You don’t have to travel 250 miles to stumble over a grand reminder of New Haven’s historical reach.
But you can.
Victoria Mansion, an opulent historic house museum in Portland, Maine, is a crown jewel of Maine’s urban crown jewel—a “national treasure… inspiring loyalty and affection” among the local community, its website says.
Some of that affection reflects our way, by way of the New Havener who designed this Italianate villa: powerhouse 19th-century architect Henry Austin. Commissioned as a summer home for Maine-born hotel magnate Ruggles Morse and completed in 1860, the mansion’s exterior loosely echoes that of Yale’s Steinbach Hall, which Austin also designed. Meanwhile, its brownstone cladding, quarried in Portland, Connecticut, echoes Austin’s local affection for that material, which he applied in his designs for New Haven City Hall and Yale’s Dwight Hall.
The inside of Victoria Mansion has few comparisons, in New Haven or elsewhere. In 1894, Morse’s mansion was sold, fully furnished, to Portland department store baron J.R. Libby, and the fact that it spent decades in the hands of both a hotelier and a furniture merchant helps explain why its interior design, replete with carved and painted ornamentation, and interior decoration, which retains “over 90 percent of the original furniture and furnishings,” are both so well preserved and so maximally fabulous. The fine moldings and furnishings, the museum says, “are today the sole intact commission” of work by the German-born cabinetmaker Gustave Herter, while “the trompe l’oeil decorative paintings throughout the house are among the last surviving works” of Giuseppe Gudicini, “decorator of many grand 19th-century theaters and opera houses.”
Few if any visible surfaces are simple, not a single vista plain. The mansion’s most unique structural feature may be a long stained glass skylight fitted above the well of the central staircase, but there’s no single showstopper here. Every stop on the tour I took, from the grand foyer to an exotically draped nook tucked away on an upper floor, held too many points of beauty and fascination to fully digest any of them.
Looking at the photos I took on my cell phone, I’m still in awe. Which tells me the in-person feeling is one these photos won’t diminish, should you find yourself in Portland, Maine, in the mood for a grand tour.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
