The House of Vanderbilt

Despite her exceedingly privileged life, Consuelo Vanderbilt’s legacy has been that of the ultimate poor little rich girl— a naïve 18-year-old forced into a loveless marriage to the Duke of Marlborough by her domineering mother to raise the family’s social standing. But Consuelo was much more than the outline of her biography suggests. She was also a determined visionary, a dedicated advocate for women’s rights, and a patron of the arts. “She was as beautiful at 80 as at 18 and went through life with perfect grace,” Diana Vreeland once observed.

She eventually remarried for love, to Colonel Jacques Balsan, a dashing French aristocrat, industrialist, and aviation pioneer, with whom she lived in France until World War II. A liberated woman, she enjoyed much of the rest of her long life in the Palm Beach area, where she spent winters until her death at age 87 in 1964.

In middle age, Consuelo reconciled with her formidable mother, Alva, who became a leading suffragette. She was bereft as she sailed back to America for Alva’s funeral in 1933. Following the services in New York, she paid a visit to her younger brother Harold Sterling Vanderbilt. A resident of Palm Beach since 1925, he had decamped in 1930 to an undeveloped locale five miles to the south, where rising architect Maurice Fatio built him a mansion. Two years prior, Harold incorporated the surrounding area as “the Town of Manalapan” and served as its first mayor. (He also invented a still-popular card game he named “contract bridge” and won the America’s Cup sailing competition three times.) After decades of living in Europe, Consuelo was so charmed by this setting that she purchased 50 acres directly across Lake Worth from her brother and asked Fatio to design a house for her, too.

With 10 commissions at the time, Fatio was in demand. But this project made him a star. “That one job has brought him more publicity than all the other nine together. Everyone speaks to him about it and [says], ‘Oh you are Mr. Fatio who is doing the Balsan house,’” wrote the architect’s wife, Eleanor, in a letter.

Casa Alva, as Consuelo called the 25,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom house, resembled a Spanish hacienda, with its red Cuban tile roof and stucco walls. Inside, however, the decor was strictly French. Consuelo had been enchanted with France since her childhood visits with her parents.

 

 

As Casa Alva rose, she shipped crates of treasures from France to furnish the house. In addition to museum-quality paintings and signed furniture, she purchased 18th- and 19th-century boiserie panels from great European houses to line 11 of the rooms; Fatio reassembled each room, and designed Casa Alva around them. He also installed an entire 18th-century staircase of oak with iron railings that Consuelo acquired. All in all, Casa Alva was said to be one of the most richly furnished houses in South Florida.

“It was like a French château,” recalls Consuelo’s great-granddaughter Serena Balfour. “Fantastic—with magnificent pictures, antiques, and boiserie, all Louis XV and Louis XVI.” (At home, Colonel and Madame Balsan spoke in French with each other, as did most of their staff.)

Though Consuelo had bought the property on something of a whim, it became a safe haven in 1940, when she and Jacques escaped war-torn France and moved permanently to the United States. They also acquired an estate on Long Island and an apartment in Manhattan.

After Jacques died in 1956, Consuelo downsized—in her way; she moved into Lakeview House, a 24-room English Regency style gem on El Vedado, in Palm Beach.

Casa Alva was bought by the real estate developer William Benjamin II, who converted the house into a private club for area residents, which he ran with his wife Maura for about 20 years. “We all loved it, but it sure wasn’t a money maker,” recalls Peter Blum, a former Manalapan mayor. Eventually, members balked at raising the annual fee from $400 to $500, and in the early 1980s the Benjamins turned it back into a house for themselves. (Mr. Benjamin also served as Manalapan’s mayor and, at the time, Casa Alva doubled as the town’s de facto City Hall.) Meanwhile, much of the estate’s acreage was developed into a gated subdivision called Point Manalapan, and homes were built.

 

 

In 2007, at the height of that decade’s real estate boom, the Benjamins listed Casa Alva for $23 million. With the onset of the financial crisis, the five-and-a-half-acre property languished on the market.

