Here, in New York, where I am spoiled by transit opportunities unavailable in Minnesota, the mundane act of getting somewhere offers peculiar pleasures. As modern and new as Manhattan is, its subways and trains travel the rails of earlier eras. They can take the willing passenger to places other than his destination. Yesterday, my destination was the Russel Wright Awards Luncheon in Garrison, NY.
The train from Grand Central to Garrison takes about 90 minutes. That’s a lot of time to imagine living lives other than one’s own. In the flurry of the terminal, dressed as I was for a gala luncheon in jacket and tie, I had a momentary “Mad Men” fantasy. I could have been a high-powered ad agency exec, leaving my mistress in the city and heading back to my family in Peekskill. I wished I could have a martini, even though it was only 9:30in the morning. The urge to smoke was alarming.
On the train, reading the Sunday Times, I looked up from the arts section often enough to absorb the bucolic vistas along the Hudson. I understood how artists were inspired by the River. The crisp, lucid autumn air made for dazzling light. Sailboats skimmed the water’s surface, breaking the pane of blue and streaking it with white wakes. Only a few trees had started to change, and they blazed red and orange among their vivid green neighbors. I wished I had learned to paint. I felt a strange yearning to seize those colors and hold that exuberant light, suspended, so I could revisit them at leisure. I imagined myself on a promontory, an easel before me, and a canvas thick with brushstrokes. Perhaps I wore a beret or a cloak. My thumb poked through the hole of a palette. I still wanted to smoke.
A shuttle met me and four others to take us to The Garrison. Less than 10 minutes along wooded, winding roads, and we found ourselves at the splendid inn/golf course/restaurant. On a hill overlooking the Hudson valley, it conjured a life where chats with people named Chuck and Waddy were commonplace, where French Canadians named Gustave and New York furniture designers named Wallis sipped champagne near flowerbeds. Which in fact was the case. Charming people, one and all. I could have felt like quite the poseur, and yet I have managed enough fundraising events in my day to know how to behave. Besides, I was in New York, where I am always magically transformed into someone vastly more scintillating than I am in Minnesota. I charged pell-mell at anyone who looked interesting and struck up a conversation.
I let out a little gasp when I saw an elegantly frail woman with white hair roll onto the lawn in a wheelchair. It was Eva Zeisel, the centenarian designer whose work I enthusiastically collect along with Wright’s. She attracted admirers like the black-eyed Susans behind her drew bees. I approached her daughter, Jean, and requested an audience. I got the opportunity to speak to her briefly about the chapters I am writing about her designs for a collectors’ book. I thanked her for how much joy she had brought to my world. She clinked my glass with hers and squeezed my hand. It was like being blessed by the pope or knighted by the queen. I left her presence in an elevated state.
I was the guest of super-collectors Gary and Laura Maurer. We had a lively table of collectors, including eBay rival tsilv425 and his partner Kelly; James McKinney; and the aforementioned Chuck and Waddy, who were actually guests of the auction committee chair, Lithgow. (I revel in these names – so delightfully East Coast Episcopalian, so alien to an ear dulled by a lifetime in Lutheran Land.) Waddy grew up dining on Iroquois Casual China in white and blue. He and Chuck use chartreuse and seafoam American Modern at their country home. It’s little details like this collectors share and take genuine interest in. You can learn a lot about a person by the dinnerware they collect, or at least make snap judgments about them. I have high esteem for Chuck and Waddy, because chartreuse and seafoam are my preferred combination, too. (Although I throw in a little black chutney to add an earthiness to the table.)
The event honored Herman Miller furniture company – introduced by the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, Eames Demetrius (another great name) – and Mitchell Wolfson, founder of the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach. A memorable film clip about Wolfson showed him drooling over a stunning streamlined scale model auto, with amazing documentation about the design, only to be told it was made in 1946. His collection stops at 1945. He was genuinely devastated. But passion won out over mission – he broke down and bought the piece.
A live auction generated nearly $25,000 in revenue for Manitoga and the Russel Wright Design Center. The fundraiser in me took joy in their success, even as the items I would have liked fetched bank-breaking prices. A pair of Riverside China carafes, donated and signed by Eva Zeisel, went for $3,250. My maximum bid of $700 was passed less than a second after it was made. I consoled myself with a luncheon set that Gary had donated to the silent auction: a granite grey hostess plate and demitasse with a seafoam and gray Simtex Harvest tablecloth – the one color combination I had not yet been able to obtain. The cloth will make a delightful setting for my next dinner party.
As the luncheon wound down, a shuttle took us over to Manitoga to see the property we had just supported. My only previous visit had been in 2001, in December, when Wright’s thoughtful landscape had been denuded and his home, Dragon Rock, lay exposed. In the brilliant weather, with trees and vines and plants still robust, the house seemed even more magical, a modernist marvel glimpsed through foliage like a buck that stopped momentarily to regard its onlooker before vanishing into the leaves. I’m not sure I was supposed to, but I left my group and hiked Wright’s “cocktail walk” from the bottom of the hill around the pond to experience the theatrical reveal that Wright intended. As you climb the stone steps and round a bend, the house suddenly appears, as if a curtain had been lifted. Further along, the marvelous “moss room” looks down upon the house – grey-green moss absolutely covers the ground and rock inside a small grove of hemlock trees. Sadly, a blight on the trees threatens the moss. The hemlocks provide essential shade, and with the trees dying off, the moss room may cease to be. (Another reason to support Manitoga – preserving Wright’s ingenious landscape. You can donate by clicking here.)
The house itself is a marvel. The restored studio wing, with hemlock needles embedded in the ceiling plaster and its light-filled office, feels paradoxically modern and quaint. The main house, still being restored, offers a thrill in warm weather. With its floor-to-ceiling glass doors open, it’s impossible to tell where the stone-floored living space ends and the outdoors begin. One really appreciates Wright’s integration of home and landscape. Even the sliding doors to the bathroom incorporate leaves and butterflies from the area, pressed between layers of acrylic. (And is it really weird to get a tickle from having peed in Russel Wright’s toilet?)
“Unique” is an overused and seldom accurate description, but Manitoga earns the title. I’m grateful for the opportunity to once again have seen this astonishing property. As the day concluded, and the shuttle took us back to the railway station, I imagined one more life: that of a genius at the end of his career, enjoying the view from his studio, sipping coffee from a cup he had designed, and reaffirming his mantra. “Good design is for everyone.”
Cut to several months later, when the pioneer urban dweller begins to understand why the washboard and clothesline endured for so many years after washing machines came into existence. Sometimes, more technology isn't necessarily better. A single dime left in a pants pocket threw this clever little unit into a three-month tailspin.
