Polhemus & Coffin
American architectural firm
Henry M. Polhemus and Lewis Augustus Coffin, Jr formed the New York-based architectural firm of Polhemus & Coffin. Together they contributed to a joint publication, Small French Buildings: The Architecture of Town and Country, with 183 plates of sketches, illustrations and photos, published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1921.
Their modest French country manor "Mille Fleurs", designed for Mrs Daniel Guggenheim on the Gould-Guggenheim estate in Port Washington, New York, on the Gold Coast of Long Island, was completed in 1932; it is modeled on the vineyard Château Beauregard, Pommerol. They designed "Champ Soleil", a small 22-room French manor on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, which was completed in 1929. Sources disagree on whether or not Champ Soleil was modeled on the famous French Norman chateau named La Lanterne, a French Norman chateau near Versailles. Designed for Lucy Drexel Dalgren in 1929, at one time Champ Soleil was the residence of Russell Aitken, artist, big game hunter, Associate Editor of Field & Stream Magazine and step-father of Sunny von Bülow. In 2006, Acanthus Press published a book authored by James Archer Abbott, Jansen - 20th Century Decorators, by James Archer Abbott, which features a chapter about the 1950s update of Champ Soleil, and contains a few detailed renderings and interior photos, detailing work done by famed French decorating firm Maison Jansen.
The firm also designed some apartment buildings and office structures in Manhattan: - 232 Madison Avenue, at 37th Street (1925, standing), a 16-storey office building with streamlined neo-Gothic details, and 140 East 54th Street (1931, demolished). Lewis Coffin, who had graduated from The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut in 1908, designed the school's Winter Exercise Building (1931, now the Johnson Athletic Center).
Lewis Augustus Coffin, Jr was born in 1892 and was the son Dr Lewis Augustus Coffin, Sr., a head and neck surgeon.
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