Like God the Father, Frederic Clay Bartlett – art connoisseur, hardware-manufacturing scion and painter – had many mansions. There was the grand house in Chicago, redbrick stolid on the outside, but teeteringly camp on the inside, with Pompeiian-style murals by his own hand. In upstate New York, Bartlett maintained a summer place, the dining room wrapped by garden scenes populated by strutting peacocks – also his brushwork. At a country house in Massachusetts, he outfitted the entrance hall with towering green obelisks, and in his apartment in Boston, the Art Deco dining room was dressed in a Grecian-style mural with lifesize galloping horses. The farm featured a picnic house that appeared to be made entirely of lace, a pavilion in the style of a Bavarian hunting lodge, and a mignon chapel of 18th-century Mitteleuropean mien. When those addresses were blanketed by snow, Bartlett motored south to Bonnet House, an airy Florida villa where he and wives two and three – Helen and Evelyn, respectively, each one an heiress with a creative streak – spent only a month or so each winter; all the same, it seems to have been the most beloved of Bartlett’s properties.
From the vantage point of a plane gliding in from points beyond, Bonnet House, now a house-museum, stands out incongruously, its densely wooded landscape hemmed by the Atlantic to the east, the Intracoastal Waterway to the west and by the glassy urban sprawl of Fort Lauderdale to the north and south. Close to the centre of the property stands the L-shaped residence, a hybrid of Florida bungalow and Caribbean villa, made of concrete blocks painted lemon yellow here and cerulean blue there, trimmed with Chinese red and expanded with stacked verandas. A large courtyard enclosed by a roofed gallery is part of the ensemble, which incorporates auxiliary structures, including studios for Fred (who had studied at James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Académie Carmen and was a member of Munich’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts) and for Helen, a composer. There is also an observation tower and an aviary in the form of a polychrome pagoda, a three-dimensional recollection of those that had bedazzled the Bartletts on their honeymoon trip to Asia.
Shortly after their wedding, Helen’s father, a Chicago magnate and Fort Lauderdale snowbird, gave them a chunk of land from his own holdings: 35 oceanside acres with 215 metres of private waterfront. Up went a two-storey house, designed to Fred’s specifications, it seems, since no architect’s name has hitherto surfaced. The only surprising aspect chez Bartlett was the constant presence of Helen’s father, who maintained a home nearby but preferred to occupy the bedroom next to the happy couple. The bliss lasted until 1925, when Helen died of cancer, aged 42, and her mourning husband turned his back on Florida for a period. But when he married Evelyn, former wife of the pharmaceuticals millionaire Eli Lilly, Bonnet House cast off its dust covers – though Fred’s father-in-law, who had encouraged the romance, continued to snore next door.
Emotionally and aesthetically, Fred’s union with Evelyn was an ecstatic embodiment of the phrase ‘third time’s a charm’. ‘He was the love of her life, and she was his,’ says Patrick Shavloske, CEO of Bonnet House, adding that her martinet former spouse ‘never gave her the support and encouragement that Fred did’.
The new Mrs Bartlett sparked the house’s name, a reference to the native yellow water lilies that she planted and which, according to one story, looked like bonnets when alligators surfaced with the leaves draped over their heads. Recalling her first visit to the estate as a bride, the elderly Evelyn – she lived to be 109 – described the land as a primordial Eden of ‘sawgrass, bulrushes, snakes and birds... It was marshland, and there was only a tiny little two-plank footpath over this marshland [to the beach]... Every time I crossed that two-plank pathway I saw snakes.’ Just as she and Fred set about formalising the untamed acreage with oblong reflecting pools and palm-tree allées, the pair picked up paintbrushes, too, gleefully swabbing walls, inside and out, with Fauvist tones.
What wasn’t chromatically charged was joyfully embellished. Seashells and tiles are cemented around doorways, fish trophies leap above a window in the dining room, and sea turtles stud china cabinets. Carousel animals were parked in empty spots. Gilded Solomonic columns were sliced in half to frame entrances in the drawing room, and a mignon out-building was erected as a shell museum. There, prize examples rest on shapely shelves, while others are arranged into vinous borders with all the finesse of embroidery. ‘They were magpies,’ Shavloske says of the Bartletts. In his youth, Fred told a reporter: ‘I cannot help buying curios, antiquities and works of art, even when I have no place to put them... I store some, I weed out about half in favour of better pieces, I exchange, I sift, I sell, and then – well, I go to work and collect more.’
After the death of his second wife, Frederic Clay Bartlett donated two dozen masterworks they had acquired – among them Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, as well as Van Goghs, a Matisse, Gauguins and a Modigliani – to the Art Institute of Chicago. A hidebound institution then, it deemed the paintings uncomfortably avant-garde but accepted them. At Bonnet House, though, the lovebird Bartletts embraced a DIY solution, as the sea-side conditions – salty and humid – and lack of climate control would bedevil blue-chip paintings. So Evelyn and Fred, once they took up redecorating the house with newlywed gusto, picked up their brushes again and turned out canvas after decorative canvas: jungle vistas, swans swimming beneath banana trees, an Indian elephant attended by turbaned youths, chic family portraits. All remain in place. The whimsical décors endure as well, so much so that it is easy to imagine the hospitable Bartletts, fresh from a walk along their private beach circa 1945 – a few years before Fred’s demise – heading to the bamboo bar, where a tray of icy daiquiris, another of Evelyn’s introductions to her subtropical domain, awaits.
Bonnet House Museum and Gardens, 900 North Birch Rd, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Details: bonnethouse.org
A version of this article appears in the June 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
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