Winfield House

Could anything be more tying than hosting a party for Charles and Camilla?

Imagine it. You're sitting next to them and trying your best to live it up and make the whole thing interesting.

How to make a dinner for Charles and Camilla interesting? You have to be interesting yourself to fill the void.

More interesting would be to bring in two horses from the stables, sit between them and converse through the night.

Telling horse jokes.

"Here, Horse, have some Chantenay carrots." Those are the short fat ones. They were actually on the menu.

* Heritage tomatoes are heirloom tomatoes. 

* Fresh Burrata is mozzarella that's filled with wet stringy cheese and cream

* Maldon salt is finishing sea salt from Maldon that has a pyramidal crystal structure. Now, when you ship this the shaking during transportation breaks the pyramidal structure, obviously, and you end up with a box of regular sea salt. This happens to flake sea salt as well. My own preference, and it is a strong preference, is the Celtic sea salt sold pretty much everywhere. It's gray. And extremely mineral-y. It has less sodium than regular sea salt. Here on Amazon and here on eBay. Another finishing salt. I gave a package to a friend and he used it for the stupidest thing where regular table salt would work just as well. It made me cross because it showed me that he doesn't know how to appreciate the thing that I gave him. He didn't appreciate its cost.

* Pommes Anna are escalloped potatoes arranged neatly as a tort.

* Grilled filet of beef is beef tenderloin. Extremely tender but no flavor, so the flavor comes from the grill. 

* Muscavado sugar is partially refined sugar with strong molasses flavor, similar to brown sugar, except original brown sugar, not modern style that is regular fully refined sugar with molasses added back into it. 

So we see the dinner is extremely light. Light as a feather. Everything barely cooked. And small amounts of everything. All these people eat very well and the trick to avoid adding two hundred pounds is to eat lightly each meal. They make it sound more extravagant with fancy handwriting and precise names for standard preparations. The horses get carrots like everyone else. There are no rich French sauces specified. No butter. No cream, except the homemade ice cream.

Two scoops!

It's hard to image a more tortuous evening. Sitting next to Charles and his wife. Did you read the love letters he wrote to her? Hang on. I have to go to hurl my guts again. Trump deserves giving himself a medal of freedom just for this one evening.

Know what's 100X more interesting than Charles and Camilla? The American house that that they're in.

The thing about gigantic homes is there is only so many things you can put into them. It goes, sofa, table, lamp, table, lamp, chair, chair, coffee table, sofa, table, lamp, table, lamp, chair, chair, chair, coffee table, rug, cabinet, small bronze statue, matching mirrors, vase, seating area, seating area, seating area, oil painting, elaborate frame, elaborate frame, wallpaper, curtains, curtains, curtains, curtains, chandeliers and so on.

The things that could make them interesting are not done. The outside is not brought inside. Trees will not be growing out of the floors, no interior treehouses for children, no rope swings, no trampolines, no sliding boards, no fish ponds built into the floors, no see saws, no sporting surfaces, no track around the perimeter, no trains you can ride, no fences to leap, no nets across the center, no throwing or kicking of balls, no end zones, taxidermy but no live wild animals to admire or hunt save for the occasional parrot, no snakes or roaming iguanas no animals that randomly drop poo. No uncaged monkeys, no equines, no birds flying free.

No suits of armor because this is a modern American house. And we didn't have those things.

And even rooms named "garden room" and fitted with eight large windows allowing abundant light from two directions will not be filled with live plants. Those are for outside and for the greenhouse. Rather, they'll feature wallpaper depicting outdoor life and cut flowers in vases and floral patterns in fabrics on furniture and on walls, and rugs.  

That said, some are done extraordinarily well starting with the interior architecture, pillars, crown molding, paneling, windows, painted plinths and lintels, staircases and railings, and fireplaces.

There are only a few large rooms of interest, and the upper bedrooms are not shown. But check it out over the decades.

Pink and green. Outrageous! But subtle. They're all light tones.

The wallpaper is older than the house. It's been carefully removed and stored during renovations, repaired and put back up. It's Chinese. It shows branches and birds.

In my opinion the green and pink combination is the best. Other variations are more subtle. Green on green, mostly sage shade. It's called the "garden room" so you could expect extravagant plants. But no. It invokes a garden by being green and the floral shades, porcelain, fabrics, wallpaper, cut flowers, but not actual plants.

If I owned this room with all this light I'd have huge ficus trees and outrageous palms.

