“I first saw the house over 30 years ago,” explains Harold Doley of the Villa Lewaro, a 34-room Italianate mansion overlooking the banks of the Hudson River in this quiet Westchester County town 40 minutes north of New York City. Villa Lewaro was built in 1918 by Madam C.J. Walker, the daughter of former slaves, who became the first self-made female millionaire in America by selling haircare products for black women.
Doley owns Doley Securities, a brokerage and investment banking firm that is the oldest African-American-owned firm in the industry. He is also the first African-American to own an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
While still a broker trainee in New York, Doley made a pilgrimage to the Walker estate, about which he had heard in his youth. For many young African-Americans, the achievements of Madam C.J. Walker were legendary. He recalls, “One weekend I got on the train from New York because I wanted to see the house. After I walked around it, I said to myself, `This is a house that I want to own.’ “
Twenty-five years later, Doley made true his desire and purchased the Walker estate, where he has lived with his wife, Helena, an educator, for the past five years. Recently, the Doleys allowed their home to be used as a decorator showhouse benefiting the United Negro College Fund. Twenty-nine designers were invited to transform individual rooms in the main building and an adjacent carriage house in a manner that paid homage to the estate’s first owner.
The Walker estate was designed in 1917 by Vertner W. Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York state. When work on the house began in 1917, neighbors included Rockefellers, Goulds, Tiffanys and other prominent families.
Tandy’s scheme for the three-story, cream-colored stucco house involved a broad center hallway leading to generously proportioned public rooms, including a library, conservatory and dining and living rooms. On the second floor, the ends of the house were anchored by two large bedroom suites used by Walker and her only daughter, A’Lelia, with multiple sitting rooms and guest rooms scattered in between. The third floor included a billiard room and a large children’s nursery, while the basement housed a gymnasium, kitchen, pantry, laundry, wine cellar and servant’s quarters. The adjacent carriage house had space for four cars with additional servants’ rooms above.
As the house neared completion in the spring of 1918, The New York Times wrote of Walker: “On her first visits to inspect her property, the villagers, noting her color, were frankly puzzled, but when it became known that she was the owner . . . they could only gasp in astonishment. `Impossible!’ they exclaimed. `No woman of her race could own such a place.’ “
During a visit to the estate, midway through the showhouse’s run last month, Doley spoke about the responsibility of owning a house of such historic import.
“Madam Walker built this house as an inspiration to her people and stated so on many occasions. There have been many days and evenings, long before this showhouse became a reality, that people have rung the doorbell and asked for a tour.” He confesses, “That has sometimes been difficult to deal with.”
Opening the house to the public alleviated some of the burden, Doley explains from a ground-floor study that has been cast in a Louis XVI-goes-modern mode by New York-based designers Cheryl Flanagan and Gail Green of Arcadia Inc. Blond wood furniture abounds (even the computer is encased in a pale fruitwood), with French gilded wall sconces and almond-toned, chenille-string drapery topped by a tea-colored cornice.
In the midst of these decidedly feminine surroundings, Doley–a solidly built man who speaks with a measured Southern drawl–looks out of place. That’s a risk anyone runs when he gives dozens of designers carte blanche in his home. “I have never been around this many creative people in my life,” he says wryly. “Nor would I ever want to again. I am basically an inflexible financier.”
African-American designers
All that aside, Doley and his wife were determined to raise $75,000 for the UNCF, an organization they have long supported. A tally taken days after the showhouse closed showed that goal was met, with more than 5,000 visitors to the house. More important, the Doleys liked the fact that their home could be used as a promotional vehicle for emerging designers, particularly African-Americans (although the showcased designers were not exclusively African-American).
“I am a graduate of a UNCF institution,” explains the Louisiana-born Doley, who attended Xavier University in New Orleans. “The idea of placing internationally recognized designers such as George Bond and Tom Vinges (an established design team, with offices in both the States and England, who were responsible for the Regency-style redesign of the entrance hall) in a showhouse alongside talented young designers such as Amani Thorpe, a UNCF graduate of Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, was exciting to me and my wife.”
“Working in this house, I feel as if I have come full circle, particularly with the UNCF connection,” says Thorpe, 24, who currently works as an in-house designer for W.L. Landau’s Ethan Allen in Hartsdale, N.Y. Her assignment was the former children’s nursery on the third floor–an L-shaped space tucked beneath the eaves of the house.
Thorpe transformed the space into a modern family room with four distinct programs: There is a quiet zone centered around a brick fireplace, a television area headed by a large wood cabinet, a gaming area anchored by a card table and a work space dominated by a computer. She restricted her color palette to caramel, brown and beige tones to create a cozy, cave-like atmosphere.
