My mother, father, sister Sue, and I lived in a comfortable yet nondescript home designed by a deservedly forgotten architect. It was located twenty miles from New York City, in one of the better neighborhoods of West Orange, NJ, where Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb.
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Our home's interiors were a forgettable mix, reflecting my mother's indecision.
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Pictured: Sandy, her two sisters Sherry and Barbara, and her father John.
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Sandy lived with her two sisters, her father, and her mother, Ada, a former Miss Detroit. They shared a sprawling estate once owned by a vice president of General Motors, located in the exclusive Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit.
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Architecturally, it was a semi-successful smorgasbord of Arts and Crafts, Tudor Revival, and Neo-Georgian design, with a strong presence of hand-painted hometown Pewabic tiling throughout.
Her parents filled its dark wood-floored interiors with a tasteful assemblage of dark wood furniture, much of which they claimed to be genuine English antiques. Unlike the broad expanses of glass that had made bird watchers out of Sandy and me, the traditional small-pane windows she grew up with largely limited her views to the manicured gardens. Ada miraculously managed to populate these gardens with a picturesque flock of peacocks, which were not native to Michigan.
Sandy had an incredible collection of hair bows when she was young, and later, a bounty of cashmere sweaters, first from Scotland and then from Loro Piana.
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I had a hefty collection of sports bubble gum cards and vinyl jazz records, which took me from Benny Goodman and Woody Herman's big bands to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s best bebop. When Sandy came into my life, our joint music appreciation focused on Broadway show albums.
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In the fall of 1953, during my junior year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a friend set me up with Sandy Brown, a sophomore. I was more of a drinker than a dater at the time, but Sandy was great-looking, well-dressed, and extremely popular.
We would never have met if I had gotten into my college of choice, my mother's alma mater Cornell, or if Sandy's father hadn't adamantly refused to let her attend her choice, a non-co-ed East Coast campus. John L. feared that if Sandy went East, she might fall under the spell of an East Coast Romeo and decide to kiss the Motor City goodbye.
I don't remember Sandy’s major. My initial major was supposed to be English, but after I slept through a final exam, I ended up graduating with a major in History. From an early age, I was an avid reader, as long as I could choose what to read.
As much as I enjoyed reading, I enjoyed writing even more. I have always had an off-the-wall, whimsical way with words. However, I was always a terrible speller and punctuator. Additionally, I never learned to type, and in later life, I have trouble reading what I wrote and remembering what it was about. It sometimes makes me wonder why I keep my pencils sharpened. My authorship of this self-interview for the website has often been very frustrating, but when my writing goes right, it's well worth the hours of rewrites.
On a couple of occasions, my arts-inclined mother forced me to march through New York's Metropolitan Museum to appreciate Rembrandt and company. I was duly impressed by the museum's soaring architecture, but its contents never came close to replacing Ebbets Field and my beloved Dodgers as my favorite field of vision.
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On the strong recommendation of several friends at Michigan, we enrolled in Professor Marvin Eisenberg's two-semester lecture course, which included architecture. His fascinating, illuminating, and rollicking grand tour transported us from Raphael's School of Athens to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, from the Parthenon and the Pantheon to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, opening our eyes to two lifetimes worth of great art and architecture.
It was not likely to be seen on the cover of Architectural Record. Our thirty-year-old residence rested comfortably two towns over from my original home, in a nice neighborhood of Maplewood. Its main attractions were a sensible layout, close proximity to my sister's home, a nearby very good grammar school, and being within the outer limits of our budget.
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Sandy wanted the interiors to reflect the spirit of her parents’ home, but not quite as formal, and with no faux English antiques. I leaned toward the then-emerging mid-century modern Scandinavian design. Our mediator was Rose Harris, my mother's interior decorator. Rose laid it out in a manner proper to the taste of the time, with dark wood floors and furniture against a beige background. When it came to furnishing, a fair amount came from our former apartment, including Sandy's needlepoint renditions, a Robert Indiana number four pillow on the sofa, and Kenneth Noland’s triangle over the fireplace.
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In the early 1960s, coming out of the Museum of Modern Art, we stumbled upon its nearly next-door neighbor, the Museum of Contemporary Craft. The museum's exhibitions, many of whose contents were for sale in its store, struck an immediate chord with both Sandy and me. Over the years, despite its number of name changes, we journeyed around the world as members of its collector circle, made up of a nationwide group of tireless travelers, some of whom became good friends.
At many of the locations we visited, there was a resident member. For example, when we went to Racine, WI, Karen Johnson Boyd gave us a private tour of her family's Frank Lloyd Wright home, Wingspread, located in the iconic S.C. Johnson wax headquarters building. On a couple of other occasions, we received the Grand Tour of the Grotta house.
