Polhemus & Coffin

Henry M. Polhemus and Lewis Augustus Coffin formed the New York-based architectural firm of Polhemus & Coffin. Together they contributed to a joint publication, "Small French Buildings: The Architecture of Town and Country", [In full, "Small French Buildings: The Architecture of Town and Country, Comprising Cottages, Farmhouses, Minor Chateaux or Manors with Their Farm Groups, Small Town Dwellings, and a Few Churches"; their co-writer was Addison Foard Worthington.] with 183 plates of illustrations, which was published by Scribner's in 1921. Their modest French country house "Millefleurs" for Mrs Daniel Guggenheim on the extensive Gould-Guggenheim estate in Port Washington, New York, on the Gold Coast of Long Island, was completed in 1932; it is modeled on the vineyard Château Beauregard, Pommerol. In Newport, Rhode Island, they designed "Champ Soleil", on Bellevue Avenue, a small 22-room French manor that was completed in 1929; it was equally said to be modeled on a French Norman chateau and on "La Lanterne", a residence near Versailles.

The firm also designed some apartment buildings and office structures in Manhattan: 232 Madison Avenue (1925) and 140 54th Street (1931, demolished). [ [http://www.emporis.com/en/cd/cm/?id=polhemuscoffin-newyorkcity-ny-usa Emporis.com] ] Lewis Coffin, who had graduated from the Choate School in 1908, designed the school's Winter Exercise Building (1931, now the Johnson Athletic Center). [ [http://www.choate.edu/aboutchoate/mapsdir_buildingpages.asp Choate Rosemary Hall: Building Pages] ]

Their draftsman George Hickey established an independent practise designing houses with a French flavor, many of them modeled on sketches from Polhemus & Coffin’s ""Small French Buildings". His most famous house in this genre, "Stonecrop", Cold Spring Harbor (1957), owes its reputation in large part to the more famous garden laid out and planted by the owner, Frank Cabot.

Lewis A. Coffin, Jr. became an associate of the firm.

An archive of photographs of their residential work in the Northeast, much of it in an unobtrusive vernacular Colonial style, is among the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress). [ [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/gottschoAuthors07.html Gottscho-Schleisner Collection: Creator/Related Name Index] .]

Notes

References

*Robert B. MacKay, Anthony K. Baker and Carol A. Traynor, "Long Island Country Houses and Their Architects, 1860-1940" (1997)