Enlarging the Museum’s garden area would allow visitors to view the Daffodil Terrace in a natural setting. The terrace, which has never been on view in Winter Park, would be enclosed by glass walls.

“Tiffany meant Laurelton Hall to be his legacy,’’ said Harold Ward, chairman and president of the Morse Foundation. “In creating a permanent installation for works from that magnificent estate, we believe we will contribute to the understanding and appreciation of Tiffany by the general public and provide an important resource for scholars. We are very pleased to be able to take this step toward sharing Tiffany’s legacy with our community and with so many others who come to the Morse to learn more about this great American artist.”

The Museum estimates it will be able to break ground on the new wing as early as next winter, which would allow the addition to open to the public by the spring of 2010.

Project Team

Rogers, Lovelock, and Fritz, Inc. (RLF), a nationally recognized architecture, engineering and interior design firm based in Winter Park will design the new wing and Ravensdale Planning & Design, also of Winter Park, the expanded courtyard garden.

George Sexton Associates of Washington, D.C., will provide lighting and exhibition design for the expansion.  The firm’s work can be viewed at the Morse Museum’s Tiffany Chapel as well as in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and other respected institutions. Griswold Conservation Associates LLC of Beverly Hills, Calif., will oversee the erection of the Daffodil Terrace and other architectural elements. Griswold most recently served as the conservator for the restoration of the Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., a 1908 masterpiece of Arts and Crafts style architecture. Steve Keller & Associates Inc. of Ormond Beach, Fla., is the Museum’s security consultant on the project.

Curatorial Advisory Committee

Morse Museum Director Laurence J. Ruggiero is heading a curatorial advisory committee for the expansion, which includes Museum staff as well as: Lewis Sharp, director of the Denver Art Museum and a Morse Foundation trustee; Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator, Department of Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Richard Guy Wilson, Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Frelinghuysen was the curator of Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall—An Artist’s Country Estate, a major exhibition at the Metropolitan on which the Morse collaborated and was the primary lender. Wilson, widely known as the host of the cable television show America’s Castles, was a contributor to the Laurelton Hall exhibition catalogue.

Laurelton Hall

Laurelton Hall, built between 1902 and 1905 on Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, is often cited as Tiffany’s greatest work of art. In his 84-room mansion, set on almost 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound, Tiffany integrated all the influences of his life—nature, color, light, and the art of Eastern and Islamic cultures—into one rapturous whole. Eventually the estate became a school for young artists and a museum housing many of the artist’s most important works.

Laurelton Hall was destroyed by fire in 1957. Hugh F. McKean and his wife, Jeannette, who together built the Morse Museum’s collection over a 50-year period, salvaged architectural elements, windows, and other objects from the ruins of the estate. The Morse, today home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Tiffany, is the largest single repository of surviving materials from Laurelton Hall.

Two years ago, the Morse loaned more than 100 objects to the Metropolitan’s exhibition on Laurelton Hall. In support of the exhibition (November 21, 2006–May 20, 2007), the Morse advanced its conservation schedule for the Daffodil Terrace and the massive 14-foot-high by 11-foot-wide marble and glass-mosaic mantelpiece from the Laurelton Hall dining room. Griswold Conservation Associates supervised both these projects. The Daffodil Terrace—the Museum’s largest conservation effort since the restoring the 1893 Tiffany Chapel in 1999—involved the complex reassembly and cleaning of the eight 11-foot columns, four large iridescent-glass panels in a pear tree motif, and hundreds of stenciled wood elements and molded tiles from the coffered ceiling.

Expansion Highlights

In addition to the Daffodil Terrace, permanent exhibits in the Morse Museum’s new wing would include the surviving components of the Laurelton Hall dining room: the marble mantel, a painted cherry table with chairs; a 25-foot Oriental rug; a domed leaded-glass chandelier 6 ½ feet in diameter, and a suite of six leaded-glass Wisteria transoms through which a visitor to Tiffany’s estate would have first observed the Daffodil Terrace.

Additional galleries would showcase objects from other rooms and buildings at Laurelton Hall, including from the living room, four panels depicting the four seasons that earlier were part of a single large window that garnered Tiffany a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

The Laurelton Hall wing would be built on Morse property now devoted to parking. The new structure would be situated behind the Tiffany Chapel, a westward extension of the existing 25,000-square-foot main Museum building.