Shanghai House History

The family of Paul Gock (Kwok) Quay of Chung Shan County

The Woman’s Page

Exploring One of Shanghai’s Newest Homes

Circular scheme used in Amherst Avenue residence of Mr. and Mrs. T.O. Schmid :

Period furniture in a very modern setting.

“Our idea was to put period furniture into a modern setting,” said Mrs. T.O. Schmid the other day after she had finished showing her guests around what is probably the most modern setting in Shanghai. It was her new house at 251 Amherst Avenue, the “round” house in Columbia Circle, that had been the subject of so much interest since she and her husband first began to lay plans for it more than a year ago.

Designed by the architect, Mr. E.S.J. Phillips, it is an original one-storey (or practically so) building, really round, beautifully round, a beautiful thing in white brick and stone and quantities of translucent glass brick.

By the time you get to it you have heard so much about the “pie-shape” of its rooms, about the solarium and of its interior delights, that you are inclined to rush through the front door without much thought for the exterior. So you sate yourself first with novel experiences inside, and then, when you are practically depleted of “oh” and “how beautiful,” you bend your parting gaze on the outside, and come away feeling thoroughly satisfied.

The house itself is round, with two rectangular wings stretching from each side and housing on the right the garage, and on the left the servants’ quarters. White-washed brick combines with imitation white stone, with touches of black in the black marble facing of the doorway and the grills and leading around the glass bricks of the great convex windows.

It is topped, although you do not notice this from below at first glance, by an octagonal sun room, set in the middle of a broad circular terrace.

Air Cooled

What strikes you first as you enter the house is the atmosphere, which now particularly in summer is about ten degrees cooler from the out-of-doors, as it is conditioned throughout by a plant of its own. The air-cooling was one of the chief problems in building the house, the architect and owners admit, although now that it is installed it is one of the chief delights. The machinery for its running occupies the ground floor of the servants’ wing, a mass of pipes and unfamiliar looking equipment, which nevertheless produces an altogether wonderful effect in their own mysterious way,

Next you grow aware of the fountain which stands in white marble in the midst of a little marble rotunda, the pivot and centre of this unusual and lovely house.

Six Rooms and Kitchen

From this hub, the rooms and the kitchen and pantry emanate, like spokes in a wheel. First to the right of the front door is the master’s bedroom, the mistress’ bedroom, the living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry, and then back next to the door again, the den. Sunlight filters in through many walls of glass, and from every room you can see the water playing and leaping in the fountain.

The Living Room

Since the centre of every house if necessarily the living room, Mr. and Mrs.Schmid have made theirs a thing of loveliness. Mrs. H.L. Gilman of the Caravan Studio did the interior decorating of the entire house, and with her flair for colours has made each room vivid and unique.

The centre of the living room, however, is a painting the Schmids brought with them from Europe, the artist Petersen’s “The Diadem,” a magnificent landscape of the sun falling in rays through clouds over fields of yellow wheat.

The gold of the scene is picked out and accented in the colour of the room, done in brilliant emerald green and rich yellow gold. A satiny green carpet covers every inch of the floor, made on special looms to fit the 27 foot measurements of the far side of the room and the narrower width of the side toward the centre of the house.

Velvet covers one rich looking lounge, a deep chair, two gold benches near the windows, and fashions the heavy gold curtains which hang outside satin drapes in the same shade. Velvet brocade in the green of the rug covers another lounge, over which hangs another painting this one by Burger, of the high Alps in Mr. Schmid’s native Switzerland.

The lamps of this room are urns of Venetian glass on high standards, and two standard pots raise a splash of pink lotus blossoms against the gold of the curtains.

From the living room, your feet lead you willingly toward the dining room, and there a surprise awaits you. Instead of a more brilliant colour, the subtle elegance of a heavenly shade of beige with lights of brown falls upon your eyes. The room is altogether different from, though totally in keeping with, the one from which you have just emerged.

It is a narrower room and panelled to the ceiling in dark stained wood. And yet it is not dark at all, for the refulgent light glows through the walls and wide French door and sets in exquisite silhouette the tracery of high-backed Italian chairs.

