why Places of Note
Indeed, this is Places of Note. The series about rooms, houses, and estates that stop me mid-scroll on Instagram deserves more room than a caption, hillwood.
Hillwood is where I’m starting, though I didn’t plan it that way. I’d already posted the carousel, doctor appointments tucked between the photos like they always are these days, and I kept thinking about the visit long after the caption was done. Some places don’t fit in a caption. They need more room to breathe.
I want more of that feeling: standing close enough to touch what’s left of someone else’s life, in rooms built by women with taste and nerve, decades before I was born. If this series works, it sends me looking for the next one.
Hillwood
Marjorie Merriweather Post bought Hillwood in 1955 and spent the rest of her life there. She filled it with exactly the things she loved.
She’d inherited a cereal fortune at twenty seven and turned it into General Foods. But the taste came from elsewhere: years of looking, a mentor named Joseph Duveen.
The 1930s, when her husband served as ambassador to the Soviet Union, shaped her collecting. She began buying Russian imperial treasures the Soviets sold off, including Fabergé kovshes and Romanov porcelain.
That family has followed me since I was a child. The Romanovs, and Anastasia most of all. I’ve felt haunted by how it ended for them for as long as I can remember. But it’s Alexandra who really gets me, and I think it’s the mother in her. She had all those children, and I can’t stop thinking about what she must have carried, watching what was coming for her family and being powerless to stop it. That’s a specific kind of hard I understand differently now than I used to. Standing in a room full of the things that outlived all of them felt heavier than I expected, and stranger too, in a good way.
I didn’t expect my own taste to line up with hers so exactly. French rococo has always been mine. I spent a whole stretch of my life researching this exact era, trying to build my own high resolution canvas of baroque framed paintings, and I actually pulled it off. Marjorie built an entire house around the same instinct I was chasing on a screen, just with a bigger budget and a Sèvres porcelain room to go with it.
Her bedroom was the room that got me. It looked like it had been lifted straight out of Versailles: the wallpaper, the chandelier, the color, all of it working together instead of competing for attention, the way a finished room does. I stood in there, then in her dressing room, then in her bathroom, and didn’t want to leave any of them.
Marjorie is the one I kept coming back to, though. The more I stood in her rooms, the less it felt like admiring someone else’s taste and the more it felt like recognizing my own. If I’d had the chance to meet her, I like to think we’d have been friends, maybe at one of the extravagant parties she was so famous for throwing. Jackie Kennedy went to those parties too.
On a piano in one room sat a photo of Nicholas and Alexandra. On a piano in another room, a candid shot of Jack and Jackie. Everyone who has ever pulled at me was somehow already in that house, calling from every direction at once.
There was a Marie Antoinette painting too, a version of the one Vigée Le Brun made famous, with an empty cradle beside her three children. The original hangs at Versailles, but this one still carries the same detail: a fourth child once sat in that cradle, painted out because the baby, Sophie, died before the portrait was finished. I stood close enough to reach out and touch it. It’s the kind of detail I can only call a chokehold. And of all the rooms in that house, Marjorie chose to hang it in her own bedroom hall. Whatever it was that pulled at me was clearly pulling at her too.
She had a pink bathroom. I’ve spent this whole year working on mine. Marjorie Post got there first, by about seventy years.
What’s Next
This is the kind of place I want Places of Note to be about: someone’s real life, turned into a room you can still walk through generations later. Hillwood isn’t precious the way a museum usually feels precious. It’s exactly as personal as my bathroom mid-renovation, just funded by a cereal empire and a much longer runway.
I’m already planning the next stop. Marjorie beat me to that piano too, in a way. The same two people who watched me from it are waiting for me again this weekend, somewhere most people already know the ending to before they even arrive. More on that soon.
