A designer’s showcase and escape

Beauport

by Randall Decoteau
All images courtesy of Historic New England

Beauport is one of Historic New England’s most popular destinations.

Beauport is a fanciful combination of Gothic mansion and English cottage set on the rocks overlooking the harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The house contains a labyrinth of over 40 rooms, nooks, crannies, and cubbyholes and is crowned with a series of towers, dormers, and dovecotes intended to evoke dozens of historical and literary themes. It was the summer home of the remarkable Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), interior decorator, tastemaker, historian, and collector.
Sleeper was born into an old Boston family that helped shape his vision and taste in the ‘Colonial’ style. At an early age he was exposed to shingle-style colonial architecture. Arthur Little designed his childhood summer home in Marblehead, and as early as the 1880s, Sleeper and his family were displaying relics and heirlooms in their homes. Henry was clearly an avaricious collector, actively buying and decorating by the 1890s. During this time, he visited the remote stark beauty of Eastern Point in Gloucester and resolved to build there.

Shaping the Colonial Revival
The house Sleeper created over several years is an architectural and decorative showcase, which helped shape the taste of the Colonial Revival movement. Curator Richard C. Nylander comments, “Beauport’s vaguely English exterior, with roof shingles laid to resemble thatch, shows its origins as a quaint but conventional seaside cottage. However, the roofline – a jumble of gables, cupola, skylights, dovecotes, and ornamental chimneys – begins to hint at the eccentricities within.”

Portfolio for parties
Beauport is a collection of collections playfully arranged in themes that evoke the early American kitchen, the English cottage, the Gothic library, or the sea captain’s retreat. Every room is tied to a different grace note – history, literature, American patriotism, the China trade, or Benjamin Franklin to name just a few. Beauport was a refuge from town, an elaborate backdrop for elegant summer parties, and a showcase for his professional life. Frequently published in books and magazines, its influence came to fashion the way we view America’s past.
Sleeper employed local architect Halfdan Hanson to translate this vision into reality. By 1908, the construction was well under way. By 1911, he had added the Book Tower, a two story cylindrical Norman room with a banistered balcony featuring two floors of books and arched leaded Gothic windows. As the years rolled on more and more additions were made to the house. The 1920s were the most profitable years for Sleeper. Many of his clients visited his home to get ideas and inspirations. By this time, he had built Beauport almost to the property line. Throughout his life, his clients demanded his Colonial Revival style over and over, even while he was producing more fanciful and Gothic interiors for himself.

Incredible imagination
A struggle between free design and American period design defines Sleeper’s work. There is a sense of patriotism evident, and yet his interiors are almost Victorian in complexity. The quintessential Colonial kitchen became his trademark and his customers demanded this theme from him over and over. Here his liberal use of folk art, hooked rugs, stripped pine, a massive hearth, and an almost monochromatic color scheme set the stage. He made a practice of salvaging outside architectural details and installing them indoors. His work is very different from the Georgian and restrained taste at Winterthur. However, in architectural historian Philip Hayden’s estimation, the room in Winterthur where Sleeper’s inspiration can most clearly be seen is du Pont’s Chinese Parlor.
Beauport’s interiors are arranged symmetrically and are not in any way suggestive of historical interiors. They are dominated by 18th century woodwork, period furniture, and collections – lots of collections. The latter include redware, tole ware, hooked rugs, paintings, watercolors, silhouettes, folk art, majolica, ceramics, and American glass. “Sleeper came up with very interesting ways of displaying his collections,” commented Historic New England Regional Site Manager, Lizzie Higgenson. “He showcased 130 pieces of amber glass in a Connecticut doorway backlit by skylights and made into a display piece.” She stated that what’s remarkable about Sleeper’s collections is not only the variety, but also the range. There are priceless treasures alongside dime store finds, but it’s the arrangement that makes them all work. The Gothic window in the Octagon Room filled with amethyst glass is another good example of innovative display for his collections.
Sleeper discovered and purchased great quantities of architectural material from sites like the dilapidated Cogswell house in Essex, Massachusetts. The paneling from this house is now installed in the Cogswell Room and the Green Dining Room. He used old shutters as wall treatments in several rooms, including the Central Hall. However, what really speaks to Sleeper’s personality is the arrangement of his collections. Higgenson went on to say that the visitors’ take on a visit to Beauport is that Sleeper had an incredible imagination.
Even though having a spectacular collection is an achievement in itself, it’s really the positioning of the objects that is so unique. Each room is meant to be awe-inspiring. In every case, the presentation of his collection is theatrical, and enhanced by his staggering sense of color. Rooms contrast from light colors to dark colors, from bold to subtle, and in every case, it’s what makes the house so exciting. Decorative treatments are thematic and use both complimentary and contrasting colors.
Patriotism was an important element in his later work. In 1917 he created the Pembroke Room, also known as the Pine Kitchen, inspired by his mother’s ancestral home. It features stripped pine, old woodwork, paneling created from antique doors with hardware removed, a massive hearth, and enormous collections. It was his favorite room, one in which he often sat alone. The whole is very much a stage set that leads to the Franklin Game Room, an homage to Benjamin Franklin. Here it is obvious that his appetite for collecting was clearly hard to control. There are aubergine walls, maple furnishings, a ruby chandelier, Franklin memorabilia, and abundant hooked rugs. The Souvenir de France room similarly showcases dark paneling, a collection of red tole ware, figured maple furniture, and red accents everywhere.

Popular destination
Beauport remains almost completely intact, and was donated to Historic New England by Mr. & Mrs. Charles F. McCann and their children. The house remains one of the organization’s most popular destinations. It is a testament to Henry Davis Sleeper’s talent as a decorative artist, for he was only secondarily an antiquarian. He rifled the past and created something very new in the process. Paul Hollister says it best in Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House (Historic New England, 1990), “After leaving Beauport, one remembers it as a series of surprises, of color bursts like fireworks or the shifting images of an antique kaleidoscope.” n
Beauport (1907-1934) The Sleeper-McCann House, 75 Eastern Point Boulevard, Gloucester, Massachusetts 01930, (978) 283-0800, www.spnea.org. Open through October 15. Admission: $10., Historic New England, members and Gloucester residents free.
Inspired by a lecture given at last November’s Deerfield Forum (Taste and the American Interior) by Philip A. Hayden, a museum consultant, architectural historian, and independent scholar, whose research into the life of Henry Sleeper stretches back nearly 20 years. Currently Mr. Hayden is working on the definitive biography of Henry Sleeper.