History in the (Re) Making: Gardiner House’s Grand Foyer Recreates a Century-Old Personal Treasure

In the 2007 feature film Evening, actor Hugh Dancy twirls his costar Claire Danes around the elegantly hand-painted foyer of a quintessential coastal New England home as notes of “I’ve Got the World on a String” hang in the salty air. The scene didn’t unfold on a Hollywood studio set, but instead, at a prominent real-life stick-style home named The Ledges on Newport’s Ocean Drive, built in 1867 for the Cushing family, who continue to enjoy it today.

The Cushings opened the home up for the film, and the majestic manse was seen more recently in HBO’s The Gilded Age. So when Howard Cushing, the great-grandson of lauded American impressionist painter Howard Gardiner Cushing, was envisioning the look and feel of the grand foyer entry to Gardiner House, the 21-room boutique hotel on Newport’s Lee’s Wharf that was five years in the making with business partner Wirt Blaffer, he already had his muse. The only question was, who could ever recreate his great-grandfather’s whimsical mural painted circa-1905 inside The Ledges?

Cushing didn’t have to look far for his answer. With more than 20 years in the wallpaper manufacturing business, husband and wife duo Kyra and Robertson Hartnett are renowned for custom work through their company, twenty2 wallpaper + textiles, based in Naugatuck, Connecticut. When Cushing approached them, they were ready to make his sentimental inspiration a reality. 

“He has this vision for the hotel, that he wants it to feel like you’re getting a little taste of old world Gilded Age, Newport – an insider’s view – so each room, each of the public spaces feels very much like The Ledges in terms of color palette and decor,” says Kyra Hartnett. “I don’t think he had any idea how we would approach it, or how we could actually achieve it, but that was definitely his vision from the beginning.”

Though in their wheelhouse, the Gardiner House project would take a new process for the Hartnetts and their team. Typically, artists send twenty2 their work, which is then photographed in their studio and the digital file work commences. “But obviously, there’s no way for him to send us the walls of The Ledges, so our team went there and took hundreds of photos,” she says. “This is the first time I can say that we have ever had to go to a space and document.”

“Our first question was, how can the power of this technology – which changes yearly – honor the legacy of Howard’s great-grandfather?” asks Hartnett. “The whole process of developing a custom mural for a specific space involves being sensitive to the original form and its history.”

As the hotel’s grand lobby is significantly larger than the foyer where the mural was first painted more than a century ago, twenty2’s design team used a combination of hand-painting and digital techniques to expand the floor-to-ceiling mural to adequately accommodate the two-story space, anchored by a curved stairway leading to guest rooms and their Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, Flora. They extended the original layout and created new elements emulating the original hand of the artist and enhancing the space’s impressive architectural design.

Delicate tree limbs, alluring peacocks, fluttering butterflies, draping willow vines and lush flora, pink blooms, lemon trees, and waterscapes in breathy hues of blues and greens with pops of unexpected color seem to change as light filters through the space throughout the day as it turns into dusk. To the naked eye, the work is a seamless continuum of tranquility; to Hartnett and her team, it’s the manifestation of hundreds of hours of meticulous work over many months. As sustainability is sacrosanct to the Hartnetts, the creation was fashioned using water-based inks on an eco-friendly PVC-free commercial wallcovering.

“I do think it’s the greatest example to date of what we view as the potential synergy between fine art, handmade fine art, and digital printing, where digital printing is actually helping to move tradition forward and preserve art that has been made 100 or more years ago, how that could be elevated and modernized, and then just capturing the hand of the artist from so long ago,” says Hartnett. “The complexity in the project, and the final result, is just very special.” Co-owner Cushing agrees, sharing, “To be greeted by it every day and for it to be part of our guests’ first moments in the hotel is exactly what I hoped for.”