Treasures of the Vanderlip Ranch House

In the dining room, a sprawling, eleven-foot refectory table with a monolithic walnut top resting on a pine base makes for an awe-inspiring showpiece. “I call this ‘the Last Supper table,’” Christy says, adding that the table is more about form than function, since its narrow surface obliges diners to stagger their plates to prevent overlap.

A suite of ten, Italian-style x-chairs (or “pincer chairs”) provides handsome yet understated seating for dinner guests. Both the dining table and chairs date to around 1900. The seat cushions are a modern addition purchased by Christy’s mother, Suzanne, at a local antiques store.

An oil-on-canvas portrait of Vanderlip Sr.’s mother, Charlotte Woodworth Vanderlip, hangs over the dining room fireplace. Her likeness was captured by Swedish-born painter August Franzen, who trained in Paris under renowned French academic painter William Bouguereau, and who enjoyed immense popularity as a portraitist working in the United States from the 1880s forward.

Directly adjacent to the dining room, the Ranch House’s living room is a testament to the diverse collecting tastes of the home’s inhabitants. In the grand tradition of Victorian-era drawing rooms, this room is styled in an eclectic manor emphasizing historical revival furniture and curio displays exhibiting decorative objects of wide-ranging origin. A series of bookshelves holds ceremonial figures and masks from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a small, bronze Pharaoh bust from Egypt, collected by Christy’s biological father during his travels as an executive for Purex soap company. Near these items are curios from Vanderlip Sr.’s collection, including a cloisonné vase, a Chinese red lacquer plate, and a small biscuit sculpture copied after Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces.

Hand-carved Chinese door panels, screens and window treatments with glossy faux-lacquer surfaces give the dining room a glamorous, exotic feel. According to Christy, Vanderlip Sr.’s wife, Narcissa, purchased these items on the spot from a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco that was undergoing major renovations. Narcissa’s fortuitous finds comingle gracefully with authentic Chinese antiques from the late Qing Dynasty, like a fire screen, a silk painting, and gilded wood panel fragments, all dating to the nineteenth century.

Among the notable furnishings in the Ranch House dining room is a mid-nineteenth century Italian mirror with a gilded gesso frame, a pair of American Federal Revival mahogany armchairs, a Neoclassical child’s chair based on a design by English furniture maker George Hepplewhite, and an American-made Regency style lady’s writing desk with elaborate marquetry on a mahogany base.

The extraordinary treasures of the home’s interiors spill out onto its well-manicured grounds, where a medieval Christian baptismal font serves as a garden planter, and rosebushes and avocado trees make casual neighbors with freestanding “rosa Verona” marble columns.

Don Christy’s Up Around the Bend will be published by Vicki Mack of Pinale Press in summer 2012.PP

Comments:

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.