In past blog posts we’ve shared the history of a number of special pieces from our collection. Now we’d like to share the history of the building that houses them: a mansion designed in 1930 by the famous architect John Russell Pope for Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt!

Mrs. Vanderbilt, the ex-wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt II (1878-1944), was one of American’s most illustrious personalities — a socialite and philanthropist, whose inheritance from her wealthy father had allowed her to commission a number of grand buildings throughout her life. The mansion on 93rd Street would be the last of these. Pope succeeded in designing a three-story residence for Mrs. Vanderbilt in the Neoclassical French style, perfectly evocative of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Pope (1874-1937) was one of the most famous architects of the time, to design the mansion on 93rd Street. After earning his architectural degree from Columbia University in 1894, Pope had won a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and spent the next few years in Europe, winning the Prix Jean Leclaire during his studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the Premiere Seconde Medaille for the restoration of the wells in the the hospital of St. Jean d’Angers. Pope returned to New York in 1900 and worked for a few years under Bruce Price before opening his own practice.





The mansion was designed in the Neoclassical French style, mirroring Pope’s experiences and successful years of study in Paris, and demonstrating his characteristic sense of proportion and efficiency. The house was separated into two sections: a three-story residence for Mrs. Vanderbilt and her guests, and a seven-story servants’ quarters, which Pope skillfully arranged to allow the house to be run with seamless elegance. No extraneous rooms or passageways existed, and while the ceilings in the residential portions of the house rose up to fifteen feet, Pope added gave the servants’ quarters low ceilings, and added mezzanine levels to increase the space available for storage and preparation. He kept the two domains completely private from each other, not only through his ingenious floor plan, but also by means of padded doors, separate elevators and staircases for each half of the house, and a dumbwaiter that ran from the kitchen straight to Ms. Vanderbilt’s bedroom.

No expense was spared in the materials used in the house. The grand staircase and all of the woodwork were made from mahogany; the locks and hinges were hand-chiseled, engraved and gilded by Bricard in Paris; the limestone used on the façade and the interior entrance-way was brought in from France; and on the first and second levels the flooring was custom-made to match the antique parquet used on the third floor. A balcony on the second level had a trellis crowned with a lead-coated ziggurat-patterned copper cornice. When the mansion was converted back to a residence in the early 2000s, great care was taken to restore its materials according to their original design. Limestone was acquired from the same quarry; all of the original hinges were kept; the floors were restored or replaced using old methods and solid woods. A team of antique furniture restorers worked for eighteen months on the woodwork, and the walls were restored by hand in the old-fashioned plastering method. All modern services, including heating and air conditioning, were incorporated into the existing ducts, to leave the proportions of the rooms exactly as Pope had designed them.

After Birdie’s death in 1935, the mansion was bought by Chrysler daughter Thelma Foy, who redecorated the interior with 18th-century French furniture, and hosted many large parties there. The house then became the Permanent Mission of Romania to the United Nations in 1957. In 1978 it was bought by the Lycée Français de New York, and remained a school until it was sold in 2002 to be converted back to a private residence. The mansion has been listed on the National Registry of Historic Places since 1982.