EVEN in a turn-of-the-century gated enclave famous for its architectural extravagance, a freestanding ballroom built into a rocky hillside with urn-shaped finials, huge windows rising to fanlight transoms, a limestone balustrade and a 28-foot ceiling is an unlikely choice for a weekend getaway. But when this one came up for sale, Jack and Kim Kilgore had no hesitations. “It was quite impractical,” Mr. Kilgore said, but “quite magical, and we have never for a moment regretted it.”
It was also, in spite of its opulence, a one-bedroom house, thanks to a conversion in the 1960s, and in that sense one of the most modest dwellings in town. A 2,050-acre gated community in Orange County, less than 50 miles north of New York City, Tuxedo Park is known for its scores of enormous mansions, built by some of most prominent American architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and ranging in style from shingle style to Arts and Crafts, Tudor to French chateau, Italianate to pure Shangri-La. In a setting like this — the splendor of which has just been documented in a 350-page book, “Tuxedo Park: The Historic Houses,” and will be showcased in an upcoming photography exhibition — it would be easy to overlook a 1920s annex to a long-demolished mansion. The Ballroom, as the building has always been called, is almost an afterthought in the book, sequestered in a section about the town’s lost houses. But the Kilgores set their sights on it the moment they learned it existed.
That was in 1997, when they came to Tuxedo Park to look at another house. Sitting in the broker’s office, Ms. Kilgore noticed a flier advertising the Ballroom, and was told that it was a local folly, under contract to Whoopi Goldberg. “My heart sank,” Ms. Kilgore said, “because I knew at once it was exactly what I wanted.”
For the next two years, the Kilgores — he deals in old masters and has a gallery, Jack Kilgore & Company, in New York; she was working as an adviser to clients at Christie’s at the time — kept coming back to Tuxedo Park. Friends would invite them up, and although they were always on the lookout for a house to buy, nothing compared to the Ballroom. Then, in 1999, Ms. Goldberg, who had decided to buy a larger house nearby, put this one up for sale.
WHEN the Kilgores bought it in 1999 for just under $1.3 million, the Ballroom still had one of its crystal chandeliers, but the parquet flooring, interior lattice work, floor-to-ceiling mirror and indoor fountain, all visible in an old photograph they had seen, were gone. What remained was a shell that needed a lot of work.
The Ballroom had been built in 1926 by Amory Carhart Jr. and his wife, Isadora, possibly in celebration of a daughter’s society debut. It originally faced Villa Blanca, an Italianate mansion built by the first Amory Carhart, an heir to a banking and railroad fortune, in 1900 — 15 years after Tuxedo Park was established by a tobacco magnate tired of life in Newport, R.I. Nothing is known about the Ballroom’s architect (the main house, torn down in the 1940s, is believed to have been designed by McKim, Mead & White), but the building, particularly the interior, bears a resemblance to the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Amory Carhart III, whom the Kilgores reached through a friend a few years ago, told them that it was built as a place for the family to hold its parties.
The original 60s conversion had cut off about a third of the space to make room for a kitchen and dining area downstairs and an upstairs bedroom and bathroom. Ms. Goldberg had replaced the rotted parquet floor with oak flooring, and divided the kitchen and dining area with a wall. The Kilgores considered doing a full-scale renovation, but having bought a house in New York City and decided not to live full time in Tuxedo Park, they opted to simply divide the bedroom in two to create a room for their daughter, India, now 6. Instead, they focused on bringing the Ballroom back to its original grandeur.
A room that measures approximately 75 by 45 feet and has such a high ceiling presents a decorating challenge. To unify the space, the Kilgores replaced the original lattice work in the alcoves with a series of 12 plaster plaques of classical themes that they had cast in Paris (the originals are in the Louvre). They painted the walls and hung an eclectic mixture of modern and classical art, often in small groupings since anything short of an enormous painting would be lost on its own on walls so big. A beige wool carpet covers the floor, tying the room together and dulling the echo caused by the height of the ceiling. On it rests an Aubusson rug, bought at auction in London. Scale, of course, is all-important, so the furniture, much of it 18th century, is oversize.
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