Tea at Trianon: Hudson Valley Weekend Retreat

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 24, 2021

Hudson Valley Weekend Retreat

From Architectural Digest:

The ramshackle horse barn, which sat quietly among the lush maples and oaks of New York’s Hudson Valley, was barely salvageable. But it had a sort of nobility that captivated designer Richard Felix-Ashman. “At first I didn’t know whether to go the extra mile—or the extra thousand miles—to renovate something that was dilapidated,” he says. “But the proportions were just remarkable; in architecture we only get those kinds of spaces in religious buildings or railway stations, so my clients and I began to think of ways to reimagine this fallen-down structure that had so much dignity to it.”
Felix-Ashman’s clients, a bicoastal couple with grown kids, wanted a place where they could host friends and family. One of their priorities was to build an ultraspacious restaurant-style kitchen, a request that could be easily accommodated in the barn, what with its double-height ceilings and nearly 4,000 square feet of living space. And so they decided to go ahead with the reconstruction of the 1920s structure, which included raising the pitched roof of its nave to create a higher clerestory with more natural light. (Read more.)