Philadelphia Magazine's Home & Garden Spring/Summer 2003
To get the inside scoop on The Philadelphia Story, you need to understand Ardrossan, the Main Line estate that sparkled with conversation, martini shakers and the dazzling debutante Hope Montgomery. "This house loves a party," says Robert Montgomery Scott, Hope's son and the current resident of Ardrossan. "It was built with entertaining in mind." One of its more inspired guests was playwright Philip Barry, who in 1938 took one part Hope Montgomery (who by then had married his school chum Edgar Scott) and added one part Ardrossan to create a classic cocktail of wit and high society, affectionately known as The Philadelphia Story. Today, Ardrossan is once more the setting for the clink of glasses and the murmur of conversation, the greeting of guests and the laughter of children, the happy result of Scott's elegant and faithful restoration of his family home. "Something like [Ardrossan] is too wonderful to let disappear," he says. "It represents the last of its kind." Named for the Montgomerys' ancestral home in Scotland, Ardrossan is the last of the splendid houses built on the Main Line before World War I that is still lived in by the original family. Horace Trumbauer, Philadelphia's architectural darling in the early 20th century, designed Ardrossan in his signature style of simple Classicism, a departure from Victorian ornamentation popular at the time. After building hundreds of homes, Trumbauer turned his sights to commercial buildings, collaborating on the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At Ardrossan, Trumbauer's legacy of beautiful homes remains. "For Philadelphia, this is the White House, the house we all respect and admire," says Barbara Eberlein of Eberlein Design Consultants in Philadelphia.
Scott asked Eberlein to work with him at Ardrossan eight years ago, when he moved to the 45-room Villanova estate, which had been inhabited by various relatives over the years. The task at hand was to create a private apartment for him on the third floor, a space replete with interesting angles, arched dormers and breath-taking views of treetops. The apartment would become a sanctuary wrapped in the vivid hues that came to Scott in dreams: cool blues for the guest suite on the north side, lemon yellow for the southern sitting room, crimson for the dining room and pine green for the study. "There was a long time the house was quiet," Scott says. "There was a lot that needed to be put right." With that, he stabilized the exterior of the 38,000-square-foot house and put the finishing touches on his apartment, hanging the Augustus John painting of his mother, his favorite of Hope Montgomery Scott's three portraits in the house. Occasionally, he would think about refurbishing the gracious spaces on the first floor. Although The Philadelphia Story was filmed on a Hollywood lot, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant would have looked at ease in Ardrossan, playing bridge in the ballroom as Scott's aunt, Mary Binney, played the piano chosen for her by Leopold Stokowski. (Although his mother was warmer and more disciplined than Hepburn's flighty Tracy Lord, Scott says his aunt indeed "was the kid sister who pirouettes into the room.") But unlike the 1940 movie, the house was subject to the unkind tug of time; the silk on the game chairs had grown tattered. In the end, Scott set aside his concerns about the expense and expanse of the restoration and set to work, bringing back each glorious room, one by one. Thanks to grandparents who never threw anything away, he had an exceptional start. All the art, furnishings, carpets and draperies the Montgomerys brought with them in 1912 were within Ardrossan's stout brick walls. "We didn't buy a single piece of furniture," Eberlein says. "Everything was there."
If Scott didn't find just the right piece in a room, he quickly located it in Ardrossan's cavernous closets. "We'd look in a storeroom and find a fabulous Georgian mirror," Eberlein recalls. "It's what everybody wishes his attic was like." Among the remarkably preserved architectural elements were swags of extravagantly carved fruits and flowers, the work of the 17th-century English artisan Grinling Gibbons, who also created decorations for Windsor Castle. But the plaster and gilding required extensive repairs, and the stained limestone walls in the conservatory presented an even greater challenge. Sandblasting would have scarred the finish. And camouflaging flaws with faux painting wouldn't have allowed the pores of the stone to breathe. So workers from Dan Lepore & Sons in Conshohocken, the artisans who helped to restore City Hall in Philadelphia, gave the limestone a facial of sorts, with the less aggressive Jos Rotec system, buffing out imperfections with tiny glass beads whose rounded surfaces wouldn't gouge the surface. The brightly colored Aubusson carpet in the ballroom was packed off to England for restoration by preservationists Eberlein had used in the past and trusted with a piece of such provenance. "It had a hole in it the size of my head," Scott recalls. "I remember where it was, but the repair is so perfect you'd never know it had ever been damaged."
While his apartment reflects his own considerable taste and style, Scott's restoration of the first-floor rooms is a tribute to its original blend of sophistication – witness a rare pair of Chinese Chippendale mirrors – and sentiment – as in the astonishing array of needlepoint. The hands that stitched the coverings for a pair of eight-foot sofas and more than 30 chairs belonged to his grandmother, Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler Montgomery. Scott called her "Muz." "She was very tiny and I remember her dragging a big, needlepoint bag behind her," he recalls. Charlotte Montgomery's 18-by-24-inch needlepoint room perspectives – miniature renderings of Ardrossan's many interiors – provided a charming and unexpected guide to original color choices and furniture arrangements. They indicate the Chippendale sofas in the living room were initially a deep red, rather than the cheerful floral slipcovers that have been around for as long as Scott can remember. "Sometime in the 1930s, my grandparents must have decided to brighten up the house," he says. "I think they must have had a good reason for it, so we'll keep it that way." Eberlein encouraged Scott to replace worn carpets with patterned rugs, rather than replicate the original scheme of neutral solids. But Scott held firm, commissioning identical rugs from a mill in England. "He decided to stay with what he felt was his grandfather's vision," she says. "With Bob, it's all about being respectful, of being connected to the house with his heart and his head." His grandfather, Col. Robert Montgomery, reacted to the impending enactment of Prohibition by filling Ardrossan's four wine cellars with enough champagne to last 40 years, along with a good supply of Bordeaux, port and Madeira. "Some of it was awful but the champagnes were magnificent," Scott says. He exemplified his grandfather's gift for foresight when he began his restoration in the library, replacing the silk that upholstered the walls with a chinoiserie pattern fortified with cotton threads to better withstand the years ahead.
The furniture was trucked off to the Center City workroom of Anthony Cocco Inc., where restorationists took apart the frames, rejoined the wood, then upholstered the pieces in a rich floral pattern. Beside the fireplace is a wide, Chinese Chippendale chair, the Victorian equivalent of today's chair and a half. "You've got to try out that chair," Scott says. "Isn't it the most comfortable thing ever?" These days, Scott and his guests are basking in the renaissance of entertaining at Ardrossan, a festive blend of the arts, good causes and family life. If he had to choose a golden moment from the long and glamorous history of the house, it would be the recent tradition of a dinner party held the day after Thanksgiving, an event that last year brought together 90 relatives ranging in age from 86 to eight months. "A bagpiper, all those kids, showing them how a house like this is supposed to look," he says. "These are the best days yet."
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