If you like, Iowa state produced a 360° interactive website of the house; from various exterior points and from various interior rooms. It's ... underwhelming. Basically a museum. But still more interesting than Charles and Camilla.

Winfield House occupies twelve and a half acres of Regent's Park. The land was once part of the great forest where Henry VIII hunted and Queen Elizabeth I entertained dignitaries. King James I used the land as collateral to go to war and King Charles II had the whole area "disparked." Lord Arlington was given one of the first private leases at the end of the 17th century.

The land stayed countryside until the nineteenth century when John Nash began an elaborate plan for fifty-six villas and a zoo. Only eight villas were built, the largest in Italianate style featuring a hexastyle portico of Corinthian columns was on the site of present day American Ambassador's residence.

The house was partially destroyed by fire in 1936 and purchased by Barbara Hutton, twenty-four-year-old heiress married to Count Haugwitz-Reventlow. She had inherited $40 million from her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth, founder of the Woolworth stores.

Friends suggested the property as a good site for the kind of home with greater security that Barbara Hutton was seeking after receiving credible threats of kidnapping their son. They received permission to tear down the old building and replace it with a red brick Georgian style house.

Leonard Rome Guthrie was commissioned to design the house, two decorators were hired, one for carpets and French furniture, another for furnishing, colors, and fabrics.

Oak floors were laid, French paneling installed, marble bathrooms fitted, several thousand trees and hedges were planted, a high steel fence erected and modern security system installed.

They moved into the house in 1937. The place held a lot of oil paintings, a few later given to National Gallery in Washington, Louis XV furniture, carpets, and objects d'art.

Their life there together didn't last long.

In 1939 Barbara Hutton's  marriage to Count Reventlow was ending and she returned to America.

The house was commandeered by RAF barrage balloon unit during the second world war.

Barbara Hutton married Carry Grant.

Everyone knows Carry Grant was a big homo but he defended his wife's honor nonetheless. Edward Murrow criticized Hutton for abandoning her home. Grant called the journalist and told him to go see the place for himself. Murrow apologized on his next broadcast. Grant wanted Hutton acknowledged for her generosity.

The house was used as Air Crew Reception Center for recruits being screened as prospective RAF pilots. German bombs exploding nearby damaged the roof and the floors were ruined by moisture. The house was later used as an American officer's club

After the war Hutton returned to visit the house and found the floorboards buckled, the walls peeling, the windows broken and wires dangling. She gave the house to the U.S. government to be repaired and used as official residence for American Ambassador. Her offer was accepted by Harry Truman.

The house has since received significant gifts in the form of antique furniture, paintings, chandeliers, object d'art, porcelain, china, and glass.

The first American Ambassador to use the house was Winthrop Aldrich in 1955.

Then John Whitney in 1957 who rebuilt the greenhouses and added two extensions. They also left seventy paintings.

Ambassador David Bruce moved into the house in 1960s and hosted extravagant parties.

Ambassador Walter Annenberg refurbished the house top to bottom between 1969 and 1974 by modernizing the infrastructure and adding a new roof, and refurnishing it with paintings and valuable object d'art, a chandelier and redecorating the bedrooms.

Then Ambassador Elliot Richardson in 1975 and Ambassador Anne Armstrong a year later.

Generous Americans who are not ambassadors also contributed to the house. Businessman Rionda Braga donated the bronze sculpture, "The Creation of Adam"

Mr. Braga felt the motif of two hands inside a globe represented British and American friendship.

Pfft.

That again. They keep propounding that ridiculous conceit that must overlook we had to have a war of great hardship and actually die to break away from these people and they still came back later to kick our butts.

Burned. down. our. capitol.

They keep saying "unique friendship" and I'll keep reminding them of that.

And now we have Steele dossier to add to the list of grievances about destructive British arrogance and interference.

Okay, I'm done with this stupid house.

There were very many renovations catalogued in fine detail but I'm suddenly tired of thinking about an American house in England. Burn it down and call it quits for all that I care.

You might ask, hey, wasn't Joseph Kennedy ambassador to England? Why isn't he mentioned in this?

Yes. Kennedy was ambassador from 1938 to 1940. He pissed off Roosevelt about the chances for British survival by saying publicly during the battle of Britain that democracy in England is finished.

Ha! How prescient. But he was talking about something else. If he only knew what would become of the place he'd be even more emphatic.