Crawford House, Easy Street, Aiken, South Carolina
Fred Astaire danced here. That's Aiken, South Carolina's equivalent of "George Washington slept here."
{Life Magazine August 25, 1941}
When the Crawford family purchased that estate, they got rid of Astaire's dance floor, but kept the ornate gate he had to pass through to get there.
The Crawfords also kept the estate's garage, which looks more like a New England church than a garage. We'll take a closer look at it in a moment.
Can't you just picture Astaire treating this path like a stage and pirouetting along those stone benches?
Here is an aerial shot of the estate, to get a better idea of how this area connects to the property. The gate and garage are on the upper right in the photo.
That brings us to the star of the show, the main house.
It's a bit tricky to photograph, because it has three separate buildings that were connected to make one grand estate, spread over 2.70 acres.
The main portion was built circa 1840. The buildings were joined together around 1910, and the Crawford family purchased the house in 1920. The garage and gate were added to the property presumably sometime after 1941.
At first the house does feel very traditional and rooted in the 1840's. Then it keeps on going...
The house has 8,213 square feet. The four bedrooms (each with their own bathroom and sitting room) are accessed via a long hallway.
These bedrooms seem a bit inspired by the "Aiken pink"stucco of its neighbor the Peabody Pink House next door.
If it were mine, I'd make this bedroom look a bit more stately, like this:
Its connecting bathroom is pleasant, but a little boring:
I would make it a little more pretty in pink -- and marble:
That brings us to the Astaire-era garage:
It has an upstairs apartment with a small balcony.
There's also a second, more recent garage, this one with a two bedroom (unpictured) apartment above.
The estate also includes a poolhouse and a barn with nine stalls and three paddocks.
{source}
It was Thomas and Louise Hitchcock who persuaded Everett Lake and Edna Phelps Gregory Crawford to come spend their winters golfing and fox hunting with elite society among Aiken's "lush longleaf pines." It wasn't too hard of a sale. Everett Crawford (1879-1960) was Cornelius Vanderbilt's nephew as well as a banker and stock broker. He was also already raising show horses and holding polo matches at his other homes in Rye Brook and Millbrook, New York.
This is the Crawford's Shanarock Farm in Rye Brook:
Today it's the Crawford Mansion Community Center, an event venue at Crawford Park.
This is the Crawford Farm Estate in Millbrook:
It was used as a school and has a separate classroom building and dormitory with 18 rooms.
I think Everett Crawford would approve of the multi-use elements of his properties. Although history dances around his connection with Fred Astaire and why he only kept part of Phyllis Astaire's family property, he definitely knew how to maximize the value out of what he had. Two of his daughters were married on the same day, in the same church, half an hour apart. In his own way, he could be just as nimble as Astaire.
The listing is here.
