Inside a Tiffany & Co. Gilded Age Mansion

Welcome to the Hoetze House. This is a Gilded Age Mansion, one of a very few located here in the heart of central Arkansas in downtown Little Rock in the Quapaw Quarter. This beautiful home was built in 1900. The exterior was designed by famed Arkansas architect Charles Thompson. But the interior, everything you'll see today on the inside, was designed by Tiffany and Company of New York. Welcome to the Hoetze House. Built in 1900, the Hoetze House is one of Little Rock's most important historic structures. Peter Hoetze, an Austrian immigrant, had settled in Little Rock in 1856 at the age of 20. After fighting in the Civil War, he moved to New York City to trade cotton. He lived and worked in New York for nearly 30 years. When it was time to retire, he decided to move back to Little Rock. There, he hired 30 year old architect Charles L. Thompson to create this neoclassical revival masterpiece. The exterior, as impressive as it was, paled in comparison to the interior designed by Tiffany and Company. Green damask laced with metallic gold threads and red cut velvet covered the walls. Woodwork throughout was mahogany and oak and stenciling enriched most ceilings. The house structure has undergone few alterations and appears much the same as when Peter Hoetze lived. Welcome to the grand entry of the Hoetze House mansion here in Little Rock, Arkansas. This home, every square inch of this home was designed to impress. You have to remember, we're at the height of the Gilded Age when this house is constructed. So we're right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution when America is booming and fortunes are being made left and right. And there is no income tax at the federal level yet. So the money made was the money that you earned. And many people took that money and invested it into incredible masterpieces of architecture like this home. So let's take a look around this incredible entryway at some of the details that were put here to impress you when you first walked through the door. Underfoot, we have a beautiful blend of parquet flooring in oak and Honduran mahogany. Why Honduran mahogany mixed in this space? Well, that's because all of your beautiful pocket doors, your architraves and entablatures around your door, your crown molding with egg and dart detail, your mantle. And this incredible staircase that rises behind me are all made from Honduran mahogany. And they still have that rich, lustrous glow that they had the day they were brought here. So let's talk about the beauty of this mantelpiece. Again, in Honduran mahogany. We are at the height of the neoclassical revival period when this house is built. And so we see a lot of neoclassical revival elements with the soaring columns, the egg and dart molding, and then some of the motifs that we see here in this mantelpiece with the shield and shell. And then we have beautiful florets. These are all very classical neoclassical revival designs. But I love how all of the tones have been taken into account with one another to blend the interior of this home just beautifully. I wish you could see how this green glazed style tile which is in a batch elder or Rookwood style. I don't know which house it comes from, or it could in fact come from Tiffany and Company, but it carries through. It is green, but it has red undertones in it. So it matches the mahogany of this mantelpiece just beautifully. So we've already taken your breath away. And we're not more than about 15 steps inside the front door. Let's go into the double front parlor. Well, here we are in a colossal double front parlor. Unbelievable space flooded with natural light from its original windows. And you can't miss access onto both the side porch and the atrium in this room. This space has incredibly intricate parquet floors that are all original. The stencil design that you see on the ceiling is the original in this house. It has been touched up, but it is original to the space. And what a treasure that is. We never find those intact anymore. Again, all of the wood in this room, the mantelpiece, the doorway, the crown mold, the baseboard and the glorious colonnade that separates the front and back parlor are all once again in Honduran mahogany. So a beautiful formal space for entertaining. Formal dining room. What an amazing space. Once again, incredible, intricate parquet floors underfoot. We have this raised panel bishop's board all around the room. Another glorious mantelpiece. I love the tiles on the mantelpiece in this room. They're teeny tiny little fired bricks. So they're actually little terracotta tiles. Absolutely stunning. But for me, the masterpiece part of this room is the gorgeous original plasterwork frieze that frames the entire room. It's glazed with its original glazed colors. That is so unheard of to find plaster with its original glazed work still intact. So that to me is just stunning and so precious. What we see here, these are portiers and you have your original brass portier rod. Very rare to have your original rods still in place. These were meant originally to hold the warmth in a room. So we do have pocket doors here in this space. The pocket doors are fronted on the main parlor side in mahogany, the dining room side in oak, because all of the wood in this room is oak. But in the wintertime, these portiers would be used to keep this snug and warm in this space as well. So we see them on both on the formal parlor side and on the dining room side. So something that this house has that is so special is we have these design cards in every room of the home, every space, including the hallways that show the original paint patterns, the original paint schemes. And then most spaces have photographs of what the rooms look like when the home was built. We're so lucky that this home was built in 1900 and we'd had the advent of photography and architectural photography was very popular at the time. You would build your magnificent home and then you would have lots of pictures taken of it. But something I want to point out in this room that is very, very interesting. And I would love to know what happened. We see our fireplace with its tile that is original. Our beautiful iron firebox, the bottom of our mantle that is extant. But then our over mantle with very intricate carving that appears to match our shield and torch, our shield and flame design that's in the frieze around the room is missing. We no longer have this original mantle piece. So