The table is a long refectory. There is no other furniture than the table and chairs, half of which are interestingly upholstered in a beige brocade and the other are backed with almost mediaeval carving. Here particularly is the period note in modern setting. For a contrast to the semi-antique dinner suite are the lights, modernistic fans of chromium against the dark wood in each corner.

Enough Cupboards

Enough cupboards to delight the heart of any Mother Hubbard line the walls of kitchen and pantry, both of which are done in cream with all the shelves and appliances in robin’s egg blue. And before you pass on through the house pause for a moment to admire a strange looking gadget in a corner of the pantry. It looks like a steam tractor wrong side up, and proves to be a warming plate for dishes on the way to the table.

A New Colour

The den is a cosy lilac colour which can be turned into another bedroom or a card room to suit convenience of the hosts, and is decorated in a particularly lovely combination of colours. Burgundy window drapes hang over gold gauze curtains, and a pattern in the same shade figure the brocaded upholstery. In the adjoining bathroom there is a black marble shower bath and fixtures in “Tang” red.

Brown and Cream

The master’s bedroom, lying concentrically opposite the dining room, is done in a brown and cream scheme which compliments the colours in every way. The furniture is in leather, studded with brown and piped in brown, and there are three rugs in deep brown. Near the window are shelves full of trophies Mr. Schmid has won at sport, mostly rowing. There is a wall of full-length pier glass in this room and a beautiful light fixture of Venetian glass like curving fern rising from a white glass bowl.

Adjoining the bedroom are a dressing cabinet and bath, and there is a story about these baths which might as well be told.

Square Tubs

As it has been noised about, the baths throughout this interesting house are square, among the first of a style Shanghai has seen in interior decorating magazines to reach these shores. And how they reached here makes a tale.

Mr. and Mrs. Schmid had picked out the colours and styles for porcelain, had made an order, and waited the necessary interval for them to be packed and freighted. And then with the day came the disheartening news that what had been loaded had been burned in the Pacific, and the order had to made all over again.

Like the air-conditioning, however, the bathroom fixtures proved well worth their trouble. They are blue with black and gold vitrolite background and a marble floor in the master’s suite, pale coralline peach against vitrolite and marble in the mistress’ suite.

A French Boudoir

Adjoining the master’ dressing room is a more feminine edition curtained in a peachy-rose velvet, with crystal candelabra lighting the dressing table from both sides. And from there, you step past a brilliant sapphire blue chair into a boudoir that is all deep rose and bright blue. The bedroom suite is brown, a French design garlanded with flowers. The rugs and curtains are pink and velvety, the bedspread rosy satin, shirred and garlanded at the head with blue satin flowers.

The Solarium

If richness of fabric and colour characterise the main floor, the solarium upstairs, reached by a narrow spiral stair, is very different. Here cool canary yellow, the green of potted palms, the black terrazzo of the floor, and white iron furniture combine to make for coolness and informality. The sunlight is not filtered here, but streams in through glass windows and doors on all eight sides of the large room.

A little white “Pan” in stone, made by Wagstaff studios, as was the fountain downstairs, pipes in sun or stormy weather, and Mrs. Schmid says it is as delightful a place in which to breakfast while the rain is falling in torrents outside as it is to entertain friends at cocktail time, when all the doors can be opened to the broad terrace, as they were ten days ago when friends came to welcome Miss Ellen Louise Schmid home to Shanghai and the Senior Schmids home to their new house.

Made in Shanghai

And so, having seen the house from toe to top, you lean against the balustrade on the terrace and look down at the pond in the garden while your hostess tells you some of the trials of making a home in China. “It isn’t done yet” she says. “There are hundreds of little things unfinished” and she points to a detail of cushion or drape.

It is a happy thing that the house isn’t “done,” really, for it would be sad to think that houses ever were so perfect that they needed not the touch of this new vase or that new lamp which makes them seem alive to their occupants.

One of the most interesting things about the Schmid house is the fact that all the furnishings, except the fixtures and some of the special equipment, were made in China by Chinese workmen. It has taken long hours of patient coaching on the part of the owners and designers, but go calling some time and see how lovely is the finished consequence.