Inside, the ground floor rooms were decorated by the British architect and decorator Sir Charles Allom of White, Allom & Company, who had been knighted by King George V after his pleasing redecoration of Buckingham Palace. \u201cWe desire a comfortable, well arranged home, simple, in good taste, and not ostentatious,\u201d Frick told him.<\/p>\n
Frick died of a heart attack brought on by food poisoning in 1919, after living in his bespoke home for only five years. His will stipulated that after his wife died, the building and the art would become a museum. And so it did; it is now known as the Frick Collection<\/a>, and you can see the exquisite works \u2014 Rembrandts, Holbeins and Vermeers, among other things \u2014 some of them displayed precisely where Frick originally placed them in his (grand) personal home.<\/p>\n Most of the Gilded Age mansions were on Fifth Avenue, along a stretch known as \u201cMillionaire\u2019s Mile.\u201d So it was something of an anomaly when the railroad entrepreneur Stuyvesant Fish commissioned a residence for himself and his lively wife, Mamie, at 25 East 78th Street, on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue.<\/p>\n Many mansions at the time were built according to a more-is-more theory, a kind of Everything Bagels of architecture, with Tudor, Gothic and Renaissance features all jostling together in an over-the-top cacophony of styles. (Edith Wharton, for one, objected to the show-off architecture of the mansions built by various members of the Vanderbilt family around the city and in Newport, R.I. \u201cThey are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them,\u201d she wrote<\/a> in 1897.)<\/p>\n By contrast, the Fish house, a five-story Italianate palazzo of orange-and-yellow brick and limestone trim, was elegant and restrained<\/a>. Designed by the influential architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White, it was a social center for upper crust New York society and the site of creative, and sometimes wild, parties organized by Mamie.<\/p>\n