MARCH 2007 »  book review

Residential Splendor

American Houses: The Architecture of Fairfax & Sammons
by Mary Miers
Rizzoli, New York, NY; 2006
254 pp.; hardcover; 200 color illus.; $60
ISBN 0-8478-2857-3

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Traditionalist architects are at last catching on to the sales power of weighty monographs. Competing with Modernist serial monographers like Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl, the traditionalists who have won over publishers so far include prolific southerners (William T. Baker, Ken Tate, Harrison Design Associates), institutional specialists (Robert A.M. Stern, David M. Schwarz), urban planners (Duany Plater-Zyberk), haut Classicists (Thomas Gordon Smith) and assorted Brits (John Simpson, Quinlan Terry, Demetri Porphyrios, Léon Krier). Many of these studies have been published by little-known houses, and at least a few are partially architect-financed. So what a surprising delight to see Rizzoli present this lavish volume about the New York City firm of Fairfax & Sammons.

Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons are eloquent, enthusiastic advocates for Classicism and preservation. They're tireless volunteers for good causes like The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, Merchant's House Museum and Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation. They've attracted a roster of prominent patrons including actors (Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Liv Tyler), culturati (the American Academy in Rome's Adele Chatfield-Taylor, playwright John Guare), law and media powerhouses (Steve Brill, Kimba Wood) and a duty-free-shopping tycoon (Robert Miller). Some clients commission apartments first and then country houses, returning devotedly for phase after phase.

This survey of the practice's first 14 years covers 14 from-scratch freestanding homes or major additions (either near New York or in Florida), six Manhattan apartments, an assortment of Greenwich Village townhouses, a block of spec rowhouses at Poundbury (the Prince of Wales' New Urbanist community in Dorset) and a proposed redesign of Marion Square in Charleston, SC. The "stylistic palette," as Chatfield-Taylor writes in the introduction, spans "Jacobean, Arts and Crafts (English and American), Colonial Revival, Palladian, Greek Revival, Rustic Mediterranean, British Colonial, Anglo-Italianate, and Anglo-Caribbean, to name a few."

Mary Miers, a British architectural historian, adeptly describes and analyzes each building – program, existing structures onsite and precedents – whether Rome's famed Palazzo Massimo or the more obscure interior of Kildowie in Maidenhead, England. She carefully lists materials, such as lime-mortared rubble stone or salvaged French-boxcar siding, and points out rarefied Classical ornament including pulvinated and strigillated friezes and stretched mutules. Most of the photographs were taken by Durston Saylor, a keen-eyed and dependable contributor to Architectural Digest. Working drawings appear alongside their realized versions.

All the ingredients, then, were in place for an appealing tome that would, if not exactly fly off bookstore shelves, then at least stand out amid the market's glut of oversize paeans to Richard Meier and Santiago Calatrava. So why did this product turn out so tepid?

The answer, in part, is that Miers devotes too much space to repeating information that is already clear from floor plans: "There is a guest-bedroom suite on the east side and the kitchen and breakfast room on the west, with bedrooms on the floor above." Saylor, for his part, too often lets bland furniture – what Miers calls "good old family antiques" – dominate the images. Not every client, of course, could be expected to own and display exotic, captivating collections. But the canopied beds and hunting trophies in this book blur together, and similar-looking overstuffed armchairs and upholstered ottomans are all pulled close to cozy fires blazing in bracketed chimneypieces.

Fairfax & Sammons' innovative details, meanwhile, get short shrift; only a handful of close-ups appear in the book. The text tantalizingly mentions design achievements that are only shown in low-resolution shots, or don't appear at all. Readers may find themselves squinting and scouring in vain for glimpses of "new moldings based on Minard Lafever's designs published in The Modern Builders Guide of 1833," or a Connecticut garage's "birdhouse (designed by Seth Weine) over a keystone formed of slates laid on their sides at the apex of the gable." The architects' fans will also lament the almost total lack of biographical insights. How has the practice and its aesthetic and scope of projects evolved? How do the partners collaborate? How does the work relate to that of other traditionalists past and present? How do the buildings typically grow from the seeds of preliminary meetings?

This volume will well serve prospective clients and the houses' current owners and future real estate brokers. But so much more could have been accomplished for the cause, so much more could have been illuminated about this important office and its role in traditionalism's rebirth. 

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