I FIRS MET ROBERT A. M. STERN IN THE LATE 1980s, when I was finishing my book The American Country House. Some of my American friends refused to believe that even during the Gilded Age such an undemocratic domestic tradition of architecture had existed in the Land of the Free. Not Bob. He had studied them; he was building them himself. He asked me to write an introduction to a book of his own works. I declined, explaining that I’d have to visit the different properties to describe them which would clearly be impossible, given that they were scattered throughout the more affluent parts of the United States.
He looked at me in horror and disbelief, raging, “how can you be so culturally insular?” He would get me there; he would make sure I saw everything. The result was an itinerary that shuttled me from the eastern tip of Long Island to the snows of Colorado, from New Jersey’s Ritzier estates to Desert Island, Maine. Last stop was Disneyworld, Florida, for the opening of a hotel he had designed —
