Daily Blague

What can one say about this? Well, one can say that newly rich Americans are going through another period of really bad taste. Having money to spare, they can build castles that, if they were really castles, would be as unaffordable as they are improbable. Look at that cut stone in the turrets. Here in New York, we call this sort of thing "Garden State Shitface," after a prominent company, Garden State Brickface, that provides remodeled walkups with an unconvincing patina of venerability.

What's especially lovely here is the scale of the turrets versus the scale of the entry. In real castles, entry is, well, difficult. Castles are not easy to get into. Their gates are not the warm welcoming Arts & Crafts portico that we see here. As for medieval towers, they rarely sport generous, lower-storey windows, such as the one on the left, beyond the entry. What I'm dying to know is whether the three graduated windows on the tower at the right really do signify a staircase to some marvelous attic chamber. I'm inclined to think that, if they do, the space is also accessible by elevator.

But what's really clear, after a long view, is that the entire façade, insofar as it is not dedicated to a Plasticville idea of the middle ages, is really a sort of amplified sweet English cottage, to be populated by vicars and maiden aunts. A century ago, the great architect Edwin Lutyens  found the secret of providing very rich people with houses that didn't, somehow, look very rich, and his work has been much imitated in the past twenty years. But this is a house that makes its inhabitants look ridiculous. Even Enid Lambert would sniff at this fantasy - to her credit.