The story behind a grand and now-refurbished Georgian mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line

To get the inside scoop on The Philadelphia Story, you first need to understand Ardrossan, the Main Line estate that once sparkled with conversation, martini shakers and the dazzling debutante Hope Montgomery.

Named for the Montgomerys' ancestral home in Scotland, Ardrossan is the last of the splendid houses built on Philadelphia’s upscale Main Line before World War I – and the last one to be occupied by the original family. Barely two years after the death of Robert Montgomery Scott, the legendary Philadelphian who commissioned a faithful restoration of the house, the next act in the history of Ardrossan remains a cliffhanger.

"For Philadelphia, this is The White House, the house we all respect and admire," said Barbara Eberlein of Eberlein Design Consultants in Philadelphia. “It’s without the puff you see in a lot of the grand houses. It has symmetry, without being predictable.”

Horace Trumbauer, Philadelphia's architectural darling of the early 20th century, designed Ardrossan in his signature style of simple Classicism, a departure from Victorian ornamentation popular at the time. The site, on a verdant hill ringed by towering trees, was discovered by Scott’s grandfather, Col. Robert Montgomery, who tumbled from his horse during a fox hunt in 1910 and was smitten by his surroundings.

“He looked up and said, ‘God, what a great place for a house!’” Scott remembered in an interview after the restoration.

A decade ago, Scott, one of Hope’s two sons, asked Eberlein to work with him at Ardrossan. He had just returned to the 45-room Georgian-style mansion, which had been inhabited by various relatives over the years.

"This house loves a party," he said then. "It was built with entertaining in mind."
One of its more inspired guests was playwright Philip Barry, who in 1938 took one part Hope Montgomery (who, by then, had married Barry’s school chum Edgar Scott) and added one part Ardrossan to create a classic cocktail of wit and high society, affectionately known as The Philadelphia Story.

"Something like [Ardrossan] is too wonderful to let disappear," Scott observed. "It represents the last of its kind."
His first move was to create a private apartment for himself on the third floor, a space replete with interesting angles, arched dormers and breathtaking views of treetops. The apartment would become a sanctuary wrapped in the vivid hues that came to Scott in dreams: cool blues for the guest suite on the north side, lemon yellow for the southern sitting room, crimson for the dining room and pine green for the study.

"There was a long time the house was quiet," Scott recalled. "There was a lot that needed to be put right." With that, he stabilized the red-brick exterior of the 38,000-square-foot house and put the finishing touches on his apartment, hanging the Augustus John painting of his mother, his favorite of her three portraits in the house.

Those paintings and more than 30 other portraits of ancestors have remained in the family. But the estate sold off some of Scott’s collection of contemporary paintings at a Nov. 5, 2006 auction in Philadelphia. Landscape at Langres by Raoul Dufy (French, 1877-1953) exemplified an innovative technique in which Dufy’s oil paintings were comparable to watercolors, painted in thinner layers that allowed light to travel through. Bidders from around the world competed for the work, which ultimately went to a collector from Montreal, who paid $207,225, double the presale expectations.

Also sold was a self-portrait of John, who developed a warm relationship with the Scotts. Estimated at $20,000-30,000, the painting went to a private collector in California for $33,460.

As a man with a keen appreciation for the visual, Scott frequently pondered refurbishing the gracious spaces on the first floor, including a dining room that seated 30 guests. Although The Philadelphia Story was filmed on a Hollywood lot, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant would have looked at ease in Ardrossan, playing bridge in the ballroom as Scott's aunt, Mary Binney, played the piano chosen for her by Leopold Stokowski. (Although his mother was warmer and more disciplined than Hepburn's flighty Tracy Lord, Scott said his aunt indeed "was the kid sister who pirouettes into the room.") But unlike the 1940 movie, the house was subject to the unkind tug of time; the silk on the game chairs and other furnishings had grown tattered.

In the end, Scott set aside his concerns about the expense and expanse of the restoration and set to work, bringing back each glorious room, one by one. Thanks to grandparents who never threw anything away, he had an exceptional start. All the art, furnishings, carpets and draperies the Montgomerys brought with them in 1912 were still to be found within Ardrossan's stout brick walls.

