How Socialite Barbara Hutton’s London Home Became the US Ambassador’s Residence
This post was originally published on this site
Over the years, Winfield’s über-wealthy ambassadors have bestowed their largesse on the American showplace, where presidents traditionally stay (including The Diplomat’s Joe Biden–like William Rayburn, played by Michael McKean), and dignitaries—Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, and Princess Diana and her sons, Princes William and Harry—are guests.
The mansion’s most extensive renovations came courtesy of Ambassador Walter Annenberg and his wife Lenore in the 1970s, when they completely modernized the house, including its infrastructure and roof. (Another infrastructure restoration that included the removal of asbestos took place in the late 1990s.) They hired California decorators William Haines and Ted Graber and English designer Dudley Poplak (who later worked with Princess Diana) to redo the reception rooms and the six upstairs bedrooms (where there are also two sitting rooms), filling Winfield with priceless antiques (a pair of Louis XV commodes for the state dining room), paintings, porcelain, chandeliers (an Indian palace’s light fixture illuminates the reception hall), and objets d’art, all donated by couple.
In the early 1980s, Ambassador Charles H. Price I, and his wife Carol asked Graber and Poplak to bring that 18th-century style and furniture back to the drawing, dining, and reception rooms, and they remain today. When last appraised in 1997, the US State Department put the value of Winfield House’s 600-plus “heritage objects”—fine art, furniture, and furnishings—at just shy of $7 million, a little over $13 million today.
Winfield’s formal gardens—with what gardener Stephen Crisp described as “their 19th-century bones”—have also been refurbished over the years. Especially in the late 1980s, when gale-force winds uprooted old trees, destroyed the greenhouses, and the State Department supplied emergency funds for repairs, including planting new trees. According to The Diplomat, one old growth with a connection to Hutton’s love of Macbeth remains. In episode three of the Netflix series, the prime minister tells the president that a “sneaky Winfield groundskeeper” knew Hutton loved the Scottish play, and “lopped a cutting off the last Birnam Oak and planted it in the garden.”
Responses