She explains, “My background is in painting, and I really like to decipher spaces with shapes, textures and patterns the same way I would in painting. Decorating for me is like assembling a still life.”
For Linda Lindsay, the Smithtown, N.Y., designer responsible for turning the master bathroom into a color-saturated, pillow- and fabric-stuffed boudoir, the historic significance of the house and the opportunity to work with other black designers “brought out the best in all of us.” Says Lindsay, “Getting together a collection of different artisans–ones who are inspired by impulses beyond the mainstream–is the idea behind ethnic design. It is a concept too often missing from the design environment right now.”
`A hero to so many’
April DuBois wants to capitalize on what she sees as a growing interest in ethnic design. Part of the creative team that turned a second-floor sitting room into a neo-Egyptian wonderland, replete with lapis-blue walls accented in gold leaf and hieroglyphics and sabre-leg chairs, Dubois is not an interior decorator by trade. Less than two months ago, she launched the IBIS Catalog offering ethnically inspired home accessories made in Africa and Indonesia. She jumped at the chance to display her product at this showhouse because of the appropriateness of the venue. “Madam Walker was a hero to so many,” she explains.
Further insight into the early history of the house and its original owner comes from Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Perry Bundles, named for Walker’s daughter. Bundles, 46, is deputy bureau chief for ABC News in Washington, D.C., and is working on a biography of her famous ancestor, having already published a young adult biography titled “Madam C.J. Walker: Entrepreneur” (Chelsea House, $8.95).
A small woman with close-cropped hair and a quick compelling manner, Bundles has settled into a mahogany daybed in an airy first-floor room converted into what New York designer Charles Pavarini III conceived as a personal rehearsal space for actress/singer Vanessa L. Williams. Pavarini, who has in fact worked on the singer’s nearby home, cast the room in a rich palette of greens, browns and golds. Most of the furnishings date to the 1920s and ’30s, including a Welmar piano from London, a French Art Deco console and two side chairs by Jean Michel Frank dating to 1933.
“When Madam Walker built this house, she knew she would get a lot of criticism from people claiming she was just showing off,” explains her great-great-granddaughter. “But she said, `No, I am not building this as a monument to me. I want to show young black people what one lone woman accomplished so they can see what their possibilities are.’ ” Bundles adds softly: “She gives me goosebumps.”
A `Builder & Titan’
What Walker, who earlier this month was named one of Time magazine’s 100 “Builders & Titans of the Twentieth Century,” accomplished is indeed astounding. Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 in Delta, La., to former slaves, says Bundles, “She was orphaned at 7, married at 14, a mother at 17 and a widow at 20.” Sarah worked as a laundress throughout her early life until one day, frustrated by hair-loss problems (like many women of the time she suffered from alopecia, a stress, diet and hygiene-related scalp ailment), she devised a hair-care formula that worked for her and began to market it to other women of African descent.
In 1906, she married Charles Joseph Walker, who helped his wife expand her mail-order business. She soon adopted the professional title “Madam,” and from then on, her ascent was dizzying. Within two years Walker, who was then based in Pittsburgh, opened a beauty school and training college for her growing body of agents. By 1912, the Walker company counted more than 1,600 employees throughout the United States, Central America and the Caribbean.
According to Bundles, once she had achieved success, Walker used her wealth and visibility “to promote social and political causes in which she believed and to encourage women to pursue business opportunities and economic independence.”
Even on her deathbed (Walker died of kidney failure on May 25, 1919, merely a year after her dream house in Irvington was completed), she busied herself writing checks to various race organizations, including the NAACP, to whom she willed the house upon the death of her daughter. Eventually, the NAACP allowed the trustees to sell the house to a woman’s benevolent organization, in whose hands it remained for 55 years until it was bought by a speculator who sold the house to the Doleys in 1993.
“I spent my first overnight in the house when the Doleys were hosting a dinner for the Westchester Philharmonic a few years ago,” says Bundles. “I stayed in what was once A’Lelia Walker’s room. As I was getting dressed that evening, the band was tuning up downstairs, the aroma of Creole food was wafting up from the kitchen, and as a light breeze streamed in through the windows, I thought: The house has come awake again.”
Seeing the transformation brought on by the designers, she says, adds to the thrill. “It took the Doleys, with their vision and understanding of Walker’s legacy, to bring the purpose of this place to life.”
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For more information on Madam C.J. Walker, contact A’Lelia Bundles at ABundles@aol.com.
