Gilded Age Mansion With a Rotunda!!

Welcome back to Preservation Travels with Lane and Kevin here at Art Restoration Nation. It's been a minute, but we have saved something spectacular for you. Welcome to the John Dick's House in Natchez, Mississippi. Welcome back to Preservation Travels with Lane and Kevin. Again in beautiful Natchez, Mississippi. Now right now, the television show The Gilded Age is all the rage. And so we're about to take you inside some Gilded Age splendor right here in our beloved hometown. This home was designed by the famous S.B. Stratton, who was with the firm McKim, Mead & White. Now, why is that significant? Well, this is one of the only McKim, Mead & White homes in the South. They were prolific in the North, and they're known for their exceptionally high degree of architectural ornamentation. Not only is this one of the most important architectural homes in Natchez, Mississippi, which is a city full of architecturally important homes, this is one of the most important homes of this era in the South. I'm making you wait outside with me while I do this intro, because once we go through these doors, you're not going to care about a single thing I have to say. The home is so spectacular. So come inside and be blinded by this beauty. Well, here we are inside a private home that has an actual rotunda. You heard me correctly. This house remains almost completely architecturally intact, as does the rest of the house. All of the ornamentation you see around me is original to the design. So let's take a look at some of these elements that make this S.V. Stratton home so spectacular. Of course, most notably, the domed ceiling above me in what can only be described as a rotunda. Originally, the domed ceiling would have been painted blue, and it had gold stars and a crescent moon. And listen, if this was my house, it would have to go back to that. This beautiful dado that runs around the room, this incredible mantelpiece that's behind me. Now, we see beautiful mantelpieces all the time that have relief ornamentation on them, but I want you to take a close look at the ornamentation on this mantel, how high the relief is. It's actually very tactile, very sculptural, something you probably never see in homes here because we don't see homes of this ornamentation. Under my feet, this incredible parquet floor. We have this five-pointed star, which, if you look at the medallion directly above, is mimicked with a star in the plaster. One of my favorite design elements. Come with me over here to the staircase. Of course, we have this exceptional newel post with a Tudor rose ornamentation. All of these little plaques are hand cast and applied. They're not part of the woodwork. But here, we have a boule escalier, which is a French term. It means stair ball, basically. But this is a French ornamentation. We don't see these in American homes. You see them all over France, but we don't see them here. So just this alone is a spectacular ornament in an otherwise breathtaking home. Let's take a moment to appreciate the plasterwork, the ornamentation, the balusters as they rise, and look around this incredible space before we move on. Again, one of the things that makes this home so incredibly unique is that so much of its original ornamentation is intact. In this room, we have two original plaster medallions. It appears as though there may be a gas pipe poking out of the end of this one, which means we would have had a gas fixture originally. But I can't tell precisely. It was not unusual to have just merely a central ornament on a ceiling like this. No light fixture attached to it. Just ornamentation inside a bay or around an area to draw the eye up. Gorgeous original plaster. Corners work all the way around the room. And of course, this crystal chandelier that's just breathtaking. Again, this is the formal receiving room. So you have another highly ornamented mantelpiece and it's a beautiful tile. In all of the rooms downstairs, we have these dual colored, not encaustic tiles, glazed tiles in each of the fireplaces. They have a different color scheme in each room and every one of the mantelpieces is different. Now, when we get into this gilded age era of architecture, we're just, we're drawing to the end of what we would consider the Victorian era. The ideas of symmetry that were in earlier periods of homes, neoclassical, Georgian, federal period homes. Symmetry goes out the window. We're throwing every architectural element at the wall that will stick. So again, in this room, you see a dido. You have plaster ornamentation on the ceiling, on the cornices. You have a single niche on this corner. So you'll just, the eye is drawn in every direction. There's something rich and delicious to look at in every corner of this room. Currently, we're standing inside what is being used as a hunt room or a study, but I have a feeling that originally, this would have been your formal receiving room. So when ladies and gentlemen went by afternoon calls with one another, which would have occurred between the hours of three and four in the afternoon, this is where you would have been received. Why do I think that? Because we have this much more formal, ornate mantelpiece in this room than we do in the formal family living space, family parlor. Again, that dual color tile, but much more ornate finishes in here. You see these gorgeous plaster medallions. We have two light fixtures. Again, you can see this one originally was a gasolier. Finishes that, to me, look like finishes that are meant to be shown off. They're not meant to be hidden in a study. The plaster frieze in this room is absolutely spectacular, but my favorite element in this entire room is what is no doubt this original chandelier gasolier. So if you'll look, you'll see the beautiful swirl glass. They look like a Fenton glass, some kind of art glass. With the little keys underneath them, that would have originally been gas. The key was to turn on and off the gas. The downward facing lights were electricity. So we're just in that period where we're transitioning out of gas for lighting. Into electricity, and we have these gasoliers that serve both purposes. Yet again, in one of my favorite spaces in any of these houses, the dining room, this mantelpiece is absolutely spectacular. Again, remember, we're in a period and in an architecture firm where it is all about doing extremely high ornamentation and showing off all the ornamentation skills that we have. So we have another incredibly distinctive mantelpiece departs entirely from everything else in the house, but a dual color tile pattern on this mantelpiece. But then above us, my heart almost stopped when I walked into this room. You'll see the cornice work around is grapes and pears. It is exactly the pattern that we had in the home that we were restoring in Louisville, Georgia that was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. This is the first time I've seen it in situ, whole and painted. The paint