Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #758204 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-24
• Released on: 2007-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This closely researched history of Kykuit, the Hudson Valley mansion built to make the Rockefeller name and fortune stand for something other than unbridled greed is too narrow in scope for most readers. The Dalzells (George Washington's Mount Vernon) cover five generations of Rockefellers, focusing on the patriarch (called Senior here) and his son (Junior), at least as far as the mansion is concerned, while taking a stab at linking it to issues surrounding American country houses of the Gilded Age. What was different about Kykuit, the Dalzells claim, was the Rockefellers' moral aspirations, their insistence that the house be not only useful and fashionable, but good. Clean prose keeps things moving, but only the most serious Rockefeller devotees will pore over long passages detailing the process of drawing up blueprints, hiring interior decorators and strategizing housekeeping. The Dalzells chronicle every tussle over control of the house's planning between Junior and Senior and, later, between Nelson and his four brothers over Nelson's overflowing art collection. Several fine biographies exist to satisfy readers' curiosity about the Rockefeller family, and it's questionable whether there's nearly as much inherent interest in Kykuit as in Mount Vernon, the George Washington home that draws 20 times as many visitors. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

The great houses of America are a decidedly mixed lot. Only a handful -- Monticello and Fallingwater immediately come to mind -- are genuine architectural monuments. A few are so freighted with historic import -- Mount Vernon, the White House -- that their architectural qualities are little more than filigree. Many were built more as tributes to their owners' wealth and power than as mere residences: the massive oceanside "cottages" of Newport, the Vanderbilts' Biltmore in North Carolina, William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon in California. And some are just oddities, lumps of stone plopped down in incongruously beautiful settings: industrialist James Deering's Vizcaya in Miami, just about anything in Palm Beach.

I have never visited Kykuit, on the east shore of the Hudson River, but on the evidence put forth by Robert F. Dalzell and Lee Baldwin Dalzell in The House the Rockefellers Built, it would appear to fall into this last category. Set high on a hill, in the heart of the incomparably beautiful region that inspired the Hudson River School of landscape painters, Kykuit ("a Dutch word meaning 'lookout,' rhymes with high-cut") overlooks one of the most breathtaking vistas in the United States, which is saying something. But the house itself, which is now open to the public, thanks to a complicated agreement between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is something else. From beginning to end the product of disagreement and compromise, it is "awkwardly perched on its hillside site" and is neither the "relaxed, unpretentious rural villa" that John D. Rockefeller wanted nor the "larger, grander house" that was John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s dream. Even the Dalzells, who have an understandable vested interest in Kykuit, are hard-pressed to find positive things to say about it.

Indeed, it seems reasonably safe to say that if the house had not been built and inhabited by Rockefellers, it would long ago have been torn down and the estate returned to its natural condition, probably as a park. That is precisely what Laurence Rockefeller, the most environmentally aware of the sons of John Jr., wanted. He was overruled by the other surviving sons, who finally -- and reluctantly -- acquiesced in Nelson's will (he died in January 1979), which "instructed his executors to convey to the National Trust for Historic Preservation his one-quarter interest in the 'Park' section of the estate -- the fenced-in area that included Kykuit -- in the hope that the house with its furnishings would be, as he said, 'preserved as nearly intact as may be practicable' and opened to the public." His motives are unknown, but the Dalzells make an intelligent guess:

"It would seem that what he wanted people to discover there was not just Nelson Rockefeller but the Rockefeller family as a group of complex, interesting individuals, each with his or her own interests, tastes, and personalities, a family, in short, not so very different from most American families. Because of all he had done to the place since taking it over, it would also be clear that Kykuit had changed through the years. And if Kykuit had changed, so by implication had the Rockefeller family, reconstituting itself anew with each generation, just as every American family did, indeed as the nation itself did -- ever fluid, constantly evolving, dynamically democratic."

The story of Kykuit begins with a fire in September 1902 that destroyed the house on the Hudson, known (after previous owners) as the Parsons-Wentworth House, that was the country retreat of John D. Rockefeller and his wife, Cettie. Eventually, the family owned an estate of more than 3,000 acres:

"Rising steadily upward from the valley, it overspread the heights above, offering glorious views of the river to the west and beyond it the Palisades." The senior Rockefeller was hesitant about building a new house and doubly so because his Standard Oil Company was coming under heavy criticism as a monopolistic trust. Senior wanted at most a relatively modest house, but Junior "had much loftier ambitions for the place." He wanted it to be "modest and unpretentious -- no opulent palace, certainly -- yet still beautiful, its architecture and contents displaying the highest, most noble values." He hoped it would be seen as "the home not of greedy, self-seeking individuals but of decent, civic-minded people, determined to do good with the riches that God and the American system of capitalistic enterprise had showered upon them."

Father and son loved and respected each other deeply, but at times relations between them were tense. Junior was not entirely comfortable with the stern Baptist faith of his parents and was interested in the arts, especially after he married the "warm and outgoing" as well as self-confident Abby Greene Aldrich. Senior wanted a house that would be a refuge for his family, "apart from the turmoil and temptation of the sinful world outside." Junior wanted something bolder, a house that would make a statement to the world about who the Rockefellers were and what they stood for. Thus from the outset there were tensions, as well as those provided by other family members, and though they always were expressed politely, they had to be dealt with by the architects, designers, decorators and landscapers who worked on Kykuit.

