Kingston Restoration

Eighteen Rooms of Calvert Vaux

by Jennifer Farley and photographs by Deborah Degraffenreid, November 30, 2011

For the price of a sensible car today, in 1977, Taylor and Elizabeth Thompson purchased a dilapidated three-story mansion on West Chestnut Street, embarking on a renovation journey that took two decades and continues to this day.

Newly into what’s proved to be an enduring and unusually happy second marriage for both, the Thompsons had a combined brood of six children, buckets of energy, and vision, but at the time, not a whole lot of money. Yet however modest the initial tariff, signing up to salvage the collapsing treasure entailed a daring and prolonged financial commitment.

The house, designed in 1886 by famed architect Calvert Vaux but built a few years later for a wealthy Rondout flour and feed merchant, was uninhabited for a year before the Thompsons bought it. Vandals had ripped out all the copper to sell for scrap.

Moreover, it was still in the original owner’s family. Estate executors would not sell the cherished, if run-down, family pile to just anyone, especially since the once-grand property next door had been converted into an apartment complex by means of an aesthetically incongruous modern addition. The Prince of Wales famously likened such building proposals to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”

All in the Training

Fate siphoned Elizabeth into a design career while resident in Turkey in the `60s, where her first husband, an army officer, was stationed. Her flare with color and form, clever use of materials, and overall ability to get things done commanded attention from the senior officers’ wives, who pressed Elizabeth for help with their own abodes. That segue must have been challenging at several levels. When pressed for details, even today the slim, elegant blonde remains discreet, but as the service euphemism goes, the end result was all “just really good training.”