`We always try to leave a house better than we found it,” Carol Price says, referring to summer places she and her husband rented when their children were younger.
But since 1983, Price`s husband, Charles H. Price II, a banker from Kansas City, Mo., has been the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James, and the house in which they have been tenants is Winfield House in Regent`s Park, London, one of the premier ambassadorial residences in the world.
For the last year, with a new administration and a new ambassador on the horizon, Price has been occupied with living up to her usual goal. ”We see living at Winfield House as a temporary privilege, and we have done the best job we could to maintain it,” she says.
Even as they prepare to leave London on Feb. 28, the Prices are still involved in the many sides of diplomatic life.
At the end of last year, they met and shared the anguish of relatives of those who died in the bombing of a Pan American World Airways plane in Scotland.
”Part of the embassy role is to do, in a human tragedy, all that can be done,” Carol Price says.
Winfield House is no ordinary domain.
Its 12 acres of private grounds in the middle of Regent`s Park are probably second only to those of Buckingham Palace in central London.
Built by Hutton
The neo-Georgian brick house was built slightly more than 50 years ago by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress. It replaced a dilapidated neoclassical villa in the now-public park designed by John Nash in the early 19th Century as a garden city.
Hutton, who named the mansion for her grandfather, Frank Winfield Woolworth, returned to America in 1939. In 1946 she gave the house to the United States as a residence for the American ambassador; it has housed nine ambassadors since 1955.
Just inside the 20-room house`s handsome portico is a central reception hall with fluted columns that doubles as a ballroom.
On one side are two drawing rooms, the Garden Room and the Gold Room, with french doors opening to the gardens. Opposite are the family and state dining rooms, both paneled in the French manner.
In the family quarters upstairs are two sitting rooms in addition to six bedrooms, plus baths, one of them an original Art Deco marble bathroom.
Of the Prices` five children, only their son Charles III, a student at Eton, lives at Winfield House, during school vacations. Guests stay in the ground-floor Adams suite overlooking the lawn.
The old days of ambassadors arranging residences to suit themselves are gone. Ambassadorial residences are treated more like historic properties. The State Department keeps track of the art and antiques accumulated in them.
Since 1986 a nonprofit group, Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies, has commissioned Sotheby`s to inventory and appraise valuable furniture and art in American embassies.
$3 million value
In a 1987 inventory, the wholesale value of the art and furnishings of Winfield House was estimated at $3 million.
The art includes a full-length portrait of Thomas Jefferson by British artist G.G. Stapko and genre paintings such as Nicolas Antoine Taunay`s
”Italian Comedians.” There are also paintings on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia that were chosen by the Prices; the next ambassador will make his own selections.
Early in her husband`s tenure, Carol Price, who is on the board of the Friends group, restored the drawing rooms and dining rooms to the style given them in the early 1970s by William Haines and Ted Graeber, California designers.
They refurbished the residence for Ambassador and Mrs. Walter A. Annenberg, who also donated antiques they bought for Winfield House. These include a pair of Louis XV commodes in the state dining room and a chandelier from an Indian palace in the reception hall.
Graeber oversaw the Prices` work with his English associate, Dudley Poplak, re-establishing the 18th Century style of the rooms and also integrating some of the Prices` own treasures, such as a Chinese Chippendale mirror that hangs in the Garden Room against the rare Chinese wall covering of painted butterflies, birds and peonies on a bright green ground.
The atmosphere of this room-much like an orangerie, with its plant stands and chinoiserie furnishings-has made it Carol Price`s favorite.
One night in October, 1987, hurricane-force winds struck London, demolishing the Winfield greenhouses and uprooting some fine old trees.
New head gardener
The State Department provided emergency funds, and to manage the repairs, Carol Price hired a new head gardener, Stephen Crisp. Formerly the gardener at Leeds Castle, he was trained at Wisley Garden, the Royal Horticultural Society`s garden in Surrey, England, and at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. Crisp recently described the landscape as ”still an 18th Century park filled with incidents for the visitor, beginning with the circular route through the boscage that fringes the lawn.” This canopy of trees and shrubs screens off most of the cityscape.
Crisp and his staff of three have cleared debris to redefine the wooded area and have planted 12 sizable trees. Crisp also plans to introduce North American trees, to be planted by distinguished guests. Last summer the Prices planted the first, a sweet gum tree.
Also reclaimed was a glade, Dingly Dell, filled with woodland plants, camellias and crab apple and pear trees, the latter dating to the 1820s. A path leads to old brick tool sheds and potting rooms and brand-new greenhouses built by Cambridge Glass.
Neat rows of potted plants line paths to the house.
In addition to the greenhouses, two cutting gardens provide material for Crisp`s imaginative arrangements. For a dinner for the Duchess of Devonshire, he constructed an English hedgerow down the center of the table.
Carol Price likes to plan a large reception for the day after an important dinner to make the most use of the decorations. The Prices give intimate dinners for 10 as well as large, glamorous affairs that seat as many as 72 people at round tables.
Last June when the Prices gave their annual Wimbledon reception at the start of the London season, the gardens were at their peak. The 50 state flags lining the back terrace and a new long bed filled with white Iceberg roses framed by bluish Munstead lavender bespoke a spanking American style.
Grant from Friends
There has also been some last-minute interior work by Poplak ”to maintain,” he says, ”the feel and continuity of the reception rooms as the Prices` antiques and porcelains are withdrawn.”
With a grant from the Friends, there is new damask and needlepoint upholstery for the Gold Room, which will lose the Chinese scrolls lent by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.
To replace the Prices` own table service, Lenox donated a new set for official use, with heavy, gold-rimmed service and dessert plates displaying the embassy seal, the rest in a pattern of fruit and flowers.
In the meantime, boxes are everywhere as the Prices prepare to move back to their home in Kansas City.
Poplak has been there, setting the long-vacant house to rights. But it will be difficult, Carol Price says, to leave the long summer evenings at Winfield House, dining with friends under an awning on the terrace. –
