An In-Depth Look at Huguette Clark's Dollhouse Obsession | Armonk NY Real Estate
Photo courtesy of The Estate of Huguette M. Clark, from the book Empty Mansions via Bill DedmanWhereas mogul William A. Clark, a copper baron and politician who died in 1925, had exacting standards for his eye-popping mansions—his Fifth Avenue manor on NYC's 77th Street had 121 rooms, 30 bathrooms, and a golden chamber that well put the "gilded" in the Gilded Age—his daughter, reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, whose 2011 death spurred a tangle of slogging inheritance battles, siphoned her energies and cash into home details on a much tinier scale. One of her Japanese miniatures, for example, required getting special permission from the Japanese government to use rare cedar reserved solely for imperial buildings. She spent $80K to get it built. "You could call them dollhouses, but they were really historical art projects," said investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who—quite literally—wrote the book on Huguette Clark's houses, large and small. "Like her father with his art collection, Huguette spared no expense," he writes in Empty Mansions (Ballantine Books, 2013), which he co-authored with Clark's cousin, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
Clark's miniature houses came in two main varieties: storybook and historical. For the former, she commissioned a dollhouse maker in Germany to build tabletop dioramas depicting the best parts of fairytales such as Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Rumpelstiltskin. Roughly the size of a desktop printer, they were, as Dedman writes, "story houses, theaters with scenes and characters painted on the walls. ... religious houses with Joan of Arc, forts with toy soldiers, cottages with scenes from old French fables, and house after house telling her favorite fairy tales."
Clark, who had a great interest in Japan of the late 1800s, also commissioned historically accurate miniatures of Japanese houses and temples. "She developed an incredible knowledge about the art and culture of Japan," Clark's Japanese artist liaison, Caterina Marsh, tells Dedman. "It was astonishing what she knew, all the legends and folklore. To me, she was the last of an era."
http://curbed.com/archives/2013/09/26/huguette-clark-dollhouse-wip.php
Clark, who had a great interest in Japan of the late 1800s, also commissioned historically accurate miniatures of Japanese houses and temples. "She developed an incredible knowledge about the art and culture of Japan," Clark's Japanese artist liaison, Caterina Marsh, tells Dedman. "It was astonishing what she knew, all the legends and folklore. To me, she was the last of an era."
http://curbed.com/archives/2013/09/26/huguette-clark-dollhouse-wip.php
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