The original design, produced in 1905, was done at Senior's bidding and reflected his modest, conservative expectations; its "heart and soul . . .would lie enshrined in the music room, that most intimate and private of spaces, where the family gathered to play and listen to music and sing hymns and pray together." Confronted with the design upon his return from a European jaunt, Junior "found plans for a house fifty years out of date and utterly lacking in grace or beauty. . . . Picturesque and homelike it surely was, but he and Abby had dreamed of something altogether different."

What finally emerged was closer to Junior's vision than to Senior's, but it was a compromise. Ultimately, Senior cared more about his son than about his house -- and perhaps even his own reputation -- and yielded repeatedly as Junior pressed for changes and additions, all of which cost money. As stipulated in the original contract, the house was to cost $223,105, but the final reckoning came to $2,770,603.16, and that was in 1915, with many more years of changes and additions to come, including Nelson's exceedingly expensive collections of art and outdoor sculpture.

"Modest and unpretentious" it most certainly was not, except by comparison with the showy statements of self-regard erected by the Vanderbilts, Belmonts, Lorillards and others along Newport's matchless coast. Yet the comparison was an important part of what the two Rockefellers (father and son) hoped to achieve. Modest and unpretentious, in this case, clearly are in the eyes of the beholder:

"By 1912 the estate covered over two thousand acres and had twenty miles of roads, plus gardens and cut lawns, a golf course, a coach barn for horses and automobiles, greenhouses to provide plants for the gardens and cut flowers for the family houses . . . the orangerie and palm house, barns, sheds and livestock pens, in addition to some ninety houses, most of them rented out to estate workers. Following Senior's precept that it was cheaper to have things done by his own (nonunion) men, the Pocantico estate was largely self-sustaining. Included in its outdoor workforce of about two hundred were gardeners, farmers, woodsmen, masons, carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, tinsmiths and blacksmiths. The total cost of running the estate when Senior voiced his concern in 1909 was $109,200; by 1919 the payroll alone, accounting for about half the overall costs, had climbed to $123,628.90."

As that suggests, plenty of diligent research has been done by the Dalzells, both of whom are associated with Williams College. For the last 50 pages, it must be said, they've done too much research; their account of the wrangling over how to take Kykuit public is tedious and essentially unnecessary, an excessively long footnote to what is otherwise an interesting and informative book.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Despite his immense personal fortune, John D. Rockefeller was by all accounts a modest man who detested displays of ostentation. So it is ironic that the Rockefeller "family house," built above the Hudson River a century ago, has evolved into a 3,500-acre estate with ornate landscaping and a multitude of statues, making it comparable to the great aristocratic homes of Europe. The Dalzells have traced the origins of the house as well as the various additions and remodelings over a century and encompassing three generations of the Rockefeller family. Kykuit, the main house, was built for John D. Rockefeller Sr., but it was constructed under the guidance of his son, John Jr. Although the elder Rockefeller envisioned a "simple, humble" residence, his son was determined to sacrifice nothing to construct an elaborate dwelling based on high standards of taste and beauty. This book will appeal to art historians as well as general readers interested in the tastes and foibles of a family dynasty. Freeman, Jay

Customer Reviews

Excellent Insights into and the history of the family and house
Lee and Robert Dalzell have put together a very fascinating look at both the history of the home that generations the Rockefeller family occupied, how they built it, wrestled over it, disagreed about it and loved it which reflected the complicated relationships of the dynasty. Not unlike many parent and sibling relationships, there were arguments about what their parents' intentions were, Senior's and Junior's, Abby's, etc. and how they lived their lives based on interpretations of their parental affinities. The home (house?) becomes the symbol of the old world of privilege as well as a modern world of the current generation. The house and now the entire estate essentially was cobbled together and pulled apart as each new generation left its own footprints.
I particularly enjoyed trying to separate Lee's from Robert's "story" as well as the intertwining story of the house and the family.

ROCKEFELLER'S KYKUIT
This is a very well written book about the iconic Rockefellers and their family estate. It's interesting how the house seems to act as a metaphor for each of the family member's, their interests, their desires. Kykuit is an amazing set peice and the mixture of Jr.'s Bosworth and Ogden Codman classical estate, Sr's wanting the house to be tasteful and not too grand, and Nelson's avande garde, modern tastes. The estate and it's location are breathtaking and the Codman interiors are exquisite. This is a very well researched and fascinating study of the Rockefellers and their Kykuit. I do recommend getting the Rockefeller Family Home: Kykuit, it's very good.

The House The Rockefellers Built
This is much more than a book on the building of a house. It is about three generations of a family, their individual personalities, their character and development over time, all centered around the construction of a house that became a national monument. It is about their time and place in history. It is well written, a delight to read and leaves the reader yearning to know about the succeeding generation.
Bob McGill