"Harbor Court" (Newport, Rhode Island)

 house, Gothic revival (architecture)

Harbour Court, the Natalie Bayard Dresser Brown House, later John Nicholas Brown House, now New York Yacht Club (1845, 1903-05, 1913-15, 1919-20, 2000; Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, architects; Olmsted Brothers, landscape architects):

An 8-acre estate overlooking Newport Harbor, Harbour Court includes a large house, two small wood-frame buildings, an ample garage and service quarters, a greenhouse, and a significant landscape, all set behind a tile-capped stucco wall.

The main house is a 21⁄2-story, L-plan, stucco-and-stone, high-hip-slate-roof Louis XIII Revival building with the main block oriented on an east-west axis and the perpendicular service wing, with porte-cochère centered on its 1st story, extending south from its west end; the north and south elevations are symmetrical and framed by projecting pavilions at both east and west ends, and a porch is recessed within the building’s mass on the north elevation. The main house’s exterior is soberly detailed, with elaborate ornamentation selectively placed: iron grillwork above the principal entrance, flanked by bronze lamp standards, and at the anding window to its west; corners and windows framed by quoining; and tall chimneys punctuating the roofline. The main house’s severity is calculatedly relieved by the picturesque east elevation, with a turreted circular-plan stair tower and a 2nd story oriel window. The main house’s siting is significant and impressive: a gravel-covered motor court with circular fountain centered on the principal entrance to the south and, to the north, a large greensward that extends from the sharp rise on which the house stands down to the water, and a formal garden to its south on axis with the principal entrance.

To the main house’s northeast is a 1-story, board-and-batten, flared-end-gable-roof Gothic-Revival building, 1 bay wide and 4 bays deep, with lancet-arch principal entrance, oversize brackets at the corners, and bargeboards on both raking and eaves cornices. To the north is a half-timbered 1-story, high-hip-roof building with a porch at its west end set within its mass and a small chimney centered on the ridgeline. The garage-and-service building, abutting the property line to the east south east, is a U-plan, stucco- and-half-timber 21⁄2-story building with high cross-gable roof. To the south of the garage-and-service building is a lacy wood, metal, and glass 1-story greenhouse with brick foundation, entrances on the south and east elevations, acroteria above the east entrance and along the ridgeline, and a parged chimney.

Landscaping includes informal groupings of trees and shrubbery as well as a formal parterre garden south of the main house whose principal, north-south axis aligns with the principal entrance of the house.

Mrs Brown (1869-1950) built this, at a cost of $103,000, soon after the death of her husband, John Nicholas Brown (1861-1900), for herself and her young only child, John Nicholas Brown (1900-1979). She had previously engaged the services of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson for the design and construction of Emmanuel Church (1901-02, 1912-13, NR), 42 Dearborn Street, as a memorial to her husband, and her son later engaged the firm, in his first architectural commission, to design the chapel (1922-28, NR) at his alma mater, St George’s School, in nearby Middletown.

Much of the overall landscaping was in place by 1907, when the property was published in Indoors and Out, but the summerhouse and rock garden were added before 1913, followed by the formal garden in 1921—both recommended by Olmsted Brothers employees Percival Gallagher and Harold Hill Blossom.

The Brown family continued to summer here until the death of John Nicholas Brown’s widow, Anne S.K. Brown (1906-1985), after which time their children transferred it to the New York Yacht Club, where their father had served as Commodore. The club relocated its first clubhouse, originally located in Hoboken, NJ, and probably designed by A.J. Davis in 1845, to this location in 2000; in both type and style, this is a rare survivor. Harbour Court is a highly telling example of the expertise, talent, and versatility of Cram’s firm, more closely associated with the very best of this country’s early 20th-century Gothic Revival than with revived forms of the French Renaissance, an idiom then generally associated with Carrère & Hastings. It also retains an exceptionally fine sense of early 20th-century estate landscaping as created by some of finest practitioners. (5 contributing elements: 4 buildings, 1 structure, 1 site)

pics - www.nyyc.org/clubhouse/
and
Robert Yarnall Richie aerial photo ca. 1932-1934 - digitalcollections.smu.edu/u?/ryr,405