Lydig Munson Hoyt House
- "The Point"
Staatsburgh, NY, on the Hudson River
By Francis R. Kowsky (Web
site)
Architect: |
Calvert Vaux |
Erected: |
1855 |
1998 owner: |
State of New York There are no plans to restore the house |
See also: |
Calvert Vaux, Lydig Munson Hoyt House |
Click on illustrations for larger size |
Calvert Vaux (rhymes with "talks"), Architect |
Hoyt House |
Hoyt House |
Hoyt House floor plan |
Hoyt House floor plan |
"H" |
Front (south) elevation |
Front (south) elevation |
Front (south) elevation |
Front (south) main entrance porch |
Front (south) main entrance porch |
Front (south) main
entrance porch. |
Front (south) main
entrance porch |
Front (south) main
entrance porch. |
|
Left side (west) elevation |
Left side (west). |
Left side (west).
|
Rear (north) elevation |
Rear (north) elevation. Note quoins |
Rear (north) elevation |
Rear (north) elevation |
Detail: Vergeboard |
Right side (east) elevation |
Right side (east) |
Perhaps
as early as 1853,Vaux undertook another important project on the Hudson, the house
and grounds for Lydig Munson Hoyt and his wife, Blanche Geraldine Livingston, at
Staatsburg, New York. Although the plans for this Gothic stone dwelling are dated
1855, Vaux must have consulted with Hoyt about charting the 92-acre farm and pleasure
grounds somewhat earlier. The delay in determining the plans may have been related
to the time it took the Hoyts to acquire their land.
In August 1852, Lydig Hoyt, the heir of a wealthy New York City merchant, had purchased
62 acres, but it was another two years before his wife, a descendent of Governor
Morgan Lewis, received a portion of the adjacent Lewis-Livingston property from her
mother. Furthermore, Vaux himself testified that it took a while for him and the
owners to agree on the best location for the house. Featured as Design 26 in "Villas
and Cottages," the building was finished by the time the book appeared
in February 1857.
The Hoyts had acquired a wooded promontory jutting into a broad bend in the
Hudson a few mile, south of Montgomery Place. It aptly bore the name its owners gave
it: the Point. To the west and north, the property enjoyed expansive river views.
It was also far enough removed from the tracks of the Hudson River Railroad that
the noise of passing trains, which marred the solitude of Washington Irving at Sunnyside
and many other riparian homeowners on the east side of the valley, did not reach
the Point.
The Hoyts' gently undulating land supported many fine trees and offered numerous
opportunities for Vaux to try out the landscape design skills he must have sharpened
under Downing's tutelage.
With his guiding principle in mind that the "great charm in the forms of natural
landscape lies in its well-balanced irregularity," Vaux proceeded to lay out
roads and to site the house and other buildings with the aim of preserving and enhancing
the rich treasure of scenery that nature had stored up at the Point.
Continuing an existing farm road that entered the property from the Albany Post Road,
Vaux conducted the visitor to the house along a winding course that offered many
charming vignettes of country life. Rounding an upland marsh, the drive hugged the
base of a forested ridge while offering the traveler bucolic glimpses of cattle grazing
in open meadowland across the way. Where the road rose to the top of a small ridge,
Vaux located a brick stable (replaced in the early twentieth century by a larger
structure). Here the road forked, one branch turning northward to a farm cottage
and vegetable garden and the other veering south, through a shallow ravine and up
again to the site of the house. (A third road led from the stable to a deepwater
dock, the ownership of which the Livingston family retained).
Following this three-quarter-mile approach road today, one can still appreciate the
care with which Vaux adapted its twistings and turnings to the singularity of the
ground Along this shady lane, we can almost hear Vaux reciting the words that he
wrote on planning rural drives " A single existing tree," he said, "ought
often to be all-sufficient reason of slightly diverting the line of a road, so as
to take advantage of its shade, instead of cutting it down and grubbing up its roots.
The accumulated influences of study, travel, sketching, and life with Downing that
had formed Vaux's attitude toward landscape design had reached maturity by the time
he laid out the drives and otherwise arranged the Hoyt property. And although the
landscape stands in need of restoration, it is still poignantly evocative of its
past beauty.
The most difficult problem Vaux encountered was that of finding the right location
for the house. After much deliberation, he fixed upon the spot that commanded the
best views of the river. This elevated area, however, was uneven and had many handsome
trees that merited preservation, factors that came to play a role in the design of
the house itself. Rather than fill in the land around the site to make level lawns,
like those that stretched behind the Parish villa,Vaux chose to keep "a varied
outline and picturesque effect in the immediate vicinity of the house" by retaining
the naturally shaping land on all sides of the dwelling. On this god-given pedestal,
Vaux erected a grand building using bluestone quarried on the property. This granite-hard
rock, once it weathered, assumed a soft gray tonality that in this particular situation
Vaux thought was far more beautiful "than any brownstone, marble or brick."
He set it off with brownstone trim and dark red mortar joints. From the road, one's
first view of this profoundly site-specific house is the animated east facade, above
which a large overhanging dormer holds genial vigil over the approach. As one rounds
the bend, the more sedate main facade on the south, with its powerfully projected
twin gables, comes into view.
The centerpiece of this symmetrical facade is the boldly protruding brownstone porch.
Manifesting and sheltering the front door, this arched and buttressed gateway to
the interior bestows a certain drama on the action of entry. Indeed, the porch, maintained
Vaux, was the part of the house that first "appeals to the attention of the
visitor," and he used the Hoyt house example in "Villas and Cottages"
to demonstrate how this feature could be treated on the most liberal scale. In the
warmer months, the emphatic architectural statement of welcome was to be enhanced
by abundant plants. For as Vaux remarked about a similar porch on the Alexander Wright
house (c. 1853) in Goshen, New York, the balcony served the women of the family as
a place to cultivate potted flowers. The porch also gave access to the wooden verandas
on either side of it, joining them together. On the occasion of summer parties, Vaux
suggested hanging calico curtains behind the veranda posts, over which vines should
be trained to grow. The enchanting effect of such a "leafy gallery," he
reflected, was especially "cool and elegant" when set off by lamplight
at night. Used in this way, the porch and verandas became festive outdoor rooms.
After the site was fixed, said Vaux, "it then became a question how to suit
the design of the house to the formation of the ground." To meet the challenge,
Vaux planned a compact, square building and avoided wasting pretty views on a service
wing (a usual feature on a house of this size) by putting the kitchen in the basement.
The rooms of the principal floor were spacious and thoughtfully adapted to the special
outlook the house enjoyed. From the entrance hall, one had access on the west to
a 24' x 18' drawing room and an equally large billiard room, a feature that marked
this as the home of a man of leisure (Lydig Hoyt, whom George Templeton Strong remembered
as a man fond of poetic expression, also took pride in his library, for which Vaux
designed the bookcases, an oak fireplace, and an ornamental plaster ceiling.
The dining room of neatly the same dimensions on the north expanded into a large
bay window that called one's attention to the beautiful water and mountain scenery
upriver. These three living rooms opened onto a large terrace that allowed guests
to view the river in the open air beneath the cover of a large hood. This novel canopy
was sustained by overhead chains rather than by supporting posts, which would have
obstructed the views from inside the house.
This magnificent dwelling now stands boarded up and silently communing with the river
in a setting uncommonly lovely and remote. Fortunately, the State of New York (the
present owner) is committed to restoring this masterpiece of High Victorian discourse
between architecture and nature.