View of Laurelton Hall, from Stanley Lothrop, "Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation," American Magazine of Art, Vol. 11, November 1919.

By Terese Loeb Kreuzer
Travel Arts Syndicate

NEW YORK -- The genie in Aladdin's magic lamp could not have summoned up a more sumptuous dwelling than the house Louis Comfort Tiffany designed and built for himself on nearly 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound.

Laurelton Hall had 84 rooms filled with exquisite objects of Tiffany's devising: richly colored stained-glass windows, lamps and vases, pottery, enamels and furnishings set amid magnificent gardens and fountains. With apparently unlimited funds, the impresario of Laurelton Hall also collected decorative objects from around the world: Japanese armor, swords, screens, Native American baskets and beaded clothing, Islamic tiles and Chinese headdresses constructed of bejeweled kingfisher feathers.

The show "Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall" is on view at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 20.

"Laurelton Hall was Louis Comfort Tiffany's most important work of art," says curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen. It was also his most personal.

	Peacock Headdress (1913), a gift of Julia Tiffany Weld, at the Museum of the City of New York. Click photo for larger image. More information: "Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall," runs through May 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York City; 1-212-535-7710; www.metmuseum.org. Open 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Suggested admission fees are $20 (adults) and $10. Mr. Tiffany is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. For information on walking tours: www.green-wood.com/tours.asp.

Even in the pre-income-tax Gilded Age, few people would have seen such a house.

Tiffany (1848-1933) came from a moneyed family. His father, Charles, co-founded a store on Lower Broadway that eventually became the jewelers Tiffany & Co. Louis, the third child and second son, preferred painting and the decorative arts. He studied in Europe, came home, married and started his own family.

The Met exhibit includes a stained-glass window never before publicly displayed from his first apartment on East 26th Street. "It's unlike anything that had happened before in the medium of stained glass," says Ms. Frelinghuysen. "It looks like a great big paint brush being drawn over a canvas."

The bold, nonrepresentational composition is inset with large, heavy, rough-cut jewels of glass and with glass sheets embedded with tiny flakes of glass of varying colors.

Concurrently, Tiffany and the artist John La Farge experimented with stained glass-making techniques, but Tiffany, with his money and social connections, soon was pre-eminent. He opened a string of businesses, hired skilled artisans and set them to work in a succession of factories, the most notable of which was in Corona, Queens.

Before long, Tiffany designs in various media ornamented homes, churches, theaters, hotels and other public buildings. Although several of his children died and he outlived his two wives, his family increased, as did his fortune.

When Charles Tiffany died in 1902, he left Louis a substantial inheritance that enabled him to build Laurelton Hall. The mansion was finished in 1905.

A showman and a good businessman, Tiffany enjoyed giving theatrical parties for which Laurelton Hall provided an unparalleled setting. In May 1914, he invited "150 men of genius" to a Peacock Feast. They arrived to find the gardens at their peak, abetted by a bevy of gardeners who worked for weeks prior to the festivities to achieve perfection.

As dusk settled on the gardens, Juno arrived -- a young woman dressed in a Grecian gown with a peacock headdress, which is on display at the Met. She led a parade of young women bearing stuffed peacocks on salvers. The meal (its menu is in the exhibit) was catered by Delmonico's of New York. The evening ended with a light show and organ music as reported in newspapers all over the world.

Less than six weeks later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off the chain of events that led to World War I.

Within a few years, the world into which Tiffany had been born was unalterably changed. People had less money to buy his luxurious products, and tastes changed as well. His opulent interiors began to seem fussy and old-fashioned.

Peacock Vase, circa 1900. Click photo for larger image.

In April 1932, Tiffany Studios filed for bankruptcy. Nine months later, Tiffany died and was buried in a grave with a simple marker at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In July 1946, the grounds of Laurelton Hall were divided into small parcels and the mansion's contents sold at auction. Three years later, the main building was also sold for $10,000 to a man who used it for a while as a summer home.

Then, on March 6, 1957, a fire started in the cavernous house -- no one knows exactly why. It burned for nearly 24 hours. When the flames were finally put out, the house was rubble and ash.

Here the story of Laurelton Hall might have ended but for a Florida couple named Hugh F. and Jeannette Genius McKean. Hugh McKean had studied painting at Laurelton Hall in the early 1920s, when Tiffany opened his estate to summer fellows as an art school. McKean loved the place, as did his wife. Shortly after the fire, a distraught letter from one of Tiffany's daughters brought the McKeans to Long Island, where they bought everything that could be salvaged. They took it to Winter Park, Fla., for installation in the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, which Jeannette McKean had founded in 1942 with her husband as its director.

Roughly half of the items in the current Metropolitan Museum show come from the Morse Museum.

The most extraordinary is the Daffodil Terrace, which has been reconstructed for the exhibit. Parts of it had previously been on display at the Morse, but most of the pieces were in storage.

"It was a pergola-like garden room that extended off the dining room," says Ms. Frelinghuysen, the curator. "This is the first time that this has been installed and seen since the 1957 fire." The installation, which took weeks, is "the most ambitious that the Met has undertaken for a special exhibition in recent memory."

The Terrace illustrates Tiffany's interest in integrating indoor and outdoor spaces and his love of nature, which inspired so much of his work. The columns supporting the roof have daffodil-shaped capitals made of glass. The stems are tiny bits of sheet glass. A central opening in the roof is faced with a lattice behind which are iridescent glass panes ornamented with stems and leaves. "It's as though you were looking through a trellis to the sky and the trees beyond," says Ms. Frelinghuysen. "It's a tour de force."