For many years, first I, then Sandy, served on the museum’s board of directors. Sandy simultaneously served as the creative director for many of its major fundraising events, the biggest being a cocktail party and auction dinner for seven hundred attendees at Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, just a few years before its September 11th demise.
All over. The wallpaper, drapes, and lamps were gradually deaccessioned, along with most of the furniture, and all of our beige backgrounds were eventually brightened to white. Simultaneously, numerous craft makers' fingerprints began to appear throughout the house. A trip to Scandinavia with Sandy's father and sisters brought home a not-as-good-playing but far better-looking piano than its predecessor, an Andreas Christensen. This trip also introduced the first of many Hans Wegner chairs and one of Kay Bojesen’s largest monkeys.
From the day we first met, Sandy and I were nearly always inseparable. When I wasn't at work, I was always with Sandy. On weekends and vacations, we embarked on joint ventures, discovering places and people that could enhance both our homes and our lives. I always used to kid Sandy that she was tireless, shopping until the minute the stores closed. I remember one time in San Francisco, when she turned to me and said, "Lou, call a cab," which resulted in our cab driver taking us on a two-block trip back to our hotel.
I often accompanied her, but Sandy was far more into clothes than I was. My father was a clothes horse who wore only the best brands and alligator belts, unlike his son, who mainly dressed in string-tied pants from L.L. Bean.
I always had a greater capacity for museum visits than Sandy. At many large exhibitions, I’d find a chair for her and tell her to take a seat while I went on a reconnaissance mission to see if what we came to see was worth her time. Once, when I returned to her at a big show at the Prada Museum, I found my fellow museum-goer sound asleep.
When both my parents passed away, my sister Sue and I jointly inherited their two-bedroom apartment in the Ambassador Hotel on the beach in Palm Beach, Florida. They acquired it under duress for $18,000 when it became a co-op in the 1970s. Over the years, Sandy and architect David Ling totally transformed its interiors, furniture, and furnishings into a visual extension of our Jersey home.
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We sold the apartment, along with most of its furniture, when the building was bought in November 2019. Needless to say, we received a substantial pay raise compared to the original $18,000. When we moved out, our New Jersey home benefited from the pick of the litter from our Florida residence. These included John McQueen's big-billed fish and Dail Behennah’s see-through wood triangle in our living room, Gyöngy Laky's OK in our bedroom, and Ingo Maurer's write-on light fixture, which looked right at home in its second Grotta breakfast room.
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Sandy and I always enjoyed spending a lot of time in New York City. When that habit extended to Tracy and Tom, we discussed buying a New York apartment. Don Gilman, the son of my former summer camp bunkmate David, who was just starting out as a real estate salesman, got wind of our desire and went scouting for a location. He soon came back with a unique discovery at 17 W 54th St. at the Rockefeller Apartments. When he told us it was on the first and second floors, we told him to forget about it. However, when he mentioned that it was right across the street with a great view into the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art, not much street traffic, and an inaccessible small first floor that had been home to the former owner’s electric trains, and that the price was right, we decided to buy it. Our interior redesign incorporated its circular stairway from the second to the first floor, which led to nowhere but storage.
The project was a joint venture between Sandy and Michael Palladino from Richard Meier’s office. Believe me, it was well worth seeing. Unfortunately, we don't have pictures of the apartment, but we do have of one of the three related fiber pieces, which subsequently greeted you when you entered our Florida apartment.
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Tracy's four-poster bed came to New York from our house and then went to her house, where it is undoubtedly destined to wind up in one of her kids' future bedrooms.
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In 1989, we reluctantly had to sell the apartment to help cover some of the rising costs of our New Vernon home. That's when our low-floor location came back to haunt us. When we listed it for sale, no one came to look at it. When a well-known songwriter from the building finally did, we accepted his low bid, and unlike the Rockefellers, we lost our shirt on a prime piece of New York real estate. P.S. Don Gilman went on to become a successful yacht salesman; the Grotta apartment was his one and only real estate sale.
Its visual presence, originality, personality, sense of humor, and much more. We were drawn to how it was made, what it was made of, and the artist's intellectual influences and objectives. From everyday items to heavyweight purchases, we gravitated toward pieces that would comfortably harmonize with those we already owned.
We probably should have, but we rarely did. One word that has rarely been applied to either of us is "practical." Don't get me wrong; whenever we think about a purchase, economics does play a part. There's no doubt our house would look different if we had hit the lottery. For one thing, I'm sure we would have owned more than one Picasso ceramic work, and they would not be from a hundred-plate edition.
Aesthetically and financially, modern craft has been a great family fit. Until the last few years, with very few exceptions, there hasn't been a hell of a lot of work we've really wanted that we couldn't afford. Now that we're no longer looking to expand our extensive Toshiko Takaezu inventory, it’s exciting to see her prices headed to the moon.
