This summer, the Friends of Rittenhouse Square marked their 50th anniversary with this year’s Ball on the Square, and honored Barbara Eberlein for her decades of work preserving and shaping the neighborhood she calls home.
The sold-out evening transformed Rittenhouse Square, William Penn’s original “greene countrie towne,” into an open-air ballroom, drawing the city’s preservation, design, and philanthropic communities together. For more than forty years, Barbara and Eberlein Design Consultants have called Rittenhouse Square home. A member of the Friends of Rittenhouse Square board since 1998 and a past chair of the Ball, she has extended that same care to the neighborhood’s public spaces as well as its private ones. Her landmark restorations, each approached with an archaeologist’s curiosity and a preservationist’s reverence, reach from the Furness Mansion and 1830 Rittenhouse Square, both steps from her door, to signature projects across the region like Ardrossan.
In accepting the honor, Barbara offered her own reflection on the quiet exchange between place and people, and gave the room, as she always does, some homework.
Barbara’s Remarks
Thank you to co-chairs Laura LaRosa and Jamie Gibbins, to an inspired board of FRS, to the gifted planners that make this magic possible, and to the inimitable June Armstrong, Executive Director of FRS.
Thank you to the inspired leaders of this organization: Laura LaRosa, Bart Blatstein, Allan Domb, Wendy Rosen, Betsy Hummel, Joe Roberts, Nancy Heinzen, Carole Shanis, and so many others.
William Penn, in 1682, knew what he was doing. Little did he know how lovingly embellished this square would become under Paul Cret’s guidance in 1913, when America awoke to the City Beautiful Movement that forever improved the health and vitality of our urban environment.
Here in Rittenhouse Square, this tapestry weaves together our buildings, our landscapes, our community, and ultimately, it creates our relationship to our city and our world.
It was Winston Churchill who said, “we shape our buildings and thereafter, they shape us.” How true. And let’s take that a step further: we shape the natural world around us, and it most certainly shapes, and nourishes, us.
I’ve had the privilege of practicing interior design from this wonderful Philadelphia base, and it’s taught me the value of crafting the way we look, the way we live, and the way we feel.
All of this underscores the critical importance of philanthropy and stewardship. Magically, it’s both the practice of philanthropy and stewardship, as well as the results, that enrich our experience as human beings and ensure the longevity of the beauty around us.
Now, no evening with me is complete without an assignment or two.
Assignment #1: Make a drawing. Make a difference. Draw your ideas for how we can enrich and enliven the Square, and share them with all of us.
Assignment #2: Get out, walk around, and look up, and discover hidden treasures in your own city, and share them with others.
Let’s celebrate the long line of history in the beauty all around us.
EDC is proud to celebrate Barbara’s recognition this year, and deeply grateful to the Friends of Rittenhouse Square for fifty years of devotion to this cherished jewel of our city.
How do you stretch the boundaries of “period-appropriate” interiors? What if you wrote a new rule book? What would happen, for example, if you introduced Art Deco antiques into a Richard Neutra modernist masterpiece? What would happen if you injected a notable collection of early 20th century art into a 1930s Georgian Revival house? Will the styles clash, compete, or create a new kind of visual conversation?
At Eberlein Design Consultants, we make the most challenging ideas take form in strikingly beautiful ways. Compelling interiors emerge when history informs the creative process rather than proscribing it with a fixed set of rules. We take the unexpected and make it feel inevitable by creating interiors in which different eras, materials, and sensibilities respond to one another rather than compete.
Come explore this dichotomy through our lens.
Cairncliff
The new owners of Neutra’s 1962 landmark “Cairncliff” wanted something truly different. Rather than default to the expected midcentury modern furnishings, we chose to create a dialogue between the bold modernism of the architecture and the vibrant personality of Art Deco design without starting an argument between the two.
Bringing a collection from another era into a historic house begins with listening to its inherent architecture, its materials, and its character then engaging it in a different voice. If the house speaks in a rustic tone, we respond with refinement. When it gives us matte surfaces, we introduce high polish. When it’s defined by hard edges, we bring in soft curves, countering angularity with sinuous, flowing forms.
