The breakfast room, with its lapis wrought-iron chairs sunk into the Greek sheepskin rug and a bay window rimmed with hand-painted Mexican tiles in shades of azure and midnight, is bracketed by tall cabinets stacked with antique crystal and modern tableware. The interiors are pure Zelda, a riot of pattern on pattern, with antiques and midcentury furnishings exuberantly combined. The roof was designed in a foreshortened pattern that David labored over - all the shingles seem the same size when viewed from the circular driveway, itself made of salvaged 18th-century Belgian blocks once used as ballast for clipper ships.īut behind the front door, the centuries collide. (Its chief architect, William Buckland, based the design on an etching by the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.) There are twin chimneys at either end, and the entrance is flanked by a pair of electric lanterns atop eight-foot beige poles. The front door is a replica of that of the 1770s Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis, Md., itself among the best examples of extant Anglo-Palladian architecture, which David Morrison had seen while training to be a Navy officer during World War II.

“My parents’ personalities,” she says, “are all over the place.”įrom the outside, the two-story, 5,000-square-foot Savannah gray brick structure is stately and, with the exception of one wing, symmetrical.

“We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.” Van Dusen, who owns some commercial properties in Savannah, comes down once a month, and Macaluso, a former textile designer, visits occasionally from New Orleans, but the decision to hold onto the house, Van Dusen concedes, largely reflects how strong its emotional pull remains. “Most families would have sold the house a long, long time ago,” says Van Dusen, who, like her siblings, now has grown children of her own, including the Brooklyn-based textile, apparel and home goods designer Ellen Van Dusen, and Henry, the production manager for the multimedia artist Cory Arcangel. But even after all the children left, the place remained largely untouched, and stayed that way long after Zelda’s death in 1998 at the age of 75. That, along with raising three kids, Lisa and her siblings, Nancy Macaluso and Bill Morrison, rendered her too busy to update the décor. AFTER HER HUSBAND’S death, Zelda, who had been a housewife, stepped in to run his businesses.

Oriental stained glass design patterns