Getting down to earth, if you came for a meal, your first course might well be served on a ceramic Karen Karnes rectangle, a Toshiko square, an Arne Jacobsen plastic alphabet plate, or one of Sandy's favorite designer unknown paper fish plates. As for your meal, it would always be served Sandy-style, which meant your melon ball first course might come hidden in a plastic cup inside a lidded silver medal commercial paint can, with your picture taped to it to serve as your place card.
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Although Sandy had a great collection of cookbooks, she was generally more interested in how a meal looked than how it was cooked.
She was a second-generation jewelry lover with a slightly different aesthetic than her mother. Sandy's jewelry was created from a wide variety of materials, but not many gemstones; her mother's pieces were more densely populated with semi-precious and precious jewels. Sandy did have a fabulous pair of Eva Isler drop earrings, which she created using the diamonds she deconstructed from a couple of pieces that were not her style, inherited from both of our mothers.
No, through most of our married life, it spent a lot of its time in hibernation, nesting within the chest of drawers that the Andersons designed for them.
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As a consequence, while she enjoyed wearing nearly all of her jewelry, many of her pieces suffered from a severe case of "out of sight, out of mind."
Their coming-out party came after Sandy tentatively hung one of David Watkins’ necklaces on the wall. In the company of a number of our craft media heavyweights, it instantly became apparent that David's design more than held its own, as would the work of other significant jewelers, led by his wife, Wendy Ramshaw.
Rarely. From day one, we were blessed with an amazing aesthetic simpatico. On the rare occasions we disagreed, we honored each other's veto. It's true I believe you can have enough jewelry, but when Sandy showed me a must-have piece, I once, for one of the few times in our married life, passed on putting in my two cents and rolled out the welcome mat.
As of this year, 2024, my guess would be no less than thirty years, with many of our older pieces going back fifty years or more.
Once Sandy became our resident orchestrator, happily, not a lot. There have been a few one-trick ponies that failed to carry their speed over the distance of time, but by and large, we've got a stable of winners.
When our kids were little, we had a variety of pets, including some jerky gerbils, a seldom-singing canary named Terry, and a tank full of multicolored fish. But our first beloved pets were our fabulous French poodle, Tally, followed by two Siamese sisters, Sugar and Spice.
Tally was Tracy's favorite. Come dinner time, he would sit by the foot of her chair, eagerly waiting for her to drop bits of her meal. Unfortunately, Tally was run into by a chauffeur-driven limousine and ended up in the animal hospital. We received a call telling us they couldn't operate on him because he was too weak from not eating. When Sandy asked what they were feeding him and they replied "dog food," she said, "No wonder! My dog has never eaten dog food!" For the rest of his hospital stay, Sandy went there every day with a sampling of Tracy’s leftovers.
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Our great-looking, curious cats, Sugar and Spice, slept on our bed, both with us and without us—Sugar on the pillow and Spice at our feet—for over 21 years.
They were a hoot! They usually waited for us to clean their litter box in the basement before they made a deposit.
I was on the tennis team in high school and played basketball against Richard Meier often in the back of his house. I enjoyed most sports, with one major exception: golf.
Sandy’s main interest was horses. At one time, she had one of her own and knew how to ride both English and Western styles. The high point of her equestrian career came when she was at a ranch in Colorado, where she ascended to the timberline of Pikes Peak on horseback.
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Once we were married, we became more into spectating than participating. In 1973, when the Garden was Eden and the New York Knicks last won a championship, we attended twenty-two of their home games.
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I have always been a devoted Democrat. When I was in college, I canvassed for the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson when he ran for president against Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson finished a distant second, but his speeches were always first-rate. My favorite lines included, “When I look at myself, I don’t see how I can win; when I look at my opponent, I don’t see how I can lose," and “He’s not too far to the left, not too far to the right; he’s in the middle—mediocre.”
Throughout my ninety-plus years, I’ve gotten into many heated political shouting matches, though not nearly as many as my father enjoyed in his seventy-three-year lifetime. Sandy's father, on the other hand, was a rabid conservative Republican. She came over to my side when John and Jacqueline Kennedy came on the scene. Sandy looked like Jackie, often dressed like her, and followed her goings-on almost as closely as I followed what was happening in the world of sports.
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We had a few. I liked milk chocolate; Sandy was all in for bittersweet. I enjoyed coffee ice cream, while she loved to place a scoop of chocolate on top of her favored apple pie. Sandy had a major dessert problem—she was always on some sort of diet and often didn't order her favorite course. I invariably ordered the dessert I thought she wanted and then ignored her, taking a taste of it or all of it if she liked it.
