The Long Island Museum Presents The Gentleman’s Coach House: A Fashionable Home for Carriages

With their beautiful façades and handsome hardwood interiors, coach houses provided stately comfort for carriages and horses…but not necessarily for the people who worked – and sometimes also lived – within.

Wealthy estate owners excitedly took visitors on tours to see the fancy stalls, gleaming harness brasses and bits, and shining rows of vehicles even before showing them the rest of the estate. 

But these grand structures did not run themselves. They depended on a huge corps of servants, from the lowest paid and least experienced stable boys to highly skilled older head grooms. Despite their splendid outer appearance, the work inside coach houses was smelly, noisy, and intense at early and late hours – all reasons why these structures sat a good distance away from the main house.

By the end of World War I, many estate owners were leaving their grand coach houses behind for new automobile garages, and their coachmen were becoming chauffeurs. The carriages were increasingly relegated to storage and to gathering dust.

But, thankfully, certain enthusiasts – such as Ward Melville and the other founders of the Long Island Museum carriage collection – came forward to save many of them for the education and enjoyment of the public. We are proud to have the opportunity to recreate the interior of a typical Gold Coast Coach House and to display these historic vehicles.

European Style and Luxury

Most styles of American luxury vehicles had their origins in the Old World – landaus, calèches, broughams, and chariots d' Orsay, to name a few. Ornate interiors, elaborate paint schemes, and even the coats-of-arms seen on the panels of European coaches were adapted by Americans, in order to associate their vehicles with old money, blue blood and good taste. 

But imitation stopped short of duplication. Traveling overseas, America's wealthiest marveled at the startlingly different carriages they saw in London's Hyde Park and along the Champs-Élysées in Paris. While their basic constructions were similar, European luxury vehicles, such as these, were heavier and featured more ornate ornamentation – more extensive use of gilding, more elaborate paint schemes, and more references to allegorical and classical figures.

Most of the European vehicles seen in the new European Vehicles Gallery were used by aristocrats or high officials. Four were owned by Prince Adalbert of Bavaria. After his death, they sat on the palace grounds gathering dust through two world wars and did not arrive in the United States until 1959, when, Dieter Holterbosch, a German executive with family ties to the Bavarian royals, purchased and displayed them at his Long Island estate at Belle Terre, Long Island. He contributed them to this museum in 1966.