Enclosed Gardens

The Swimming Pool and Loggia

The Swimming Pool and Loggia

In the early 1920s the Blisses hired architect Frederick Brooke to design a swimming pool and bathhouse on the Blounts' stable yard and manure pit north of the former barn. In the mid-1920s, architects McKim, Mead & White, working with Farrand, redesigned the bath house into the loggia and arcade that exist today. Artist Allyn Cox, who also painted murals in the rotunda of the US Capitol, developed a series of canvas frescoes for the ceiling and walls of the loggia, depicting the fable of Diana and Actaeon. When the paintings declined in the 1940s, they were reproduced in three mosaic panels of Portuguese tile.

At the western end of the pool, framed by weeping cherries, is a cast-stone wall with rocaille ornamentation surrounding a fountain and red marble basin from a design drawn by Beatrix Farrand. To the south of the pool, leading to the Green Terrace above, is a curved stairway whose steepness is broken by a series of small landings and the Horseshoe Fountain.