Designer Lee W. Robinson’s Old Kentucky Home

Hello, Glampad, welcome to my home, Malvern House. I'm Lee W. Robinson in Kentucky, and I want to give you a quick tour. Come on in. Hello, Glampad, welcome to my home, Malvern House. I'm Lee W. Robinson in Kentucky, and I want to give you a quick tour. Come on in. So Malvern House was built by my wife's great grandparents on property owned by my wife's great great grandparents since the late 1800s, and it was three square miles overlooking the Ohio River. The house had Ogden Cobman as the architect, and all the grounds and gardens, formal gardens, were done by Olmsted. So this would be what I consider a gilded age house for Louisville, Kentucky. Babs family was in business in New York, so they knew people in New York. Companies were based in New York, etc. So they went to Newport. They saw Ogden Cobman and Vanderbilt houses. So that's why you'll see a lot of things in this house that you would see in Newport or in old New York townhouses. You'll see the limestone block walls in here. You'll see the black and white marble foyer floors, and you'll see French doors and you'll see all of these big stone cased pediments around the doorways. All the doors are mahogany. Sloan & Company from New York did all the paneling and wainscoting in the house. Charles of London, Charles Duveen also helped decorate this house, took the family over to Europe and bought several pieces of art to fit in all the moldings that were designed here. So a lot of these pieces have been here since the house was built. I am all about the five senses. It's all about the scent. It's all about the texture. You know, I've got velvets, I've got silks, all sorts of things that feel good. Usually when we have a party, we have something to taste, something to eat. So we have that taken care of. Oh, I have music. I have Sonos and, you know, speakers in every room. So this house is fully modernized. So, you know, the five senses are very key with me. I think everything needs to kind of be vibrant. I should travel, as Diana Vreeland said. So I think every room, I think your eye kind of wants to wander and just kind of go from corner to corner. So that makes it fun. So let's go on to some other rooms. So next room, guys, I'm going to take you into the dining room. But before we do that, I just want to have your eye go over. This is one of the few houses in Kentucky that has a marble staircase. The shallow steps really come in handy. Now, we do have an elevator here. So when I'm 100, I guess somebody will roll me into that and I'll get upstairs. But in the meantime, these shallow steps help. So that's one thing that's nice. Let's go into the dining room next and see what we have in store for you in here. So this table was from the Shawcross Speed family and they started the Speed Museum and they also invented or started a company called Global Cement. So the Speed family were very good friends of the Cox's. And when my good friend John Speed was downsizing, he said, Lee, you all need to have this table in your house. And we put it in the house because we did not get Babs grandmother's table or the chairs. So we had these chairs and these are period chairs, of course. Not everything is for a party. I mean, we could sit around. This is a supper table. Sometimes we'll just put supper out on here, casual supper and let people sit wherever they want. All right, let's go on into the drawing room. OK, so here in the drawing room, all this mold and the paneling was done by Sloan and Company from New York. And Mr. Sloan married to Vanderbilt. And, you know, that was kind of his connection to all the old gilded age houses of Newport, et cetera. So Sloan and Company was around for many years on Fifth Avenue. And I'm going to now tell you a little bit about some of these fun things that we've got. I am a collector. You can tell that you can't put anything down in here because everything's got a provenance. One of my favorite things is this micro mosaic cross. But you can see all of this is St. Peter's, you know, the Vatican, and it's all done out of micro mosaics. So I think that's kind of fun. I love Russian art. So we've got things in here that those are some Fabergé cufflinks. And the infant of Prague crown, which used to be on baby Jesus's head in the cathedral in Prague, and it disappeared during World War II was since replaced, came up for auction. No one took issue with it. I bought it and here it is in Kentucky. In today's world, people don't really entertain where they eat off dessert sets like this. And these used to be in this house and people did have dessert off these. But now I decided they bring life to a bookcase because bookcases are always dark. And I mix a little bit of a reflective quality of the silver in here. And then, you know, some of the bindings of the books have a little gold in there and some color. And I think it all works nicely together. It gives it kind of this aged patina. But yet it makes the eye travel again, as I said earlier. And I think that makes it fun and a little more unexpected. Everybody says, what is this for? What in the world do you use this for? So the fruit would go up here and this would be full of ice and it would keep the fruit from rotting. So that's what they used to use these for. I love icons, Russian icons. I think they're fun. And this table was Sarah McNeil Fuse and it was at Hershberg along with these lamps. So now let's go to the next room where we have fun. It's called the music room. All right. In the music room, you're going to see a wallpaper here that I really put a lot of time and effort into. And there's a house, the U.S. ambassador's house over in London called Winfield House, built by Barbara Hutton back in the days when I guess