Fabrics inspired by Doris Duke's Rough Point.(Design notes)

In the late nineteenth century Newport laid claim as the preferred summer destination for Gilded Age millionaires, among them Frederick William Vanderbilt who was the first of four grandsons of the New York shipping and railroad magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt to commission a large cottage there. In the late 1880s he bought two lots on Belleview Avenue with a view of the Atlantic Ocean and then commissioned the architectural firm of Peabody and Stearns to design an English manor house for him. Named Rough Point, the colonial name for the spur of land on which it is situated, the house remained in the Vanderbilt family until the early twentieth century, when it was sold to William and Nancy Leeds. In 1922 the tobacco tycoon James Buchanan Duke purchased Rough Point and hired the architect Horace Trumbauer to substantially enlarge it. Doris Duke, a passionate and omnivorous collector, inherited the house on her father's death in 1925 and filled it with paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, wall coverings, and textiles from around the world. Her treasured and eclectic objects have inspired the Doris Duke Collection, the latest addition of fabrics to the Newport Mansions Collection by Pindler and Pindler of Moorpark, California.

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One of Doris Duke's remarkable purchases was a suite of Louis XVI chairs stamped "Falconet" (perhaps for the late eighteenth-century furniture maker Louis Falconet) and a sofa by the joiner Nicolas Quini-bert Foliot for the drawing room, or yellow room, at Rough Point. The elaborately carved furniture, originally used in the Chateau de Valency in the Loire Valley, is covered in the original eighteenth-century hand-embroidered floral silk upholstery, a design that ...