I'd love to know what happened to it and where did it go? But I can tell you that the replacement that they made to go in its space is glorious. And you would never know that it's not original to the room. Now, let me show you a piece of this house that I've been eyeing for the last 30 years, the atrium. Here we are in the front receiving room. So this would have been a space for less formal receiving. You come for a business call. You come for a very informal visit. This would have been the space into which you would have been escorted underfoot. Again, we have incredible parquet floors that once again blend oak and mahogany. Now, why oak in this space? Because all of the other finishes in this room are in oak. Something about these pocket doors that I really want you to see. We see this detail in very, very fine homes of the day where the doors are faced on either side with different woods to accent the woods in the room that they face. So our pocket doors that face the entryway, the entryway side is Honduran mahogany. The informal receiving room side is oak to match the rest of the oakwood in this room. I want to point out this glorious original oak mantle piece. What I love about this is it shows that we have all of the forms of neoclassical revival architecture represented in this house. So we have an Ionic column, a Doric column, and we have Corinthian columns somewhere in the house. We have all of the forms of column. We have two here. We have some other ones in the living room. We have some in the entryway. All the forms of neoclassical revival can be found in this house. It differs from true neoclassical style architecture in that in those spaces, you typically only see one of the orders of architecture represented in a home. So you would see Ionic or Doric or Corinthian. But when we get to neoclassical revival in this part of the early 20th century, we're going to throw it all in and mix it up. Let's go to the Moorish room. Well, here we are in what is known as the Moorish room. At the turn of the 20th century, the interest in the Middle East was riotous. Moorish architecture, anything Middle Eastern in influence was very, very, very popular. Entire neighborhoods were being built in a Middle Eastern form of architecture. And almost every large mansion of this scale is going to have at least one space devoted to that trendy style that was of the moment. And this is that space for the Hotzi house. Above me, you'll see a light fixture, a chandelier in that design. And we see on this style board, this is part of the original frieze that went around the room. You can see that it was this beautiful Middle Eastern design that ran the perimeter of the room. And then the ceiling was actually in gold leaf. So this room with its parquet floors, its dusty rose walls, its gold leaf ceiling, its beautiful frieze and this incredible chandelier probably decorated fully with Middle Eastern style furniture would have been a breathtaking showstopper. Now let's take a look at this glorious kitchen made modern for modern function. Located in the kitchen space is a door. Behind the door is an elevator that will take you to all four floors of the Hotzi house, and there's a laundry chute. Now let's take a walk up this glorious mahogany staircase on your way up. Take a close look at the volute on top of these mahogany capitals. These are exquisitely hand carved. Each centimeter of this capital has beautiful detail in it, far more exceeding, far more than what we normally see, even in houses of this magnitude. You can tell the interior of this home was designed by a master. So let's go see what we find upstairs. Well, this home has something I've always dreamt of having. It has a dais. Now, what is a dais? A dais is a space that is specifically built with the intention of housing a band. This is a bandstand inside a house. Your string orchestra would have sat here and played because of the acoustics of the home, the way the home is designed. The music would have filtered out the windows, into the lawn, down into the first floor. It would have been completely audible throughout the home, but the band would have been completely hidden from sight. This is the early 20th century version of surround sound. For lack of a better word, this is where it would have happened. On the second floor, you're going to find six bedrooms and six bathrooms, which we're going to take you through here in just a minute. But we're starting in my favorite room on the second floor, the billiard room. This glorious raised oak paneling that surrounds the room is absolutely beautiful. But the treasure in this room is the tapestry wall covering that's original to the Hoetze house, original from the 1900 period. Originally, there was also a canvas wall covering that had a beautiful stencil detail that since deteriorated, gone. But we can see an example of the pattern on the card for this room. You can just imagine how glorious this was back in its heyday. Well, we're in the northwest bedroom, and from as far as we can tell, this is the main bedroom. But this is the thing about this home. Every single one of the bedrooms is huge. Every single one of the bedrooms has an en suite. This is the largest en suite with the largest closet. That's actually a walk in closet. So we think this would be your best bet for a main bedroom. But honestly, any of these glorious spaces would make an incredible main bedroom. So let's go take a peek at the rest of them. Thank you for joining us today on Preservation Travels with Lane and Kevin here at Our Restoration Nation. We hope you've enjoyed this look inside a one of a kind gilded age mansion. These are very rarely on the market. They're rarely open for us to get to see. Certainly not in this part of the country. And they're very rarely on the market. Now, having said that, let us remind you once again, we are not real estate agents. We don't represent the house. We make no guarantees about the house. We're merely sharing this architectural treasure with you and hoping to share a little bit of architectural education. If you want to know about the house, anything we didn't show you, anything you didn't see here or you're interested in taking a look, we're going to link the Zillow information in the description. Again, thank you for joining us on Preservation Travels with Lane and Kevin. Don't forget to subscribe. Give us a thumbs up and follow our own restoration journey on our Restoring Our Victorian series, and we'll see you next time.