Caroline Seebohm's Colorful Book Reveals New Jersey's Secret Treasures

Stuart Mitchner

With New Jersey – to misquote the Rolling Stones – you don't always get what you want but sometimes you may get more than you ever expected even in your wildest dreams. For example: Caroline Seebohm's beautiful book Great Houses and Gardens of New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, $39.95) with photographs by Peter C. Cook that were surely taken in Devon or the Cotswolds or the Berkshires or the south of France. Anywhere but New Jersey, which is supposed to be, in the words of the introduction, "the butt of comedians' jokes, the scorn of restaurant critics, the symbolic home of organized crime, and the nightmare of drivers traversing its interstate highways to get somewhere better!" In a book that claims "great houses and gardens" for our much-maligned state, the chemistry works brilliantly since a preconceived notion of Jersey grit makes an excellent foil for the visions of beauty presented and described in this big but not unwieldy volume. Open it and you, who may have smiled at the world-class vulgarity of Tony Soprano's dream house on a hill, will find truly world-class mansions and gardens on hills, riverside and seaside, or right here in Princeton.

There are so-called coffee table books and home and garden books and then there are books like this one where the images are more than merely decorative or informative. In Peter Cook's photographs, especially the full page pictures that open chapters on each of the 23 homes and gardens, the colors are so deep and the detail so rich you seem to feel the light and air of the moment they were photographed. The patterned-brick facade of an early 18th-century house in Salem County is shot in vivid contrast to a sky so blue it might have been painted. The snowy view of a white, terra-cotta-tile-roofed Mediterranean mansion in Bernardsville occupies a place near the center of the book, giving it the effect of a winter vision surrounded by inviting sunny or shady vistas you can imagine entering – walking under the wrought-iron archway into a wild cottage garden in Linwood or the richly detailed display of dogwood, azalea and mountain laurel in an Eden transformed from wild woods and swamp in the Atlantic Highlands.

A former staffer at House & Garden magazine, Caroline Seebohm gives expert accounts of the histories, the styles, and the owners past and present, among them interior decorators, art historians, and architects (no surprise), university presidents, a newspaper publisher, and a professor of philsophy who doubles as a garden columnist (his "dual passions...dahlias and Descartes"). The architects and designers involved include Richard Meier, Robert Venturi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley, and Princeton's own Michael Graves, who, along with designing two hotels for Walt Disney World and household objects like alarm clocks and tea kettles, turned the central New Jersey cow barn featured here into a habitable work of art.

Three Princeton houses are represented. One is the imposing Tudor structure near the Battlefield known in the text simply as the Barn. The British may have lost the battle and the war but the Tudor influence employed by architect Raleigh Gildersleeve lives on, not only in the Barn's two half-timbered towers but in the heart of Princeton in the quaint Elizabethan presence of the building housing Hamilton Jewelers, formerly one of the Pyne dormitories. In fact it was Moses Taylor Pyne who conceived and commissioned the Barn in the late 1890s after being "swept up in the current fad for model farming," according to Ms. Seebohm, who playfully adds that the Barn was meant to "accomodate his beautifully conceived herds of cattle and sheep." The author's light touch makes the book easy to read and is also in evidence in the dust jacket photo of herself and Mr. Cook, posed as the farmer and his wife in Grant Woods's American Gothic.

The second Princeton house dates back to before 1763 when it was bought by Captain William Howard who named it Castle Howard after Sir John Vanbrugh's Castle Howard in Yorkshire (the British connection again). Three of its owners bore the title of captain, the last being a Quaker sea captain most noted for supporting a rally in Princeton to raise money on behalf of a runaway slave. Although the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 requiring the return of escaped slaves was still in effect, the money raised by local Princetonians enabled them to buy the slave's freedom. Castle Howard's other notable Princeton connection was to athletic hero Hobey Baker, whose father bought it to be near his son.

The third Princeton home featured in Great Houses and Gardens of New Jersey is on Cleveland Lane. Yet another half-timbered Tudor revival house, its most famous owner was Woodrow Wilson, who moved in after becoming governor of New Jersey. Its most notable feature, however, is its dazzling garden, known as Hester Garden for its owner, James Hester, president of the New York Botanical Garden.

To call these homes and gardens New Jersey's secret treasures is not a figure of speech. As the author mentions at the outset, the only criteria for inclusion in the book were that the house or garden had to be privately owned and not open to the public. The Garden State's best-kept secrets are its gardens, and if, while admiring the beauties on display in these pages, you begin to feel you are in an art exhibit, remember: people live in these works of art.