"We didn't buy a single piece of furniture," Eberlein recalled. "Everything was there."
If Scott didn't find just the right piece in a room, he quickly located it in Ardrossan's cavernous closets. "We'd look in a storeroom and find a fabulous Georgian mirror," Eberlein said. "It's what everybody wishes his attic was like."

For clients who want to achieve the lavish look of the early 20th century, the designer shops on both sides of the pond, chiefly in New York and London. She frequently buys at auction.

“The auction market is particularly active,” she said. “The best pieces are flying.”
Among the remarkably preserved architectural elements installed at Ardrossan were swags of extravagantly carved fruits and flowers, the work of the 17th-century English artisan Grinling Gibbons, who also created decorations for Windsor Castle. But the plaster and gilding required extensive repairs, and the stained limestone walls in the conservatory presented an even greater challenge. Sandblasting would have scarred the finish. And camouflaging flaws with faux painting wouldn't have allowed the pores of the stone to breathe.

So workers from Dan Lepore & Sons in Conshohocken, Pa., the artisans who helped to restore City Hall in Philadelphia, gave the limestone a facial of sorts, with the less aggressive Jos Rotec system, buffing out imperfections with tiny glass beads whose rounded surfaces wouldn't gouge the surface. Once more, the walls were as smooth and flawless as a debutante’s cheek.

“A project like this requires a treasure hunt for craftsmen,” Eberlein noted.
The brightly colored Aubusson carpet in the ballroom was packed off to England for restoration by preservationists Eberlein had used in the past and could trust with a piece of such provenance. "It had a hole in it the size of my head," Scott observed. "The repair is so perfect you'd never know it had ever been damaged."

While his apartment reflected his own considerable taste and style, Scott's restoration of the first-floor rooms was a tribute to its original blend of sophistication – witness a rare pair of Chinese Chippendale mirrors – and sentiment – as in the astonishing array of needlepoint. The hands that stitched the coverings for a pair of 8-foot sofas and more than 30 chairs belonged to his grandmother, Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler Montgomery. Scott called her "Muz."

"She was very tiny and I remember her dragging a big, needlepoint bag behind her," he recalled.
Charlotte Montgomery's 18-by-24-inch needlepoint room perspectives – miniature renderings of Ardrossan's many interiors – provided a charming and unexpected guide to original color choices and furniture arrangements. They indicate the Chippendale-style sofas in the living room were initially a deep red, rather than the cheerful floral slipcovers that had been around for as long as Scott could remember.

"Sometime in the 1930s, my grandparents must have decided to brighten up the house," he said.

Eberlein encouraged Scott to replace worn carpets with patterned rugs, rather than replicate the original scheme of neutral solids. But Scott held firm, commissioning identical rugs from a mill in England. "He decided to stay with what he felt was his grandfather's vision," she said. "With Bob, it's all about being respectful, of being connected to the house with his heart and his head."

His grandfather, the colonel who sited the house, reacted to the impending enactment of Prohibition by filling Ardrossan's four wine cellars with enough champagne to last 40 years, along with a good supply of bordeaux, port and Madeira.

"Some of it was awful but the champagnes were magnificent," Scott said.
He exemplified his grandfather's gift for foresight when he restored the library, replacing the silk that upholstered the walls with a chinoiserie pattern fortified with cotton threads to better withstand the years ahead.

The furniture was trucked off to the Center City workroom of Anthony Cocco Inc., where restorationists took apart the frames, rejoined the wood, and then upholstered the pieces in a rich floral pattern.

Beside the fireplace is a wide, Chinese Chippendale chair, the early 20th century equivalent of today's chair and a half. "You've got to try out that chair," Scott told a visitor shortly before his death. "Isn't it the most comfortable thing ever?"

Who will be sitting in Scott’s chair in the future has yet to be determined. His nephew, family spokesman Edgar “Eddie” Scott III, has proposed a plan that would permit clustered residential development around the fringes of the estate, allowing for preservation of more than 200 acres of open spaces.

None of the heirs has immediate plans to move into the house. Eddie Scott said he is reconciled to the notion that Ardrossan might be sold outside the family, but said he will hold fast to fond memories.

“We are working on a solution that we think will be satisfactory for everyone,” he said. “But these things take time.”