it was the 30s, when, you know, people were getting kidnapped, et cetera. She had one child, so she really had the top security you could have in a home when she decided to live in London. And after she was finished with the house, she gave it to the U.S. government and it became where the ambassador lives, the ambassador's residence. It's in Regent's Park. But they have a room that had this wallpaper and I fell in love with this wallpaper. So I had it replicated. And this is on tea paper. You can see and it's all hand painted. You know, of course, the architect had to draw out all the room with the arches, get the angles correct so that they could make it to go there. But I wanted a modern element to add in here. So if you look at the dado or chair rail, you'll see below that I have aged mirror fretwork panels as the wainscoting. And you'll also see that around the crown molding. You'll see the aged mirror and the fretwork around the crown molding at the top of the ceiling. I think that just adds interest and kind of a little bit of modernity to this to make it kind of fun and just kind of a talking point. This piano, we've had Bob Harbrook play that before. I mean, it's it's a fun room and all the doors can be thrown open at a minute's notice. One thing that I think is fun is this mirror. Look at the little pagoda rooftop at the top of it. I think that's kind of cool. But it's, you know, kind of the chinoiserie style to kind of match this room. Kind of have a lot of Asian influence out here. This coffee table, you'll see the Malachite collections. So, yeah, I mean, this room, I would say, is inspired by the Asian culture. Now we're going to go into the morning room that gets the morning sun. It's not because we're crying in here all the time in the morning room. You'll see that these panels, all this English pickled pine was brought in. It was an actual room in England. You'll see that the ceiling is about a foot lower in this room than the other rooms of the house. And that's because this room was disassembled in England and reassembled here. For instance, the door over there is a door to nowhere that goes to a closet. But you can see from all these lock sets that this was a very old room. In England. I think it's kind of interesting that all the hardware, you can see the hinges, everything were brought intact. So it's an interesting, interesting room. So this is our flop and drop room. A great fire usually is roaring in the winter. Again, the light pours in in the in the morning. As you can tell, this is around five o'clock. All right, guys, I don't often give everybody a tour of the ladies room, but I think our ladies room is unique enough. It warrants a quick little tour. We won't show you all the elements, but just the tasteful ones. In here, I decided to do mirrored wainscoting because I always think a lady's room should have an ante room in front of it. And this one always did. I just recently acquired Mary Lou Whitney's dresser set, which is great. It has Mary Lou Schroeder Whitney, her monogram on everything. But the bonus was one of the mirrors that came with it. I got it at Doyle's and it just arrived last week. One of the mirrors is Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt. And then I always like glass lamps for a dressing table. I just like to keep everything light and airy and reflective. In this room, I have more silver leafed wallpaper that's hand painted. And this is on T-paper as well. And this was done in New York. And I had this applied. The onyx floor was not original. I had this put down with the Schluter brush, Schluter strips that you use for terrazzo. So one of the things Ogden Codman always did in his houses is he designed a men's room and a ladies room. So he designed these Gilded Age homes to be more like a club. Really, if you think about it, you know, the men were on one side of the house and the ladies on the other when they needed to hit the toilet. So this is the men's room. And I've updated this. You'll see the malachite wallpaper, the black quartz floor with the brass Schluter strips. So I'll let you look at that. And there's also another stained glass element in there. This house, because the Olmstead Gardens always had this flower room here where they would bring fresh flowers in through that door from the gardens and they would have fresh flower arrangements at all times. Vases to the left, the flowers arranged on the right. So I just think that's an interesting thing. I have a collection of baskets over here so we can take them to the garden and cut flowers ourselves since we don't have the people that flower, do the arrangements in the house. So anyway, some things do change over time. Hello there. I think most of you all know I'm kind of known as a silver collector. So here's the silver vault. And I kind of keep everything in a very disorganized slash organized sort of way. But everything does have its place hanging on hooks. I don't treat everything so preciously. I don't mind a ding every now and again. It just shows we live with it. So you can see all this is Pacific cloth. It's upholstered in Pacific cloth, the whole room, which is treated. And it makes its best effort at keeping the silver where it's not tarnished at all times. Now, I will say you have to freshen it up sometimes when you take it out. But for the most part, we're party ready. For those of you that are familiar with my Instagram, welcome to my bar, which should feel like your second home. We do a lot of shots in here. This is where I make all sorts of fabulous Kentucky drinks. But the thing about this that I love is that it kind of has an old world feel again, the stained glass window. And this used to be a dining room where the staff used to have their meals.