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ARTISTS AND WILD MONKEYS: PART ONE
I’m back now from my week away on vay-k – a vacation, as you’ll remember, that I took just a short drive from my Fort Lauderdale home. But I packed so much into that week, that I’m still floating on a relaxed cloud of memories. And I want to share more of those experiences with you. So we’re going to travel back in time several days to the first of my two vacation visits to the Bonnet House.
Officially this place is called the Bonnet House Museum and Gardens. On 35 lush acres of South Florida foliage, Bonnet House lives up to its billing, as both a delightful museum and impressive garden. My friend and I really did have to go twice last week to get the full sense of it all. We began on a Sunday afternoon by touring the museum, which is mostly the main house designed by Frederic Clay Bartlett, a wonderful American artist of the early 20th Century. This was a man definitely ahead of his time, as was his third wife, Evelyn. The house is full of life and humor and the unexpected. Whimsy was a real part of their personalities and that rare quality is reflected throughout the house and grounds.
Let’s start by saying they had money. As in, lots and lots of money. But so do many other people who don’t know how to use it. The Bartletts did. They painted murals on ceilings. They collected exotic wood carvings from around the world. They built their home with an outdoor courtyard as the living room and they ate dinner there together every evening. They constructed a bamboo bar to serve their own house specialty drink, a Rangpur Lime cocktail. There’s a shell room, which showcases pairs of shells gathered everywhere. And there’s an Orchid House, where Evelyn could show off her many blooming orchids.
I said they were ahead of their time and let me offer you a bit of evidence to back that up. When Frederic was in Paris, he bought paintings created by some young upstarts few people had heard of – or liked. These struggling artists included Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and others. You would recognize many of these paintings, which Frederic donated to the Art Institute of Chicago in memory of his deceased second wife, Helen. But the Bartletts were advanced for their era, or even ours, in many other ways. They believed in a healthy outdoor lifestyle and built a path from their house to the ocean to swim twice daily. They believed in quality time as a couple and created their Shangri-la to accommodate shared nightly cocktail hours outside as well as in at the bar. They used natural local materials to construct the house and had a xeriscaped garden long before the word xeriscape existed. They were original, intelligent, warm and funny people, if we can judge by their home and work. I wish I had known them.
The Bonnet House is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 4, Sunday from noon to 4. It is an oasis located just south of Sunrise Boulevard and just west of the A1A beach road. Call 954-563-5393 for more info. And in my next blog, I’ll tell you about our second trip to the Bonnet House, which we spent mostly outdoors. And, yep, there really are wild monkeys. This place is way cool.
I’m back now from my week away on vay-k – a vacation, as you’ll remember, that I took just a short drive from my Fort Lauderdale home. But I packed so much into that week, that I’m still floating on a relaxed cloud of memories. And I want to share more of those experiences with you. So we’re going to travel back in time several days to the first of my two vacation visits to the Bonnet House.
Officially this place is called the Bonnet House Museum and Gardens. On 35 lush acres of South Florida foliage, Bonnet House lives up to its billing, as both a delightful museum and impressive garden. My friend and I really did have to go twice last week to get the full sense of it all. We began on a Sunday afternoon by touring the museum, which is mostly the main house designed by Frederic Clay Bartlett, a wonderful American artist of the early 20th Century. This was a man definitely ahead of his time, as was his third wife, Evelyn. The house is full of life and humor and the unexpected. Whimsy was a real part of their personalities and that rare quality is reflected throughout the house and grounds.
Let’s start by saying they had money. As in, lots and lots of money. But so do many other people who don’t know how to use it. The Bartletts did. They painted murals on ceilings. They collected exotic wood carvings from around the world. They built their home with an outdoor courtyard as the living room and they ate dinner there together every evening. They constructed a bamboo bar to serve their own house specialty drink, a Rangpur Lime cocktail. There’s a shell room, which showcases pairs of shells gathered everywhere. And there’s an Orchid House, where Evelyn could show off her many blooming orchids.
I said they were ahead of their time and let me offer you a bit of evidence to back that up. When Frederic was in Paris, he bought paintings created by some young upstarts few people had heard of – or liked. These struggling artists included Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and others. You would recognize many of these paintings, which Frederic donated to the Art Institute of Chicago in memory of his deceased second wife, Helen. But the Bartletts were advanced for their era, or even ours, in many other ways. They believed in a healthy outdoor lifestyle and built a path from their house to the ocean to swim twice daily. They believed in quality time as a couple and created their Shangri-la to accommodate shared nightly cocktail hours outside as well as in at the bar. They used natural local materials to construct the house and had a xeriscaped garden long before the word xeriscape existed. They were original, intelligent, warm and funny people, if we can judge by their home and work. I wish I had known them.
The Bonnet House is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 4, Sunday from noon to 4. It is an oasis located just south of Sunrise Boulevard and just west of the A1A beach road. Call 954-563-5393 for more info. And in my next blog, I’ll tell you about our second trip to the Bonnet House, which we spent mostly outdoors. And, yep, there really are wild monkeys. This place is way cool.
posted by LauderBLOGGER at 2:41 PM
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