Carolands

Harriett Pullman, daughter of George and Harriet (Hattie) Pullman, was born in Chicago in 1869. Educated both at home and in Europe, she became fluent in French and German. She graduated in 1889 from Miss Brown’s Fifth Avenue School in New York City.

In 1892, she married San Franciscan Francis Carolan, and they established their home in Burlingame, CA. Harriett’s father died in 1897, making her an heiress to his railway car fortune. Harriett established a second home in Paris around 1900, having long been fascinated with France’s artistic heritage. During World War I, she became active in the American Friends of France, an organization advocating U.S. involvement in the war. She served as Director of the Fine Arts Department of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Harriett, a bibliophile, was the only American member of “Les Amis du Livre Moderne” in Paris. She planned her splendid Carolands Library to share her passion for books and learning.

Music and drama were Harriett’s other passions. In her early years she studied singing, and in California she hosted a French opera singer as a long-term houseguest. In the 1930s she helped found the Berkshire Music Festival. Harriett enjoyed portraying “The Tragic Muse” at the Tableaux Vivants, and she read poetry aloud to enthusiastic audiences. Her closest friend of almost 40 years was one of the most famous stage actresses of the day, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Harriett was admired for her distinctive and beautiful clothing.  She collected and preserved many examples made by the finest Parisian couturiers of her day.

In 1923, Francis Carolan died in San Francisco. Harriett married Colonel Arthur Schermerhorn in New York in 1925. The couple occupied Carolands for brief periods over the following two years. In 1929, the Schermerhorn’s purchased Spring Lawn, a large estate in Lenox, MA and offered Carolands for sale. Arthur died in 1933, leaving Harriett a widow for the second time. When she sold Carolands in 1945, she was 76 years old. Harriett died in October 1956 having spent the last years of her life in the quiet luxury of her duplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue in New York City. Having no children of her own, she left most of her possessions to her late sister’s children and a fortune to charities.

Carolands may stand as Harriett’s most enduring legacy.

Achille Duchêne (1866 - 1947)


Famously dubbed a “Napoleon of the Garden” Achille Duchêne brought the art of the traditional French garden to an international clientele. The restoration of the historic gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte and Champs, were among his finest early works. These were completed alongside his father Henri, who was also a noted landscape architect. Achille Duchêne’s most famous original creations are the Water Parterres at Blenheim Palace completed in 1931 and his 1914 original designs for Carolands. If completed, Carolands would have been the largest garden of his career.

Ernest Sanson (1836 -1918)
At the age of 18, Ernest Sanson was accepted into the prestigious L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. One early commission was the restoration of the Château Chaumont for the Prince de Broglie. Sanson eventually became the French aristocracy’s most sought after architect. His Palais Rose (Hôtel de Castellane) was the most spectacular Parisian mansion built during the “Belle Époque”.  His first American commission was an elaborate residence built in Washington DC in 1910 for Perry Belmont. A year later, Sanson was awarded France’s highest award, becoming a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Carolands was Sanson’s second and final American project, commissioned in 1913 for Harriett Pullman Carolan. Sanson died in Paris at the age of 82.

The Panama–Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) was a world’s fair held in San Francisco, CA between February 20 and December 4 in 1915. Its ostensible purpose was to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, but it was widely seen in the city as an opportunity to showcase its recovery from the 1906 earthquake. The fair was constructed on a 635 acre site, along the northern shore now known as the Marina District.

Carolands Foundation is a Core Partner of the Centennial Celebration of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE100).

From the Gilded Age Mansion to the Public Museum; the French Period Room in the United States;

The French period room in America originated in the mansions of the Gilded Age. French paneling and furniture became an essential element of the grand house in New York, Newport, or San Francisco in the last decade of the nineteenth century and up to 1920, reflecting the taste and power of the owners. Although we are more familiar with these French paneled rooms in the American museum today, their origins are often due to the barons of the Gilded Age. Several of the period rooms in The Wrightsman Rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the J. PAUL Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor originated in the private mansions of the very rich Americans in the early years of the twentieth century.