It is not about making one era conform to another; it’s about exploring the tension between them and then celebrating the visual excitement in what happens as a result.
Neutra’s architecture poses a challenge because it is such a powerful, self-sufficient statement that presents itself as a complete thought. We took a very conscious position, saying “We understand your language but want to use different kinds of aesthetic descriptors and then see how you respond.” This requires balancing those two voices continually to discover a lyrical connection.
Looking at these images reveals what is compelling about Neutra’s design. There is a constant reinforcement of the connection between the indoor and outdoor worlds. The original reflecting pool in the foyer and the mirrored wall behind creates an undeniable connection with the flowing waterfall outside the entrance. This scene, anchored by an ancient Roman bronze statue, creates a meditative moment as you enter the house, setting the tone for revelations that unfold elsewhere. Visually, the vertical channels in the bronze rendering of the fabric recall the architectural columns that punctuate this space and draw your eyes upward. Floating spine-like wedges mimic the diagonal sweep of the top of her dress, making the powerful scene reinforce notions of the past, connecting inevitably to the unmistakable – we see the world all around her as she looks out beyond us, inviting us to do the same.
Our clients wanted to celebrate a new phase in their lives in a recently acquired Georgian Revival house. Again, we tapped into the inexhaustible richness of early French Art Deco furniture and 20th century art to create a compelling dialogue. We were given free rein to explore the intersection of unexpected surfaces and precious objects. In some rooms, we created evocative plaster wall finishes with a craqueleur surface to reveal an underlying wood grain pattern. In other rooms, matte and gloss surfaces intermingle to catch light in a painterly tableau.
The geometrically articulated mantle almost demands that you focus on the grain of the walnut in the 1935 Dominique table. To heighten the effect of the Dominique dining chairs, we turned the bespoke Prelle fabric sideways so that the weave would mirror that of the table itself, creating a sinuous, wave-like motion throughout.
Sometimes, a light tough is the secret to a convincing aesthetic statement. Rather than removing all the Georgian architectural details, we were selective and maintained the original floors, doors, and millwork. The telltale dentil moulding, however, was replaced with a simpler crown that accepted the Art Deco aesthetics more readily. All of the Georgian paneling is preserved but treated with a series of strié glazes whose final coat is heat treated to force the craquelure, recalling the rich surface of antique porcelains. We don’t take the architecture away; we add to its history some elements that would not have been part of the original finish. When those elements settle into the background, almost like camouflage, the room’s true tour de force of ideas and powerful geometry expresses itself anew.
The most interesting thing about Art Deco stylistically is that there is a tendency to think of it (particularly in its earlier forms) as feminine, lightweight, and flowing. Here, it is anything but. We choreographed an explosion of every kind of geometry imaginable. Zigzagging patterns at different scales meet intersecting rectangles and interlocking circles in the carpet that was reproduced for this room based on an Ivan da Silva Bruhns original.
We deliberately created a subtle backdrop for the character-defining Jules Leleu cabinet so that its sumptuous materials – amboyne, ivory, and bronze – maintain the starring role. Seemingly simple in its design, it is so powerful in the way it’s rendered in exotic materials; one of the hallmarks of Art Deco design. The floral motif appears three dimensional and yet the surface is flat, almost creating a “painting” in inlaid materials that reveal a level of true ingenuity and artistry.
In-depth research of the period led us to original documents by some of the greatest designers of the time, such as Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Maurice Dufrêne, Paul Follot, and Ivan da Silva Bruhns, whose designs and color palettes provided the inspiration for textiles and area rugs custom made in France by skilled artisans.
By celebrating the beauty of the luxurious woods and inlaid materials of the Art Deco period, we controlled the aesthetic by enveloping everything in shimmering palettes of violet, cocoa, amber, celadon, and silver. Walls lined with handmade paper, macassar ebony, and textured silk complement the collection and maximize its visual impact.
The result is a dynamic blend of elegant modernism in a house of classical proportions.
By orchestrating environments to showcase refined collections, a new visual language between two eras becomes an elevated dialogue expanding on the concept of “appropriate”. The result is a dynamic and surprisingly fitting marriage of styles, a 21st century conversation in which the architecture, furniture, and art thrive in one another’s orbits.
