to the Audubon Society to create the Gimbel Sanctuary. Although once a practical working farm, the Gimbel Estate, nevertheless, is remembered as an architectural gemstone designed in the fabled Gilded Age and Jazz Age summer cottages-style of Newport and Long Island. The Designer Showhouse Premier redirected the shining lights of High Society immortalized in the novels of Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald to focus on the glorious days of the Gimbel Estate while sustaining the Gimbel legacies of Issac and Rachel, Bernard and Alva, and the Golden Age of Greenwich in the early twentieth century.
Titian Butash
Greenwich, Connecticut
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First published in Greenwich Time, Architecture, May 1987.Modified September 28, 2024; November 8, 2024; November 16, 2024; November 21, 2024.
(c) Titian Butash All rights reserved
References
"Alva Gimbel is Dead; Active Philanthropist," New York Times, May 1, 1983, Section 1, 44. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/01/obituaries/alva-gimbel-is-dead-active-philanthropist.html. Accessed March 23, 2024.
Bartol, Norma. “Norma Bartol: Grandaughter unearths history of horse show,” Opinion, Greenwich Time, May 12, 2011. greenwichtime.com. https://www.greenwichtime.com/opinion/article/norma-bartol-granddaughter-unearths-history-of-1377323.php. Accessed March 23, 2024.
Butash, Titian. "When Chieftains was Alive with Parties," Architecture, Greenwich Time, May 1987. Edited March 23, 2024.
Crispino, Domenico. "The Hameau de la Reine at Versailles and the reproduction of vernacular architecture," Proceedings HERITAGE 2022 - International Conference on Vernacular Heritage: Culture, People and Sustainability, Universitat Politècnica de València, September 2022.
https://www.academia.edu/92100778/The_Hameau_de_la_Reine_at_Versailles_and_the_reproduction_of_vernacular_architecture. Accessed November 16, 2024.
The Gimbel Estate
