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Tragically,
Joye Cottage’s first hostess was also its first fatality.
Two months after a ball that inaugurated the improved house at
Christmas 1897 – and only five months after she married Whitney –
Edith Whitney broke her neck in a riding accident and died.
Whitney died in 1904 (officially of peritonitis, though rumor
says he was shot by a jealous Aiken husband).
His descendants stayed on until 1980 – Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, a daughter-in-law, had a sculpture studio in one wing –
though they closed room after room as finances grew tighter and repairs
too onerous.
That
shrug-and-retreat sensibility has been avoided at the Naifeh-Smith Joye
Cottage. Now there are 21
zones of heating and air-conditioning, so saving on energy costs means
flicking a switch and turning a room off, not abandoning it completely. Mr. Naifeh estimates that all the new plumbing, wiring and
myriad structural improvements, from replacing all the plaster and
refinishing the floors to rebuilding the spacious porches, cost
$650,000.
Corners, however, were
repeatedly and ingeniously cut, a practice that also fuels the
couple’s art collection. They
live in six or eight rooms and use some of the others to accommodate
their guests and their art.
“Father of,
son of, student of, friend of,” is how Mr. Naifeh describes their
“bargain niche” of 19th- and 20th-century art,
which includes everything from a set of 1951 Jackson Pollock prints in
the main dining room (all authentic) to “eight century” Balinese
sculptures in the breakfast room (all fakes bought on a trip to
Indonesia) and challengingly gloomy landscapes (“much cheaper than
cheerful paintings,” Mr. Naifeh said).
“We’re all
for saving money, as long as the result looks and feels right,” Mr.
Smith said. The men
learned, for instance, that big Oriental carpets are cheaper by the
square foot that smaller ones. (The
28-foot-by-17-foot Indian-Heart palace carpet on the ballroom floor cost
$5,000 at a Sotheby’s auction.) Replacement
lamp shades for the brass chandeliers and sconces were too expensive to
replicate, “so, we’ve learned to live with the bare bulbs,” Mr.
Naifeh said, though in a tone that suggested he is not entirely
convinced. And instead of
plastering the inside of dozens of closets, the men saved money by
lining them with painted bead board.
When it came
to softer furnishings, Mr. Naifeh said, “New advances in medicine are
less shocking to me than the cost of having curtains made.”
The long, lean ballroom curtains are made of the white cotton
chintz ($8 a yard) traditionally used for curtain linings.
For the rest of the house, the men regularly ransacked Silk
Surplus, the Manhattan discount fabric shop, for rose, blue and yellow
damask, hundreds of yards at a time, at about $30 a yard, and had it
shipped to Aiken.
Some of the
cut-rate compromises, however, turned out surprisingly elegant.
The ball-shape feet they needed to finish off the legs of a
bathroom sink, for instance, would have cost hundreds of dollars to
manufacture. Stumped for an
appropriate substitute, Mr. Naifeh was delighted to hear a workman
suggest steel trailer hitches. The
cost: “a couple of
dollars,” Mr. Smith said.
As for the
stops that keep the creamy walls safe from the heavy mahogany doors (the
men found them in a former Whitney stable, under a pile of hay), they
are Kirsch curtain-rod finials, $1.59 a pair.
“I’m very
proud of those,” Mr. Naifeh said, though he is perhaps proudest of the
life he and Mr. Smith now live. “In
New York we used to have to make appointments three weeks in advance
just to have coffee with good friends.
Here you call somebody up and walk right over.
Everything you’ve heard about Southern hospitality is true.”
There is, both
men agree, only one drawback in bringing Joye Cottage back to life.
“We spend so much time working on the inside of the house that
we’ve only just remembered about the five acres around us,” Mr.
Smith said, groaning.
Grab a
shovel.
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