Another of our marriage strengtheners was the fact that, until the very end, Sandy alone signed all our family checks. I always said to her, “My love, if I knew all of what you spent, I probably would have strangled you a long time ago.” To which she replied, “And then what? Who else would put up with you?” I could have shot back with what Charles de Gaulle once said: “The cemetery is full of irreplaceable people,” but I knew damn well that when it came to Sandy, de Gaulle was dead wrong.
Ten days short of our 66th wedding anniversary. At her funeral, I read a thank-you note to Sandy:
"Thank you, Sandra-Reeny-Reeny-Reeny, for your deeper then skin deep beauty, your courage of your convictions creativity, your warmth ,your kindness, your you. Thank you so-sought-after sophomore Sandy Brown for picking this Michigan wallflower forever.
Thank you for presenting us with the two best presents of our lives, Tom and Tracy. Thanks for your focus on family, you set our example, you showed the way that's been so fervently followed by everyone around us this day. Thank you for your unforgettable parties, your Thanksgiving Turkey turnouts, there's so many special occasions you magically maestroed. Thank you for your 'stood up to the test of time' interior designs. Thank goodness for our uncanny simpatico wherever you look, whenever you look, there's no place like our home. Thanks for the worldwide world-class creative collaborators you uncovered, commissioned and championed. Thank you for your long tenured extended family that great cast of characters you’ve gravitated our way throughout our great joint run."
What made Sandy such a special person was her uncanny way of getting along with all kinds of others. Our queen was never a big shot, never a spoiled brat, always a lady. Thank you, Sandy, for a myriad of great memories. Sandy, my love, it will always hold true what I said about you at Tracy and Rich's wedding- when it came to brides, mine took the cake!
Just prior to Sandy’s passing, I asked Tom Hucker to design a container that would fit into Norma Minkowitz’s basketry sculpture of Sandy to house her ashes. Nowadays, the two of us stand together on the living room coffee table. When I pass away, I wish to have my ashes mixed with Sandy’s so that we might be together forever.
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On a happier note, in memory of our marriage, I asked Richard Meier, Tom Geismar, and John McQueen to create something for me—the number 24097, the number of days Sandy and I were married. Linda Mendelson took things one step further when she needlepointed two pillows that represent 578,328 hours.
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Sandy's presence can still be felt throughout our home—not just because I’ve placed at least one piece of her jewelry in every room. She undoubtedly wouldn't have approved of my decision, but I’m sure she would have to admit they do look darn good.
Her hospital bed support equipment and a lot of her clothes are long gone, but the best of the rest of her pocketbooks, shoes, and clothes remain. Like her jewelry, they now hang out in the open, where they prove to be a good fit with their new surroundings.
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As she grew older, Sandy orchestrated her clothing in the same way she dressed our home. Less and less of her wardrobe featured well-known designer labels, and more and more she wore lesser-known names that complemented rather than competed with her jewelry. Sandy's pocketbook purchasing history paralleled her clothing choices, moving from mostly well-known names to those that should have been better known, headed by Chris Teverek’s fabulous fur bags and Shinichi Miyazaki’s wonderful wood pocketbooks.
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Yes, our underworld. What’s that?
Our windowless basement rooms have never appeared in publications, but they’re well worth a look. Starting with a group of Tom Grotta’s photographs and unique paper placemats, you can go down the stairs to see the contents of our two-foot wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling cabinets. These once had doors that have since been removed, allowing a glimpse of the best of Sandy’s kitchen and tableware.
A right turn from there brings you into our laundry and mechanical rooms, where you’re in for a shock. Our washer, dryer, and furnaces are surrounded by a large flock of turkeys and pilgrims that enliven our underworld—except when it's time for them to take center stage upstairs for Thanksgiving.
On a more personal note, my most memorable underworld room is our former downstairs bedroom. Robert Indiana's large graphic “LOVE” is the cornerstone of a room full of memorabilia, pictures, and clothing of Sandy's that date back to our Michigan days.
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My long-time photographer, graphic designer, and bookmaker son, Tom; his wife; website developer son, Carter; and my recently developed house photographer, Elpidio, are its impresarios. I love books, but once they go to press, they’re finished. In contrast, our website can be perpetually expanded and improved daily. Going forward, this site will devote more attention to the saga of its two main characters, Sandy and Lou, as well as some of the creative people we believe deserve more recognition, like Markku Kosonen, Bill Wyman, Tom Hucker, and Tom Grotta.
Our town recently granted us a variance that makes it practical for us to form a foundation to preserve the house and its contents in perpetuity. 46 Dickson’s Mill Road is neither spacious nor a museum; it’s a home best viewed, as it has always been, by a few people—perhaps a six-pack at a time. We want our place to be seen realistically and practically. This website is where it will always be most accessible, and we welcome you to continue enjoying the view.
