The Marden House

An Interview with James Kimsey

By Martin Moeller

Blueprints Summer 2006
Volume XXIV, No. 3

Martin Moeller: How did your purchase of the Marden House come about?

James Kimsey: The Marden House is hard by my house. Every morning when I shave I’m looking out my window at that house, which has been a constant reminder that I needed to do something with it. When attorneys for the Mardens approached me to buy the house, Luis had moved into an assisted-living facility, Ethel was still living in the house, and they were both in their nineties. Given the amount of money that a house on the river costs, and given the amenities that were in that house, there was a concern that whoever would buy it wouldn’t really live in it, so how would that work? The fact that I happened to live next door, and built a monument to wretched excess, which was my own house, made me the clear and logical buyer for it. So before the [high-tech] bubble burst, I said, “Sure, I’ll buy it.” “And can Mrs. Marden live in it?,” they asked. “Sure,” I said. I never saw the inside of the house until maybe six months to a year after I bought it. I went over to meet Ethel Marden, who I figured to be a very frail woman in her nineties, and instead I met this very robust woman who showed me around, and ended up taking my house manager and me to lunch at the Cosmos Club.

MM: The Mardens themselves were clearly an extraordinary couple — as fascinating as Wright himself. In what ways did the house reflect their character?

JK: I think if you did some kind of Freudian study on the gene pool of Wright’s clients, the graphs would look different from those of normal folks. I never met Luis Marden, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get to know him a bit, but Ethel is really interesting. She held the women’s underwater diving record at one point. They were buddies with Jacques Cousteau—there’s a picture of him that Luis took while diving. Philippe Cousteau, Jacques’s grandson, spent a lot of his young childhood in the Marden house. The house was full of stuff when I walked in for the first time. I could tell that Ethel went to some trouble to tidy it up to greet me, but the place was still packed with stuff. Not a square inch of anything didn’t have stuff on it. Now, we have put her husband’s picture up, and have some of his possessions still on display, so while it’s clearly a monument to Frank Lloyd Wright, I think secondarily it’s a monument to the Mardens. We also kept a lot of Luis’s books, so just looking at the library he left, and walking around the house, there is always some little quirk to dig down into. I came across a picture of me in Vietnam—the Mardens had put it in a Frank Lloyd Wright frame. I don’t even remember that picture! It’s me sitting with an AK-47 reading a Playboy. It was 1965. A 41-year-old picture of me—it was rather shocking when I saw it. They had found it somewhere. It’s fascinating to see how this couple lived in this house for almost 50 years—you can really just see how it worked for them.

MM: After you bought the Marden House, were you besieged by preservationists and Wright aficionados eager to tell you what to do with it?

JK: The article in The Washington Post [August 21, 2005] made it sound as if I had this Greek chorus behind me, but nobody ever sat me down and lectured me about the house. Some people actually even said they had ideas of how I could change it. But if I renovated and changed it, over time, it would lessen its value—and I don’t mean monetary value. It would be a Frank Lloyd Wright house modified to suit my taste. Well, nobody cares about my taste. They all care about Frank Lloyd Wright. So I made a very conscious decision that I should restore it. This became clear to me when I would go over there and I would say, “Maybe I should turn the garage into a bedroom, or maybe I should take this closet out and put in a window or cut a hole in this wall,” and there were gasps of horror that I would even contemplate changing a line of a Frank Lloyd Wright work. This was probably a binary decision—either I would restore it faithfully, or I would screw with it and risk the ire of a whole Frank Lloyd Wright cadre. Well, the thing of it was, what’s the point of having a Frank Lloyd Wright house if it’s not a true Frank Lloyd Wright house? So other than taking off the tar-and-gravel roof and putting the copper roof on, which I think was aesthetically good for me, because that’s what I look at every morning when I shave, there have been very few changes. Friends gave me some cute metal birdhouses for the house, there’s been some general landscaping to brighten it up with flowers, but mostly it’s faithfully restored and I’m very happy with it. Obviously I have added some electronic stuff that Wright couldn’t have conceived of. I put a TV in, but it’s behind a cabinet. We had to find one that fit the cabinetry, which we did.

MM: Were you a Wright fan before you undertook this project?

JK: I certainly knew who Frank Lloyd Wright was, and had a sense that he was the inspiration for Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. This guy’s always been kind of fascinating to me, but I wasn’t an addict. I made it a point to go to a couple of exhibitions about Wright’s work—it was kind of interesting to see his stuff. Now I’m beginning to understand the cult that surrounds Frank Lloyd Wright. I am going up this summer sometime to see Fallingwater, which I’ve never seen. I’ve seen the Pope-Leighey House. I did deliberately go to Taliesin West when I was out in Arizona, and I’m glad I did because I spent the whole day there. They were very nice to me, showed me around, and took a lot of time. Proximity has made me appreciate the Marden house, and though I wasn’t involved hands-on in much of the restoration process, I found myself wanting to go over and see it more and more, and put in my two-cents’ worth here and there, but it was really in a delicate mode.

MM: How did you find Bailey Adams, the contractor who oversaw the restoration?

JK: References, word of mouth. A number of people said, “If you’re going to do that, here’s the guy who ought to do it.” I met him, he made a proposal, and clearly he was the most knowledgeable. I think for him it was more than just a job.

MM: How are you using the house, now that the renovation is done? Have you had a chance simply to enjoy it?

JK: I have special dinners over there. I’ve had some quiet time—an hour here and there—and sometimes I’ll be like Squire Worthy and walk the properties. It’s not a consuming passion of mine, but owning a Frank Lloyd Wright house is pretty cool, I have to say. Somebody I know was explaining my life to someone who didn’t know me, and he went through the whole litany of explanations and ended up saying that I have a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and the other guy looked at me and said, “Okay, that does it. Nobody has a Frank Lloyd Wright house!” Actually the first guest to spend the night there was Patti Austin, the singer, who said it was a Zen experience for her. She lived there for about a week. You do get a different feeling when you’re in that house—certainly different from being in my house. As I’m sure you know, Taliesin [the name of Wright’s compound in Wisconsin] is Welsh for “shining brow,” and he loved to build on the brows of hills. The Marden House is sited that way, and it is so arranged as to really bring the river into the house. In pictures, you can see that expanse of glass that sits right on Little Falls, though you really have to see it first-hand to appreciate what Wright did. In short, for me, it’s been a joy, as it was for the Mardens. They had a wine cellar down in the basement with a little plaque on the door that said Hic habitat felicitas— “Here resides happiness.” •

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