And the translucent foliage ceilings are a nice touch – very eco but traditional, too.
Behind that central window is a grand state room of solid Renaissance proportions – it is called the double cube room – but dripping with proto-baroque ornament, all gold leaf, carved foliage, painted ceilings and Van Dyck portraits.
Consider what bats have to do: because they roost by hanging from their heels, they must land upside down against a cave ceiling or foliage.
The border and the compartments of this ceiling display foliage, flowers, peacock's feathers, and other ornaments of a rich hue, and of a delicate texture, which... seem peculiarly adapted for this lofty and suspended situation".
In yet another passage, he recalls the hallucinatory "rustling in the painted foliage under the vaulted ceilings of the Bibliotheque Nationale -- produced by the many pages continually leafed through in the books here".
The first-floor room has a 17th-century painted ceiling, decorated with fruit, foliage, and heraldic emblems.
The walls are decorated with maps, a kite and a floor-to-ceiling photograph of exotic foliage.
The Parisian interior designer Armand-Albert Rateau, the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White and the classical muralist Allyn Cox collaborated on the project, adding wings to the house, covering walls and ceilings with images of foliage and mythological creatures, and installing mirrored shutters and gilded pilasters shaped like palm trees.
As a child, I played on the wooden animals in the foyer (a horse, a tortoise, and a giant caterpillar) and marvelled at the fountain in its centre, surrounded by foliage, reaching up to a celestial domed ceiling.
"It had bars on the windows, smoke stains on the ceilings and it was covered with foliage, but I felt it had potential". Now that the work is done, the two-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot house will go on the market July 20 at $649,000.
"The notes devoted to the Paris arcades were begun under an open sky of cloudless blue that arched above the foliage," he writes in one passage, referring to the painted ceiling of the Bibliotheque.
