Finest Rooms Remembered

I have been speaking to all comers about rooms they admire and have included many of them in my forthcoming book "The Finest Rooms," Monacelli Press, November 2010. In this book, all the rooms chosen exist because I wanted to be able to have fresh photographs. And, I also see it as something of a baseline for a type of quality to be found today.

I do think it is interesting to ponder the running list of rooms that are no longer with us but still haunt our memories. I called this the list of ghost rooms. One such room that I have recently remembered, and show here, is the House of Tomorrow built at Disneyland in 1957 and updated until 1967. I remember particularly the radical flat-screen TV and the Jetson like decoration. I also remember thinking that it did not look so new, even at the time.

Here are some rooms that also come to mind:

- The Jean Michel Frank apartment for the Rockefellers
- Rose Cummings’ bedroom
- The Kennedy White House
- Mrs. Parrish’s living room
- Kevin McNamara’s green lacquered living room in Southampton
- Tony Duquette’s Ranch
- The Newport Mansions with their original contents
- Hearst Castle in full operation
- Peter Marino for Peter Sharpe
- Billy Baldwin’s apartment with the brown lacquer walls
- The Fountains as originally arranged by Parrish Hadley
- The original Payne house in New Jersey by Albert Hadley
- Henry DuPont’s Cottage at Winterthur – now the gift shop
- The Vanderbilt Mansion on 5th Avenue

Please add your suggestions to this list. I do believe in ghosts.