Five years later, the right buyer finally came along in Gary Parr. A lanky North Carolina native known as “the banker’s banker,” he excels at finding value in distressed assets. During the 2008 economic crisis, when he was Deputy Chairman at Lazard, he played major roles in resolving many of the era’s epic financial disasters, from Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley to Fannie Mae and Bernie Madoff. “The night Bernie Madoff was arrested, I got a call from the Justice Department,” Parr recalls. “I was in the DOJ’s office the next morning.” In 2017, when he moved to Apollo as Senior Managing Director, Bloomberg reported that “Parr has been a player in just about every financial story worth bold headlines in recent years.” (In the early 2000s, when Jamie Dimon became CEO of the troubled Chicago-based Bank One—after he had been fired at Citigroup by his mentor Sanford Weill—he hired Parr to advise on Bank One’s merger with JPMorgan Chase, which ultimately led to Dimon becoming CEO there.)

Somehow, Parr still found time to pursue his real passion—meticulously restoring historic houses. (“It’s easy—I don’t play golf,” he says.) Over the years, he has fixed up about a dozen beauties, including Chastellux, a French Chateau–style mansion in Tuxedo Park designed by McKim, Mead & White. There is some overlap between restoring historic houses and rescuing financial institutions. “I’m a value investor,” he explains. “I look for houses that need work. I see value in that.”

When most people were still reeling from the financial crisis, Parr thought it was the perfect time to buy real estate in Florida especially a large, historic house. He took several road trips up and down the state, until he found Casa Alva. “This one spoke to me. I loved this house from the first time I came through it. It had history and great architecture.”

“Gary would be an architect if he hadn’t had a career on Wall Street,” says his wife, Katherine, during a recent chat at Casa Alva, when both sat on a settee beneath a portrait of Consuelo. A strategic advisor and model originally from New Jersey, Katherine enjoys living in their houses and hosting events to share her husband’s work with the community, but leaves the design work to him. “I provide the love and support,” she says.

 

 

Indeed, Parr is seriously hands-on. “Every time I see work that needs to be done, I think, I can do that,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for years. I enjoy the process. I do my own interior decorating. I buy everything at auction. I do all the architectural drawings myself.” (He does hire an architect “to make it official.”)

When Parr acquired Casa Alva, it was not in a state Consuelo would have recognized. After functioning as a club and a town hall, “a number of rooms had become commercialized,” he says. “A door had been taken out and replaced with something that looked like a 7-Eleven. There were some really cheap tile ceilings that looked like my junior high school.”

Even more sadly, two rooms had been stripped of their boiserie. One set that had survived, in “the Madame Suite,” had been painted orange. Despite that transgression, there was a silver lining for Parr. It led him to sand the paneling in spots in an attempt to analyze the original paint colors. Although the results were “inconclusive,” the test pointed him in the right direction, he says. “I selected colors that were consistent with French colors of that period. And specifically made sure the texture was a bit ‘chalky.’”

As for the flooring, he again tried to keep things as they were, especially on the first floor, which features, he says, one of the largest installations of Cuban tile in Florida. In the Grand Salon, meanwhile, he carefully refinished the old wide-plank teak to ensure that it looks like the original.

 

 

On the whole, he was impressed at how well the house had held up. Doors on delicately carved wooden cabinets still close and lock perfectly, for example, despite having endured Florida weather since 1934, with no air conditioning for the first decades. “That tells you about the quality of the craftsmanship.”

Parr waited several years to do any significant work “because I really wanted to think it through,” he says. When he did make additions, such as a new kitchen and a balcony, he sought to ensure they looked like they were original to the house.

Constructing a new garage turned out to be one of his biggest challenges. A lovely old garage still stood, but it was a distance from the house. Of course, Madame Balsan’s chauffeur would have dropped her at the front door. “Parking the car wasn’t her problem,” Parr says. “But we come home carrying our groceries and would prefer not to walk through the rain, so we needed an attached garage.”

A history buff, Parr has read up on Consuelo’s life. He’s impressed: “She divorced a duke, which was scandalous. She got some backbone from her mother. She and her mother were both very active in women’s voting rights, she helped wounded soldiers, she founded a hospital. She knew everybody, but she didn’t go around just socializing. She was saying, How can I help?”

This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 10. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.