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Auldbrass Wasn't Rebuilt In a Day
Alan Weintraub/Arcaid
The living room of
the main house establishes the motifs that run through Auldbrass: red
cypress planks, canted walls and hexagons.
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By MATT LEE and TED LEE
 hen
Joel Silver talks about Auldbrass, the Frank Lloyd Wright house in
Yemassee, S.C., which he bought in 1986 and has been restoring for the
last 15 years, filmmaking metaphors are often close at hand. Silver,
Hollywood's top-grossing producer, likens the work on Auldbrass to one
of his big-budget action pictures (''Lethal Weapon,'' ''Die Hard,''
''The Matrix'' and their many offspring). Like a movie, a restoration
begins with an idea set to paper, and after ''a process fraught with
negotiation, problems, compromise and tremendous budget and cost
issues, becomes something that lasts forever.''
Another Silver movie metaphor -- the one that best reflects the
process -- casts Auldbrass as ''its own sequel,'' in which each major
accomplishment completes another installment in the saga. The vision
that Wright committed to paper in 1939 is foremost in Silver's mind as
he builds, but at the same time, he is willing to adapt Wright's design
to suit the comfort of his 21st century family. Wright wrote that
architecture proceeds ''according to the nature of man and his
circumstances as they both change.'' In his meticulous restoration of
Auldbrass, Silver felt free to imagine what Wright would do with
today's materials and technology.
Silver tends to deny the creative force he brings to that process --
''It's like painting with a checkbook,'' he says. (In 1994, The New
Yorker reported that Silver had already spent $10 million on the place;
Silver won't talk hard figures today but offers this movie-budget
calculation: ''Take a 'Gothika' '' -- which had a reported $40 million
budget -- ''then subtract a 'Ghost Ship' and a couple episodes of
'Tales From the Crypt,' and you're close.'') But talk with Silver
about, say, his decision to conceal the vents of a modern
heating-and-air-conditioning system behind screens that Wright
originally designed for speakers, or about the time he scavenged for
the rare Tidewater red cypress needed to replace some rotted wood
vertical support beams from an old wine vat, and it becomes clear just
how much Auldbrass's reconstruction is a feat of creativity and
invention.
Silver's connection with Auldbrass began in October 1986, when
he learned from a fellow Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast that the
property was for sale and needed to be rescued.
Though he had never set foot in the Lowcountry of South
Carolina, a coastal plain where rice and indigo were once cultivated,
Silver was intrigued by Auldbrass's singularity. Of Wright's
thousand-odd commissions in the United States, Auldbrass is his only
one in the region, and his only Southern plantation. Wright had just
completed Fallingwater, the critically acclaimed house perched over a
waterfall in Mill Run, Pa., when C. Leigh Stevens, a wealthy Michigan
industrial consultant, commissioned a Lowcountry retreat and
gentleman's farm in a swampy, 4,000-acre tract on the banks of the
Combahee River, 20 miles upstream from the Atlantic. Wright conceived
Auldbrass as a collection of one-story, slender buildings of polished
cypress. His design called for a main house, a guest house and cabins,
a caretaker's residence, staff cabins, a barn, stables, kennels for
dogs, a ''dining barge'' floating in a pond on the property and an
aviary, all unified by material and design: cypress walls canted inward
at an 81-degree angle, copper roofs, doors with ornamental panes and
hexagonal tables.
Silver arrived at Auldbrass to find Wright's vision much beaten
and bruised. Both Wright and Stevens died before the design could be
fully realized; only half the buildings were finished. The barn and
stables burned down in 1952. Stevens's daughter inherited Auldbrass
upon his death in 1962, and she lived in and maintained the property
for 20 years. But when its upkeep proved unmanageable, she sold the
place, and it fell into the hands of a group of hunters who used
Auldbrass as a lodge. It became derelict, its cypress walls buckled and
turned the ashen gray of weather-battered wood. ''By the time I first
visited Auldbrass,'' Silver says, ''It was a month away from the
bulldozer.''
Silver was undeterred. At the time, he had just completed a
challenging restoration of Wright's 1924 Storer residence, a house in
Los Angeles made of decorative concrete blocks that Wright invented and
that Silver had to get manufactured from custom molds.
''I knew Auldbrass would be a huge project, and I always like
huge projects,'' Silver says. ''I walked around the place that day, and
I thought there was a chance here to really do something special and
fantastic. I said to myself, This could be monumental.''
