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Storybook Ending

When a blaze virtually destroyed a best-selling author's 1890 mansion, D'Aquino Monaco got the chance to rewrite history

Jill Connors -- Interior Design, 7/1/2002 12:00:00 AM

In 1992, interior designer Carl D'Aquino of the New York firm D'Aquino Monaco spent nearly a year outfitting Greystone Manor in high Victorian style. When he was finished, the 1890 Queen Anne—perched on a canal off the Delaware River—was a virtual time capsule, replete with extensive collections of period art and antiques set amid dark oak and walnut paneling and elaborate moldings. Then, several years ago, the nine-bedroom house, the summer retreat of a best-selling author and her husband, burned nearly to the ground. All that remained were exterior walls of local Pennsylvania stone. The collections and the ornate fin de siècle appointments had all gone up in smoke. "You could see from the basement up through the third floor," says D'Aquino, who still vividly recalls receiving the devastating phone call with the news of the fire.

The author and her husband called on D'Aquino to do Greystone again. However, they chose to put the past behind them in more ways than one. Instead of re-creating what had been there before, they decided on a lighter, more summery look. So D'Aquino and his partner, architect Francine Monaco, went back to the drawing board.

"Architecturally, the house has been completely renovated. It's not a reverential restoration," says D'Aquino. "The house has a very fresh feeling now." Where once rooms were lined with dark paneling, today every piece of woodwork—paneled wainscot, door and fireplace surrounds, base and crown molding—is painted a crisp white that seems all the snappier for its contrast with the new, ebonized oak floors. Walls above the wainscot wear shades of taupe, sage, and cinnamon. Window treatments are muslin and linen; floor coverings are simple wool sisal.

Having lost all their possessions, the owners were reluctant to set aside time and energy from their demanding schedules in order to collect period antiques again. Instead, D'Aquino Monaco was commissioned to design all the new furniture and lighting. For the owner's writing desk in the study and the dining room's table and sideboard, D'Aquino took his inspiration from the John Roebling truss bridges spanning the Delaware River, devising a system of diagonal timbers as supports. He made all three pieces in ebonized cherry, a material and finish used throughout the house, he says, to "unite everything."

With 11-foot ceilings and grand proportions, the first floor's living room and adjacent library—the two most lived-in areas of the house—demanded furnishings on a large scale. For the 20-by-38-foot living room, D'Aquino Monaco designed two 11-foot-wide sofas, placed them on opposite sides of the room, with the fireplace between, and covered them in a striped linen. In the 14-by-18-foot library, leather upholstery and detailing create a clubby feeling. The custom sofa is upholstered in men's wool suiting fabric, with taupe leather piping; the accompanying ottoman, another D'Aquino Monaco design, is covered in leather.

In a nod to the era in which the house was built, the chairs in the author's study are reproductions of an 1897 design by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The black-stained ash pieces, with their signature Mackintosh straight backs, contrast with nearby undulating bookcases designed by D'Aquino Monaco. The latter feature a cascading profile that accommodates shelves of varying depths, so a shallow paperback sits as handsomely on the open shelves as a deep storage box.

"The sensibility for the furniture is sculptural," D'Aquino says. The same can be said for the lighting throughout the house. D'Aquino Monaco's fixtures include a series of delicate, modern linen boxes suspended from iron rods. "I used the idea of multiples, of a progression from singles to pairs to quads," he says. The effect recurs in the first-floor hallway (pairs), in the study (quads), and on the second-floor landing (four sets of pairs).

Looking back on a job well done, D'Aquino is most impressed by the owners' willingness, in the face of disaster, to experiment and reinvent. "They thought of it as an adventure," he says admiringly. For his part, the designer loved the opportunity to reexamine the house. "We were able to do our own interpretation of Queen Anne style, to do the exact same rooms in a completely different way," he says. "You don't get a chance like that very often."