: When George Schoellkopf, a noted dealer in American folk art,
closed his Madison Avenue shop and resigned from the Winter
Antiques Show, where he first exhibited in 1975, it was to pursue
a grander vision: that of creating a sprawling garden on 26
tilted acres outside Washington, the small but fashionable
Litchfield County town two hours north of Manhattan.
A gatherer of portraits and quilts, weathervanes and game boards,
Schoellkopf became a hunter of plants and stone and arresting
outdoor ornament. Over the past 28 years, he has installed dozens
of uncommon varieties of perennials, shrubs and trees in an
series of outdoor rooms whose architectural rigor, like the
whalebone stays of a corset, restrains a voluptuous excess of
leaf and bud.
Having developed Hollister House Garden, Schoellkopf, who is 63,
decided to donate his country estate, an incremental process that
began last year. A project of The Garden Conservancy - the Cold
Spring, N.Y.-based nonprofit organization founded in 1989 to
preserve exceptional American gardens - Hollister House Garden
recently opened two days a month from May to September and to
groups at other times by appointment, having long been part of
the Conservancy's Open Days program. Schoellkopf retains lifetime
use of the house, which, along with its contents, will one day
also be permanently on view.
"I needed something to do," Schoellkopf says with the wry, ready
laugh that is his trademark. The Yale graduate, who earned a
master's degree in art history from Columbia, opened his first
antiques shop in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s. By the
1970s, he had moved uptown, and upmarket, to Madison Avenue and
81st Street. A Russell Carrell dealer, he exhibited at the
Philadelphia, Wilmington and Kent shows, among others.
"George always had impeccable taste and was charming
company," Stonington, Conn., dealer Marguerite Riordan says of her
former Winter Antiques Show colleague. In the midst of the 1970s
quilt revival, New York Timescolumnist Rita Reif declared
that Schoellkopf, who mounted the first exhibition of Amish quilts
in his gallery in 1973, "continues to have the best eye in the
business for Amish quilts," whose dusky tones, as the dealer put
it, appeared "made by the light of the moon." Their palette of
plum, mauve, teal and maroon now plays across the larger canvas of
his garden.
It was to Litchfield dealer Jeffrey Tillou's mother, then an
apprentice realtor, that Schoellkopf turned when he fancied a
look at Hollister House, the circa 1760 Saltbox that he bought in
1978. Erected by Gideon Hollister II just before the Revolution,
the dwelling perches alongside Nettleton Hollow Road, five miles
from Washington's center.
A plummy brown with slate-colored shutters, the original
center-chimney structure has been only slightly altered over the
years. Though most of the windows and glass are original, a few
were changed in the 1820s. Gables were added upstairs, off the
back of the house, in the 1850s. A decade ago, Schoellkopf and
his partner, French photographer Gerald Incandela, whose work is
in the collections of the Getty Museum and the Museum of Modern
Art, among others, moved a barn from across town to make a
comfortable new wing with melting views of the garden. The main
sitting room is fitted with early Eighteenth Century paneling and
a mantel from Farmington, Conn. To support the raftered ceiling,
Schoellkopf appropriated an antique beam that lay unused in
another large, freestanding barn on his property, where Incandela
now stables his horses.
