The Board of Trustees of the Charles Hosmer Morse Foundation has announced that the Morse Museum has begun design development on a new wing in which to exhibit most of its holdings of objects and architectural elements from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Long Island country estate, Laurelton Hall.
The expansion project would add about 10,000 square feet of interior space, including additional offices, to the museum’s existing building and triple the size of the outside courtyard garden to 4,450 square feet.
The Daffodil Terrace from Laurelton Hall is to be an architectural focal point of the addition. Tiffany designed the terrace, an outdoor room measuring 32 feet long by 18 feet wide, around 1914 as an extension of the house into his gardens. The terrace is supported by eight faceted marble columns topped with bouquets of yellow daffodils crafted in glass.
Enlarging the museum’s garden area would allow visitors to view the Daffodil Terrace in a natural setting. The terrace, which has never been on view in Winter Park, would be enclosed by glass walls.
“Tiffany meant Laurelton Hall to be his legacy,” said Harold Ward, chairman and president of the Morse Foundation. “In creating a permanent installation for works from that magnificent estate, we believe we will contribute to the understand and appreciation of Tiffany by the general public and provide an important resource for scholars.”
The museum estimates it will be able to break ground on the new wing as early as next winter, which would allow the addition to open to the public by the spring of 2010.
Rogers, Lovelock and Fritz, Inc (RLF), a nationally recognized architecture, engineering and interior design firm based in Winter Park, will design the new wing and Ravensdale Planning & Design, also of Winter Park, the expanded courtyard garden.
George Sexton Associates of Washington, D.C., will provide lighting and exhibition design for the expansion. Griswold Conservation Associates LLC of Beverly Hills, Calif., will oversee the erection of the Daffodil Terrace and other architectural elements.
Laurelton Hall, built between 1902 and 1905 on Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, is often cited as Tiffany’s greatest work of art. In his 84-room mansion, set on almost 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound, Tiffany integrated all the influences of his life †nature, color, light and the art of Eastern and Islamic cultures †into one rapturous whole. Eventually the estate became a school for young artists and a museum housing many of the artist’s most important works.
Laurelton Hall was destroyed by fire in 1957. Hugh F. McKean and his wife Jeannette, who together built the Morse Museum’s collection throughout a 50-year period, salvaged architectural elements, windows and other objects from the ruins of the estate. The Morse, today home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Tiffany, is the largest single repository of surviving materials from Laurelton Hall.
Although the museum’s Laurelton Hall materials returned from a loan to the Metropolitan Museum in New York a year ago and a few objects are now on exhibit, the Morse has had no room to display the Daffodil Terrace, the marble mantelpiece or important leaded glass windows also rescued from the estate.
Besides the Daffodil Terrace, permanent exhibits in the new wing would include the surviving components of the Laurelton Hall dining room: the marble mantel, a painted cherry table with chairs, a 25-foot Oriental rug, a domed leaded glass chandelier 6½ feet in diameter and a suite of six leaded glass Wisteria transoms through which a visitor to Tiffany’s estate would have first observed the Daffodil terrace.
For additional information, www.morsemuseum.org or 407-645-5311.