on it is original. It is painted in his original color scheme with his original paint. Now, no doubt when it was originally done in 1888 or 1889, it would have been slightly brighter, more fresh. How spectacular to have that original touch in this incredible space. Let's go through. We'll take a look at a butler's pantry, a bathroom, a family room, and the kitchen. It's absolutely spectacular as all of the places in this home are, and they are. They're all breathtaking. If this were my home, I think I would spend all of my time about halfway up that stair. When you reach the midpoint of the stair and you can see over the banister, down into the ground floor of the rotunda, and then you're so close to this domed ceiling, it is absolutely a breathtaking moment. And again, imagine with me if this domed ceiling were painted like the heavens or painted blue with stars and a crescent moon, and you would really feel like you were ascending into the night sky. What a spectacular moment that would be. But we're going to take you through and show you the bedrooms that are up here. There are four bedrooms and a host of bathrooms. So let's take a look at these beautiful spaces. Well, I wanted to bring you into this bedroom particularly to talk to you about the painted woodwork. Every time we do one of these videos, somebody's going to comment on, they ruined it by painting the woodwork. And I want to remind you that A, painted woodwork in this time period was really, really common. We see it in lots of photographic evidence of domestic dwellings, even on the bottom floors, even in the areas where guests were entertained. Once we get to the second floor in homes of this period, we almost exclusively see painted woods. Why? Because the wood that was used was very inexpensive. It did not stain well at all. It was pine and generally low quality pine does not accept stain evenly or well. So it would have always been painted. So all the woodwork up here that's painted would have started painted, needs to stay painted. I wanted to point out to you that all of the mantelpieces on the second floor are also different from one another, but we do carry the two-tone tile pattern from the first floor up into the private spaces of the second floor, just much more simplified for private space living. Now we're going to take you around the rest of the upstairs. The second floor, we're going to show you the rest of the bedrooms and bathrooms. And while we do, I'm going to share with you more of the history of this incredible home. Sydney V. Stratton was born in Natchez on August the 8th of 1845 and died in Natchez on June 17th of 1921. Stratton studied in Europe from 1865 until 1869 and began work shortly after his return as an architect in the office of Richard Morris Hunt in New York. According to Stratton family members, Stratton returned to Natchez in the early 1900s and died there in 1921. The John Dicks House is the only building in Natchez known to document Stratton as a designer. Buildings that Stratton is known to have designed, at least partially during his association with McKim, Mead, and White are the Brooklyn Riding and Driving Club in Brooklyn, New York, the residence for Mrs. Clemens S.B. Fish in New York, the residence for James K. Gracie in Oyster Bay, New York, and the Elliott Roosevelt House Renovations in New York, New York. John Dicks, the first owner of the house, was a prominent Natchez businessman in the insurance business. Due to the ill health of his wife, Dicks put the house on the market in 1893 and finally sold the house in 1895. Photographs of the original interior of the house taken for marketing purposes and an inventory of the Dicks household furnishings are in the possession of the present owner. The house had a succession of owners until it was purchased in 1920 by Luther Whittington, mayor of Natchez and later a state senator. We never talk about the decorative arts in these homes because generally speaking, the decorative arts will leave with the people when the home is sold. I don't know if the owner's gonna sell any of their furniture, but if they were, this would be the piece I would want to buy. So it looks like a fairly common half-teaster bed, which I don't know that fairly common is a word that we can even use to describe this gorgeous piece. But this piece was manufactured by Charles Lee out of Massachusetts, but it has a hidden element in it. You wanna see? I know you do. One of the biggest problems here in the South in the summertime are the bugs. The times before air conditioning and even before the invention of window screening. So window screens were not invented until the very early 20th century. At nighttime, when you went to sleep to get any kind of airflow, you had to open all of your windows. Well, what was that gonna do? It was gonna let in all the nighttime pests. So what do you do? How do you protect yourself? How do you keep yourself safe? You raise these poles, they would lock into place. There would be a mosquito net that would drape over this pole, drape up onto the canopy, right here is a little knob. There would have been a cord on the net that would have attached, twisted onto that knob, and it would have done its very best to keep you safe from the nighttime creepies and crawlies that were coming in your windows. Here's a fun little thing I had to show you. Looks like a doorbell, doesn't it? It's not a doorbell. This room, if you look, as we toured through this room behind me, the one with the mosquito net bed, you saw that there was an attached smaller room. If I'm just speculating based on what I know about architectural history, this would have been the main bedroom, and that would have been the nursery. So these homes were built and set up to prepare for children arriving in the home and having to be close to mother at night. But I find it interesting that there's a servant call bell right outside of what would have been the main bedroom. So mom and dad wakes up in the night, they need something, there's a problem with baby, they can quickly call for help right here from the second floor. Thank you for joining us on Preservation Travels with Lane and Kevin here in Natchez, Mississippi, at Our Restoration Nation. We promise to try not to make you wait so long in between home tour videos again. You know, we have our irons in a lot of fires right now, so bear with us. But we, like we've promised you, saved you one of the very best for today's treat, the John Dicks house. Now this house is for sale. Again, remember, we're not real estate agents. We don't list the home, we don't represent the home, we're not even really advertising the home. It just gives us an opportunity to get you inside a space you'd never see before. But if you're looking to buy a home and you want to join us here in Natchez, Mississippi, make sure you click the Zillow link in the description below and we'll see you next time on Preservation Travels with Lane and Kevin here at Our Restoration Nation.