Hartland's Castle, Billow Road, Old Saybrook, Connecticut
It's not often that you can trace a house's history by its postcards. Over the years, this castle of a house went from a private residence to an army training ground to a few different resort hotels and restaurants.
Two constants throughout all of those colorful years: celebrities and lots of booze.
Let's start with that first postcard.
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Hartlands, as the house was known then, was built between 1903-1908 for George and Elizabeth Colt Jarvis Beach. Elizabeth was named for her aunt Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, of Colt's Manufacturing, Connecticut's firearms company.
Elizabeth Beach had another prominent relative, General William Hart, and named her house Hartlands in his honor. The Hart and Jarvis families had ties to the land where it was built dating back to the 17th century. The area is still called Cornfield Point for the fields of corn that fed those early colonists.
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It's where the Connecticut River meets the Long Island Sound with 200 feet of shoreline, and it's only thirty feet above sea level. The shoreline is so rocky that the coast guard stationed the Cornfield Point lightship there until the 1950's.
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George and Elizabeth used some of that stone to build Hartlands. They wanted a house that looked like the fashionable summer "cottages" in Newport, so for some reason they made their mansion look like an old Tudor village. (Interestingly, they hired architect Alfredo S.G. Taylor who went on to design a mansion named Hillside for the Remington Arms Company heiress Helen Hartley Jenkins.}
Today Hartlands looks less like a rambling Tudor village than it did, but that's another postcard story.
Before we get to that, let's look inside.
The foyer fireplace reportedly has a heart shaped "Hart" stone, but I'd need to have it pointed out to me.
The kitchen was beautifully renovated around 2009 and nicely references its rocky location:
That brings us to postcard #2. Rumor has it that the Beaches were in debt in the years following World War I. During the war they had leased their property to the Army for a dollar a year as an artillery training site, but soon after they sold the mansion and land to developers.
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Hartlands became "Ye Castle Inn" and quickly had more celebrity connections than just local ones. Innkeepers Otto and Maggie May Lindbergh bought it in 1923, and after Otto's nephew Charles crossed the Atlantic in 1927, it became the place to be seen -- especially after the Lindbergh's son-in-law started his bootlegging operation there during the Prohibition.
Celebrities ranging from Charlie Chaplin and Tallulah Bankhead to Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra and Doris Day all enjoyed the "fine liquor, cigarettes, big-band music and gambling" offered at the inn. Most likely they gathered here, in the "gentlemen's smoking room:"
To me, this room just has too much going on. If it were mine, I'd darken the ceiling and simplify it a bit:
That brings us to this other party room. It supposedly was a chapel at one point, until it became a movie-screening room:
Maybe it has good acoustics, but I don't know why you'd project the sound into the bedrooms open above.
If it were mine, I'd turn the media components closet into a sleek wine storage room and hang a picture of the bootlegger next to the celebrity photos.
That brings us to postcard #3. In 1950, the Lindberghs sold Ye Castle Inn, right around the time TV started taking off and they were screening movies less frequently. Hartlands became The Inn at Cornfield Point.
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Hartland still had its rambling Tudor village annexes then. Even without them today, it's still very inn-like with eleven bedrooms and eleven bathrooms in 17,000 square feet.
There's a lounge and second kitchen on the second floor, in the castle's tower section.
Hartlands changed hands pretty rapidly after 1955, with more name changes and more postcards:
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The 8,500 square feet of the rambling Tudor annex was gone by 2002, while developers built houses all over Cornfield Point. The house was abandoned and The Castle Inn sign ended up in a dumpster.
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A neighbor saved the sign and it's now property of the Old Saybrook Historical Society.
And obviously that's not the only happy ending for this house. Wayne Rand and Maria Foss-Rand bought the house in 2006 and worked diligently to restore its former glory.
By the way, the turret is 55 feet tall and has rooftop accessibility. What a perfect place to perch and pen postcards.
The listing is here.
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