In fact, the monumentality of Wright's plantation (as all large
properties are referred to in the area, whether or not crops are
planted) lies in its understatement. Dwarfed by old oaks, obscured by
the stables and with a barely discernible front door, Wright's dark,
asymmetrical main house at Auldbrass is a rebuke of the prevailing
Southern-plantation ideal -- the becolumned brick pile (the most famous
in South Carolina being the 1742 Drayton Hall) that rises emphatically
out of the grass as the most potent expression of control and order a
colonial planter could muster. Commissioned the same year that ''Gone
With the Wind'' had its premiere, modernist Auldbrass must have seemed
as alien to its neighbors in the early 1940's as Joel Silver does
today. Among the subsistence farmers and genteel country squires of the
Lowcountry, the 51-year-old Silver is the portly Hollywood tycoon in a
Hawaiian-print shirt stepping out of the dense underbrush in search of
his son, Max, or piloting his vintage 1913 fantail launch down the
Combahee, a portrait of his wife, Karyn, emblazoned on a pennant flying
at the bow.
Auldbrass is no Tara, and you know it immediately from the
quiet country road, a former king's highway in the earliest days of
English settlement, that passes the entrance. Wright's vision opens in
the form of a stark fence of dark, chestnut-colored cypress boards
marching at a suave rake. At properties just down the road from
Auldbrass, ancient oaks march in neat pairs up to the front door; at
Auldbrass, you enter the gate to find the oaks running roughshod over
the place, dropping acorns in every corner of the property and
obscuring sightlines. The driveway, a bright red lane paved in crushed
brick bordered in red concrete, takes off at an oblique angle from the
fence toward a cluster of buildings moored in a grove of oaks. It is
impossible to distinguish main house from caretaker's house from farm
building, and the vocabulary of Wright's late period is all there:
mitred corners; pagodalike spires; attenuated, jagged proportions; and
hexagonal motifs -- it is no exaggeration to say that there is scarcely
a right angle in the place.
What excites Silver most about Auldbrass are the features of
the house that speak uniquely to this setting. Copper downspouts hang
from the corners of the main house, like the Spanish moss draping over
the branches of live oaks. The gentle angle of the slanted boards and
canted walls seems to mimic the gentle slope of the oaks' trunks. The
cypress was an obvious choice for Wright, since the bedrooms of the
main house look north over a few acres of cypress trees rising from an
old rice pond. The wood is as rich and honeyed as an old schooner and
its many-faceted surfaces absorb close to 150 gallons of deck oil each
year.
The name Auldbrass is Wright's modification of ''Old Brass,'' the name
(which is thought to refer to slaves beyond working age and of mixed
African and Native American descent) given to the property in the
mid-19th century. Wright's logo for Auldbrass, a stylized arrow, was
his nod to the iconography of the Yemassee Indians, who inhabited this
area before the arrival of the British. The same arrow motif is cut
from panels just under the eaves of the main house. After dusk, when
light from inside the house illuminates the arrow design on these
panels, the building has the look of a paper lantern.
''Over the years, I've seen so many Frank Lloyd Wright
buildings,'' Silver says, rattling off the pilgrimages he has taken, to
Chicago, California, Arizona, Japan. ''Auldbrass looks like no other
Wright house because he never built anything in an environment like
this. There's nothing like the Lowcountry anywhere.''
Silver grew up in Maplewood, N.J., in the 1960's, and his first
experience of Wright's work was a childhood visit to the Guggenheim
Museum, where he imagined he was in a spaceship and thought it was the
coolest building he'd laid eyes on. Some years later, when Silver was a
teenager, neighbors in Maplewood hired Taliesin Associated Architects
-- the firm that continued Wright's work after he died in 1959 -- to
build a house. Silver recalled watching that house rise from the
ground. ''I remember thinking, Why is this different from anything I've
ever seen?'' Silver says. ''I was moved by his design and his
aesthetic.''
By the early 80's, Silver had moved to Los Angeles and produced
''48 Hours,'' the cop hit starring Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. With
the windfall the film brought him, Silver bought the Storer house in
Hollywood and hired Eric Lloyd Wright, Wright's grandson, to help
restore it. Two years later, Silver took that first trip to Yemassee.
For Auldbrass, Silver again hired Eric Lloyd Wright, and they
amassed an archive of the nearly 500 documents and drawings related to
its construction. Auldbrass was beset with problems from the start.
World War II made both cypress and copper scarce, causing delays and
compromises in Wright's original plan. By 1942, the staff cabins, barns
and stables were erected, but according to the Wright scholar David G.
