HYLAND
of another era, and which also had strong connections
to the political world of Washington D.C. Presidents and
powerful families have shared the hospitality and history
of Marwood. Anyone other than a prodigious talent would
be daunted.
Commissioned by Samuel Klump Martin in 1929, and
completed by architect John J. Whalen by 1931, the
20,000 square foot house was modeled, in its exterior
expression, after one of the most important houses in
the history of the decorative arts: Malmaison, seat of
Napoleon Bonaparte, engineered by Empress Josephine
and the architects Percier et Fontaine. Malmaison is icon-
-even shrine--of the Empire style.
Marwood, an American vision of French grandeur, reflects
the American genius for borrowing splendors from abroad,
yet doing so with great originality. While the exterior
architecture of this property looked to a past perfected
for inspiration, this house also reverberates the optimism
of a different time in America, a time of rising world power
and prominence and belief in the future, which fueled this
country at the beginning of the 20th century.
The novelist Henry James would have appreciated
Marwood as sheer phenomenon of American wealth and
taste, the desire to appropriate and express anew the
spoils of Napoleon's France. In a letter of 4 February 1872,