Authentic French paneling, or boiseries, were first introduced into the Vanderbilt mansion, the Breakers, at Newport in the 1890s, while others were also included as part of the furnishing of the elaborate new mansions being built on Fifth Avenue in New York in the succeeding decades. The salon from the Hotel D’Orsay, Faubourg Saint-Germain, Paris, was bought in 1904 by Senator William Andrews Clark for the enormous and rather overwhelming mansion that he built on Fifth Avenue.¹ Completed in 1908, this massive structure only survived for less than a generation, giving way to a rapidly changing world in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940 many of these great houses had all but disappeared from the New York cityscape. Senator Clark’s Salon Dore was given to the Corcoran Museum in Washington DC in 1928, where it survives today, much altered in form, but still reflecting the grand aspects of this fine French interior dating from 1770.² In the third quarter of the nineteenth century French taste in architecture and decoration was already well known in the guise of the Second Empire style. Mansions with tall mansard roofs and lavishly gilded interiors of more contemporary French style were found all over the United States, but only later in the century did Americans discover the charms of the eighteenth-century Louis styles which could be freely employed as markers for taste and refinement. Architects such as Richard Morris Hunt who were trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris set to work creating adaptations of the Grand Trianon, and the Petit Trianon, as well as major eighteenth century chateaux of France for America’s Gilded Age.

A whole industry grew up around supplying French eighteenth-century style architecture, interiors and decoration for Americans. The Parisian decorator and cabinet maker Jules Allard moved his business to New York in 1885. He supplied the lavish interiors for Marble House that was built from 1888 for William K. Vanderbilt, whose wife famously used this background to launch her daughter Consuelo as the future Duchess of Marlborough. He was swiftly followed by Lucien Alavoine in 1893, and the two firms were to become the mainstays of French eighteenth-century style interiors many of which incorporated the paneling exported from Paris due to the demolitions of Haussmann from the 1860s onwards. The Parisian dealer in paneling, Carlhian (1867-1975) was another major figure supplying boiseries for these homes, and it was this dealer who sold three rooms to Mrs. Carolan in 1912 Carlhian also supplied several interiors for Mrs. Hamilton Rice’s New York mansion, including a room inspired by the Chateau de Louveciennes, and a Louis XV salon which were later put on display in the Museum in Philadelphia in the 1930s. These would be among the first and finest French rooms to be shown in an American museum. Another figure who was closely connected with Gilded Age clients in supplying works of art as well as paneling was the antique dealer Joseph Duveen. His dealings with the paneling from the Salon Dore of the Hotel de La Tremoille, then thought to come from the Hotel Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, show the progression of panelings from private mansion to public museum. Originally installed in the huge Otto Kahn mansion at 91st and Fifth Avenue in 1916, Duveen bought the paneling in 1934 after Kahn died from his widow. Duveen then used this paneling as a background for displaying his French furniture in his premises further down Fifth Avenue. In the early 1950s the firm sold the paneling to Richard Rheem for his mansion La Dolphine in Hillsborough to panel his new ballroom. However, within a very few years Mr. Rheem gave the paneling to the Legion of Honor museum in 1959 where it has been redisplayed after a recent renovation.³

At the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco period rooms were an important feature of display in the post war era. The old De Young included some nineteen rooms, or architectural features, by the 1980s, including a series of rooms from Dijon given by J. Pierpont Morgan to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But as with the Gilded Age mansions, taste shifted rapidly and today there are no paneled or period rooms at the new De Young. At the Legion of Honor, however, three French period rooms remain on view, and are treasured aspects of the museum. They include the small room sold by Carlhian for the Carolands in 1912. Only briefly installed in the Carolands, this finely-painted room was given to the Legion of Honor in the 1950s. As it is now recognized that some of the panels painted with arabesques were created in the 1680s rather than the early seventeenth century, it is now installed as a Louis XIV room. It will be the subject of a renovation in the near future. This room is one of the finest examples of French paneling sent the United States in the early twentieth century as furnishing for one of America’s greatest Gilded Age mansions, Carolands, and today is shown in one of the great public museums in the United States.

–Martin Chapman Curator in Charge of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture