Elle Decor: Jackie Kennedy

ELLE DECOR

NOVEMBER 2024

HOW JACKIE KENNEDY GAVE THE WHITE HOUSE—AND AMERICA—ITS HISTORY BACK

by DAVID NASH
Photography: CBS Photo Archive // Getty Images

Thank you @elledecor and @davidbryannash for including my thoughts about Jackie Kennedy’s incredible project of restoring the White House and making it into the people’s museum!

“Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there.” As election day approaches, Jackie Kennedy’s words from 1961 feel particularly poignant. Her vision transformed the White House from just a presidential residence into America’s most important living museum, setting a standard for preservation that still resonates today.

At just 31, she orchestrated what designer Glenn Gissler calls “a herculean task,” bringing history back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Jackie’s mission wasn’t about redecorating – a word she equated with “sacrilege” — but about resurrection.

“Well, I really don’t have one, because I think this house will always grow and should,” she replied. “It just seemed to me such a shame when we came here to find hardly anything of the past in the house—hardly anything before 1902. I know when we went to Colombia, the Presidential Palace there has all the history of their country in it…every piece of furniture in it has some link with the past, [and] I thought the White House should be like that.”

And that’s something New York-based designer Glenn Gissler (whose own interest in historic preservation spans decades) can agree with. “She didn’t use [the restoration] as an opportunity to express herself, but rather to express the history of America,” he shares. “She was a very well educated and well-traveled person, and she found purpose [in this project]. Jackie used her connections and moxie to make things happen—and she was only 31 years old!”

“It isn’t just the president’s house, Jackie made it a museum owned by the people,” adds Gissler. “There’s a sense of altruism around what she did, and a collective responsibility to our history and the future. Her legacy is a benchmark in preservation for America.”

 

Visit ELLE DECOR to read the full article

Glenn Gissler Design - Elle Decor: How Jackie Kennedy Gave the White House And America Its History Back

1st Dibs – 41 Impeccable New England Homes

1st Dibs

41 Impeccable New England Homes

blank

Martha’s Vineyard Home

by TRENT MORSE, JESS CHERNER AND DICKSON WONG
Photography by Gross & Daley

This airy Martha’s Vineyard home, decorated by Glenn Gissler, includes a Poul Henningsen Artichoke lamp from Lost City Arts, a pair of T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings armchairs and a custom daybed by Gissler.

A bluestone-paved hallway leads to a collection of antique Italian oil jars.

 

Visit 1stDibs.com to read the full article

Gissler reached out to several New York dealers — all of whom are on 1stDibs — to furnish the space. In keeping with the wallpaper’s French origins, he included a circa 1960 Jules Leleu desk and a pair of circa 1950 Jacques Adnet armchairs, all from Maison Gerard. The desk is adorned by a modernist lamp from Karl Kemp Antiques. A 19th-century Khorassan carpet from Nazmiyal fills the space while allowing the original Greek-key floor inlay to be seen around its edges. The English Arts and Crafts armoire is from Newel.

Design Leadership Network – The Living Room

Design Leadership Network

The Living Room

blank

The Living Room

by the Design Leadership Network
Photography by Gross & Daley

For the living room of a colonial revival home by architect David Neff, Glenn Gissler drew his palette from the nearby Hudson River, which the house overlooks, and then enlisted abstract art to break up the symmetry of the classical proportions. The room’s airiness is grounded by an elegant panneled library behind it.

Glenn Gissler has called Brooklyn Heights home for more than 12 years, so when he was chosen to decorate the living room of the first Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse, he was thrilled. “It’s a grand 19th-century townhouse,” he says. “We decided to honor the architectural history while making it a relevant room for 21st-century living.”
Gissler reached out to several New York dealers — all of whom are on 1stDibs — to furnish the space. In keeping with the wallpaper’s French origins, he included a circa 1960 Jules Leleu desk and a pair of circa 1950 Jacques Adnet armchairs, all from Maison Gerard. The desk is adorned by a modernist lamp from Karl Kemp Antiques. A 19th-century Khorassan carpet from Nazmiyal fills the space while allowing the original Greek-key floor inlay to be seen around its edges. The English Arts and Crafts armoire is from Newel.

Elle Decor

Elle Decor magazine

August 2024

ELLE Decor - He bought a modest farmhouse. It's secret history shocked and amazed him.

He Bought a Modest Farmhouse. Its Secret History Shocked and Amazed Him

It all started with a tale of a “womanizing surrealist.”

By David Nash
Photos by Ryan Lavine and Gross & Daley

Published on elledecor.com

Since arriving to New York City in the early 1980s, interior designer Glenn Gissler had his sights set on buying a little place in the country he could escape to on weekends— “somewhere to go barefoot in the grass,” says Gissler who, in 1987, founded his eponymous Manhattan firm after working with internationally acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly.

After a 30-year search, Gissler found the perfect place in 2014: an 1840 Greek Revival farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, set over eight acres of idyllic countryside. As the years went by, he slowly began unraveling the home’s history. He also began spiraling down a fantastical rabbit hole—one that could have easily been illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

It began when a carpenter working on the property told Gissler about a “womanizing surrealist” named David Hare who lived in the home “I’m a student of art history and I had never heard of him, but I just began to scratch the surface when I came up with an image of André Breton and Jacqueline Lamda, with their daughter, and Dolores Vanetti at my front door.”

The photograph picturing Breton (the French writer and surrealism’s principal theorist), Lamda (Breton’s wife and a surrealist painter), and Vanetti (Jean-Paul Sartre’s lover) was just the tip of the iceberg. As Gissler discovered, the 2,600-square-foot farmhouse was a haven for surrealists exiled from Europe during a period of time between 1930 and 1950 when Hare owned the property.

“It became this outrageous epicenter for that creative community,” he explains while listing other luminaries who visited, stayed over, or lived in the house that included Sartre, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Peggy Guggenheim, Jackson Pollock, and Alexander Calder (who lived just around the corner).

“The people who come here and know a lot about art history, their eyes bug out of their heads wondering how it was possible nobody knew about this before.”

Further research would reveal Hare’s family wasn’t as well known as the DuPonts or Astors, but was equally well-to-do and culturally minded. “It turned out that Hare’s mother was a funder to the Armory Exhibition of 1913; his uncle, Philip L. Goodwin, codesigned the [new] Museum of Modern Art with Edward Durell Stone that opened 1939; and his cousin, artist Kay Sage, was married to Yves Tanguy.”

Its connection to the art and cultural movement aside, Gissler’s four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom retreat from city life was a dream come true. “I’m from Wisconsin, so getting a house from 1840 was a big thrill, and it hadn’t been screwed up over time,” he says, noting that the part of Litchfield County where the home sits hadn’t really prospered beyond the 18th-century. “The good news, for me, was that the town wasn’t developed, and people didn’t spend money to overbuild, renovate, or add on [to their homes].”

Given his longtime involvement with historic preservation, the designer tackled a number of glaring cosmetic issues that included correcting “a lot of wrong paint colors” and refinishing the “icky orange” floors, as well as giving the facade a fresh coat of white paint and a minimalist-inspired update. “Originally there were shutters on the windows which were falling apart, so I removed them; I like the ecclesiastical purity of the Greek temple front without shutters—there’s a sort of Shaker austerity about it.”

On the inside, Gissler has filled the home with things he’s acquired since starting his business 37 years ago, like furnishings by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, a collection of ceramics and metalwork by 19th-century British designer Christopher Dresser, and multiple sets of Russel Wright dinnerware, which are a favorite obsession (“I have piles of them in three different colors so I can host dinners for up to 30!”).

Of course, he’s also paid homage to Hare and the long list of artists who found refuge there by installing surrealist and abstract works by some of the period’s most influential figures.

As for that art historical rabbit hole, he has yet to emerge: “At this point I probably have four or five feet of printed matter on the history of the home. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

FULL GALLERY

Mature globe boxwoods were moved from the paddock behind the house to soften the transition between the road and the front door. A sea of pachysandra enhances the effect. Many of the stone walls and walkways around the property appear ancient but were lovingly added over the years by Gissler and a supremely talented local stone mason.

Litchfield Magazine

litchfield magazine

MAY JUNE 2024

Litchfield Magazine May June 2024 Garden Issue

Just What the Doctor Ordered

An 1810 Roxbury Antique Gets a 21st Century Makeover

By Jamie Marshall
Photos by Ryan Lavine and Gross & Daley

Published on litchfieldmagazine.com

It was love at first sight for Patricia Yarberry Allen when she stepped into the antique Greek Revival on South Street in Roxbury. “You know how people say they get struck by a certain house and they just know?” she says. “I just knew.”

Part of the appeal was the location on the edge of the town’s historic district. Part was the finished basement. But the biggest draw? The view. “When I stepped inside I could see all the way from the front entrance out through the dining room windows to a sloping lawn and trees and out to a very large pond. I felt like I was home.” 

Precocious, smart, and driven (her friends call her a force of nature), Yarberry Allen started working at a local hospital before she was 16. “I lied about my age,” she says. She moved to New York after medical school to complete her internship and residency at Cornell-New York Hospital before going on to establish the thriving women’s health practice she still runs today.

In 2015, she and her husband Douglas McIntyre, a founder of digital media sites and consultant for nonprofits, sold a vacation house in Palm Beach and rented a mid-century modern in Litchfield County hoping to find something to buy. “The topography reminds me of southcentral Kentucky,” she says. “Except that every two miles, you see a sign for an Episcopal church instead of a Baptist church.”

As soon as they settled on Roxbury property, Yarberry Allen turned to her good friend and neighbor, New York City-based designer, Glenn Gissler, to bring their vision to life. The goal? “Sophisticated, comfortable, gracious, dramatic, and personal,” says Gissler. “I think we were creating the farmhouse of her youthful dreams.” One by one, he ticked all the boxes. Among the priorities—space for books and clothes. Both Yarberry Allen and her husband are voracious readers.“I’ve known Pat for about 40 years. She buys good clothes and she still has all of them,” he says.

Most of the interior work involved “architectural corrections,” which were done by a local contractor, Ryan Fowler. He also reconfigured the attic into a proper third floor, lined two walls of one sitting room with bookshelves, and created a storage pantry for Yarberry Allen’s tabletop collection.

Much of the furniture was repurposed from her former homes. The foyer chandelier came from a Madison Avenue duplex she owned in the ‘80s. “Initially that foyer had rough-hewn beams and columns and with the amazing chandelier, we needed to make the space a little more formal,” Gissler says. “We painted the wood paneling aubergine. It’s a dramatic color. She’s not afraid of it at all.” The sitting room couches are dressed in an aubergine linen from Romo, while the club chairs are done in a gray floral by Kravet.

Though she’s not a fan of window treatments, “I have no interest in fussy stuff,” Yarberry Allen says—she made an exception in the primary suite. “Glenn gave me these beautiful cream-colored linen drapes. I wake up in the morning and pull them back and the sun hits my eyes while I’m having my breakfast. It’s an oasis.”