De Long, whose book ''Auldbrass: Frank Lloyd Wright's Southern
Plantation'' will be published in December, Wright and Stevens
frequently disagreed over details in the design, and fluctuations in
Stevens's fortune caused work to be suspended for long stretches of
time. Complicating matters further, Stevens's third wife, Nina,
redecorated the interiors in her own personal style and even made
structural alterations to the main house that caused Wright to send a
cable to Stevens that read simply: ''All hope lost.''
Silver and Eric Lloyd Wright decided that Wright's original
plans would be both Rosetta stone and road map, and they began in 1988
by restoring the buildings that existed on the property, starting with
the main house. Cypress that had deteriorated had to be patched;
unsalvageable wood was replaced entirely. Nina Stevens's modifications
to Wright's design were removed, and cracked concrete floors were made
level. Wright elements that had never been built, like a window that
zigzagged the length of the main dining room, were finally realized.
Restoration of the main house alone required two years of constant
work. ''We had some rough spots along the way,'' Silver says. ''It took
10 years to put Auldbrass in a place where I thought it was secure.''
The next phase of the restoration was to rebuild the barn and
stables that were leveled by fire, and the third phase (still going on)
is to build the elements Wright designed but never executed: a swimming
pool, the guest house and cabins and the dining barge. Silver also is
creating new features, like a small marina overlooking a canal. These
were not part of the original plan, but Eric Lloyd Wright is designing
them in a manner consistent with the look and feel of the rest of the
plantation. Silver is aware that he's playing loose with the strictures
of a museum-quality restoration, and he is careful to keep such
projects at a safe distance, out of sight from the original complex.
''It's not a formaldehyde restoration, because Wright was
always looking for the cutting edge,'' Silver says. He cites Wright's
use in Auldbrass of Lumiline, a tube-shaped incandescent bulb, and plug
molding -- a precursor to track lighting -- as evidence. In Silver's
Auldbrass, there are plasma-screen TV's in the bedrooms of the main
house. The gas fires in the fireplaces are lighted by infrared remote
control. ''I try to make the place work for me, my wife, my baby and my
friends,'' Silver says. ''It's comfortable, but it's still pure from a
Wrightian point of view.'' A purity that allows for Silver's particular
eccentricities, like the zebras, the pygmy hippo and the herd of
longhorn cattle that roam in the pastures alongside the driveway.
But if certain elements and methods may seem contemporary, even
fanciful, Silver seeks a rigorous authenticity in the materials. The
bricks used to build new structures on the plantation are extralong, to
Wright's specifications, and shipped to Auldbrass by the containerload
from a kiln in Cheraw, S.C., that makes them to order. In his quest for
the perfect, most authentic shade of Taliesin red, a brick red that
Wright favored for his fleet of cars (paint was otherwise anathema for
Wright), Silver purchased two Lincoln Continentals from the 40's that
Wright had owned and modified. What Silver believes to be the original
tint was found behind one of the car's door panels. After four visits
to the paint supplier in Beaufort, they reproduced the hue perfectly,
and now, all the golf carts and farm trucks on the property have a
shiny coat of Taliesin red, with the Auldbrass arrow in contrasting
black on their doors.
In the process of restoring Auldbrass, Silver and his staff,
led by the plantation manager, Scott McNair, have by necessity become
their own contractors, craftsmen and manufacturers of building
materials. Being deep in the South Carolina countryside has its
disadvantages (aside from spotty cellular service and lack of D.S.L.).
The hexagonal concrete floor panels were beyond the scope of local
concrete companies, so McNair welded an aluminum template that could be
used to imprint the original floor pattern for the house. Repairmen
were rarely available for emergency fixes to the geothermal HVAC
system, so Silver enrolled McNair, a 41-year-old marine biologist by
training, in heating and air-conditioning school, and McNair now boasts
to visitors of his four diplomas in the field.
All that remains to be built of Wright's original design for
Auldbrass are three guest cabins, whose foundations have already been
laid; the two-story guest house -- the largest house in the plan --
scheduled to rise in 2004 along the same axis as the main house; and
the ''dining barge'' to float in the cypress pond in front of the
house.
And after that?
Silver seems unwilling for the sequel to end. ''I'll be building stuff here till they bury me,'' he says.
Matt Lee and Ted Lee write frequently about food for The New York Times and are contributing editors at Travel & Leisure. Get home delivery of The Times from $2.90/week
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