Property of Mr. Jon Whitcomb | Architects: Sherwood, Mills & Smith

11/11/2025 10:34:00 AM

Like most creative people who have a sense of the dramatic, artist Jon Whitcomb is a good host and one who sets the stage well. His house in Darien, Connecticut, has all the necessary props, plus a few non-essentials which certainly add to the fun. (The lighting includes uplights and downlights, dim lights and spot lights and even colored lights.) It is also a house ready at all times for guests, in spite of the fact that Mr. Whitcomb works at home, frequently far into the night to meet magazine cover deadlines. The present house, built around a small week-end cottage, has a plan carefully tailored to the owner's work-and-play kind of life. Guests can be put up overnight. A party can be going on in the playroom, living room, or adjoining terrace, with- out in any way disturbing the quiet isolation of Mr. Whitcomb's studio. For a hospitable man with an unpredictable work schedule, such an arrangement is absolutely necessary.

To stage-set the house for parties is an easy matter. Outside, there are portable floodlights to play up a corner of the terrace, or black out a flowering shrub past its prime. In the living-dining room, there are spotlights in the ceiling above the dining table, pink and white lights in the bar recess, a blue spotlight above the piano keyboard, another spot above the radio-record player. The exceptional studio lighting is a necessity for Mr. Whitcomb's work and a glamour asset for parties. In both living room and studio, there are master switches to control the lighting pat- terns, and rheostats to regulate brightness.

The main entertaining area is the huge, L- shaped living-dining room. Glass window-walls in the L bring the adjoining terrace right inside. At one end of the living room is a music center with grand piano and organ. At the opposite end is the fireplace, flanked by two sofas. Next to the fireplace is a built-in radio-record player. Built into another wall, behind sliding doors, is the bar sink and shelves for glasses and liquor bottles, the latter stored horizontally, each in a cardboard mailing tube. The bar proper, of chestnut with black plastic top, is on rollers so it can be moved easily. The flooring is beige rubber tile except in this area, which is marked off by black tile. The bar and fireplace walls are bleached chestnut; wall behind organ is chestnut paneling, holds bookshelves.

The downstairs playroom is gay and rugged, and obviously belongs to an artist. Mr. Whit- comb's collection of art by well-known illustrators is all around you. One wall is of pegboard painted red; the sofa is upholstered in bright green felt.

When it is used for entertaining, the studio has strictly professional music and sound effects. The high-fidelity music system has a tone of concert- hall caliber, with speakers placed so music can be enjoyed both in the studio and on the adjoining screened porch. The movie projector is set into a mirrored wall recess, and the screen pulls down over the window-wall opposite.

But the studio is mainly Mr. Whitcomb's place to work, and as such is a complete unit with adjoining secretary's office. It opens to the porch and to a secluded terrace where he likes to step out for a break on working days, and to his own bedroom and bath-dressing room. On week ends when three bedrooms are needed for guests, Mr. Whitcomb sleeps in his studio on a pull-out bed which serves as a couch by day.

One guest room and bath is located on the main floor, the other on the lower level next to the playroom. These are furnished to double as sitting rooms, with sofas, television, and comfortable reading and writing spots. Since they are frequently used by models, the bathrooms are carefully lighted for making-up. One has a pink-and- red color scheme: three walls are papered in a small, geometric red-and-white pattern, and the fourth covered in pink pegboard; the flooring is red-and-white marbleized asphalt tile.

Throughout the house are evidences of the owner's three strongest beliefs about how to make a house livable: (1) music of superb tone; (2) furniture on rollers, so it can be easily rearranged; (3) lighting for mood and for fun as well as for working. Mr. Whitcomb also is a great believer in flexibility, and sees no reason why rooms shouldn't adapt themselves to their owners' changing moods. After all, it's no trouble to push an eight-foot sofa if it's on rollers, and a whole room may take on a new look if you simply change a bouquet of flowers and turn a colored spotlight on it.