Scenes from Mai Coe's bedroom

Spring has sprung. As the new season beckons, it’s a great time to venture out and explore our region. One place worth a visit is Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, where Long Island’s Gilded Age comes alive at historic Coe Hall.
The Elizabethan revival Gold Coast mansion – built by insurance magnate William Robertson Coe and his wife, the Standard Oil heiress Mai Rogers Coe, in 1921 – represents life lived on a grand scale. Along with its impressive 409 acre grounds, the mansion has been painstakingly renovated.
Its latest refurbishment involves Mai Coe’s bedroom, which reopens to the public on April 1.
In 1921, the walls and ceiling of Mrs. Coe’s bedroom, in then newly-built Coe Hall, were painted with a remarkable landscape mural by the American artist Robert Winthrop Chanler. Mrs. Coe died only three years later, and in the late 1920s Coe’s third wife, Caroline, had the room completely redecorated (the murals, originally on canvas, were later destroyed by fire).
During the last six months, Chanler’s work on the bedroom’s plaster walls and ceiling has been recreated by scenic artist Polly Wood-Holland and her assistant Joyce Kubalak. Their work is based on just two surviving color photographs taken soon after the murals were originally completed.

The project is part of Planting Fields Foundation’s ongoing restoration of Coe Hall. Over the last thirty years most of the ground floor rooms have been brought to life again by the return of approximately 80 percent of the original furniture and works of art that had been removed in the 1950s when the building was used as a state college. The furnishings are gifts to the Foundation by Coe family descendants. Work on several more rooms continues, especially on the second and third floors.
“The mural is very beautiful,” said Marianne Howard, Collections Manager for the Planting Fields Foundation. “This bedroom is part of our large effort to reopen all 65 rooms of this outstanding Gold Coast mansion. Repainting this mural is a huge step in the process of reopening this room and the entire second floor.”
Robert Chanler was part of a coterie of high society New York artists that included the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and the architect Lloyd Warren, for whom Chanler painted decorative interiors. As a young man, Chanler, from a prominent New York City family, had studied art in France and Italy where he lived for several years. In 1902, on his return to the U.S., he specialized in painting decorative schemes for interiors. His 1916 painted room at New York City’s Colony Club survives as do a handful of other interiors, including his 1920 buffalo hunt murals for the breakfast room at Coe Hall.
In Mrs. Coe’s bedroom, Chanler’s vision takes the form of fanciful landscape vignettes with flowering plants. It was inspired by the 18th century French rococo art of Francois Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard. What makes Chanler’s original work particularly fascinating was his use of a painted silver background for the entire room.
In the newly re-painted murals this technique has been recreated to stunning effect. The walls glow and sparkle with an Art Deco flourish.
Mrs. Coe’s choice of a flowering landscape theme for her bedroom speaks to her passion for horticulture. This passion is evident in the park at Planting Fields with its elaborate gardens, greenhouses and camellia house that she and her husband built in the late teens and early 1920s. The huge bay window of Mrs. Coe’s bedroom looks out towards the Italian Garden, which was her flower garden, the design of which she closely supervised.
The restoration of the Italian garden, which re-opens June 19, appropriately coincides with the recreated bedroom murals.
Visitors can celebrate the reopening of the bedroom, with its French-style murals, at a family “French Toast” Breakfast, on Saturday. The event features French toast and croissants in Coe Hall’s Dining Room.

Mrs. Coe’s Bedroom at Coe Hall
Family “French Toast” Breakfast

Saturday, April 3, 9-11 a.m. $20. Reservations required.Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park, 1395 Planting Fields Rd, Oyster Bay.
(516) 922-8678 or www.plantingfields.org.