In 1979, the Rockefeller family bequeathed 84 acres of its estate to The National Trust for Historic Preservation for use as a museum and conference center to advance the philanthropic mission of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The property includes the family house, Kykuit, built in 1909 and 1913; the Orangerie of 1908; and the Coach Barn of 1902 and 1913.

Our work involved two parts: restoring Kykuit to serve as a museum of the family's history and provide guest rooms for conferees, and renovating the family coach barn into a state-of-the-art international conference center with guest rooms.

The Coach Barn

Originally a three-story utility building with horse stables, an automobile garage, workshop, and various maintenance and staff rooms, The Coach Barn is now the international conference center of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

We cleared the ground floor, retaining a series of brick-vaulted spaces with large windows and masonry walls, for construction of the conference center, designing two conference rooms, a lecture hall, a dining room, a catering kitchen and a flexible area adjacent to the dining room within this old fabric. We created a new loggia opposite the entrance for use as an informal gathering place, staff offices, bathrooms and mechanical spaces.

The first floor, housing the family's tack, carriage, and automobile collections, was left intact as museum space open to the public. Renovation of the second floor required major intervention that completely transformed the upper level staff quarters into guest rooms for conferees. We transformed the hayloft into a common room, and utilizing roof space, made an outdoor living room. To reconnect guests with the floors below, we widened the corridors and other public spaces, adding a new stair. The curving walls and portals enhance the clarity of the circulation, leading conferees back to the lower levels of the Conference Center.

Kykuit

Kykuit, the family house, required major infrastructure changes to enable it to accommodate group tours of the first floor and art gallery, and provide guest rooms on the upper floors. Our underlying preservation goal was to replace its heating, plumbing, life safety and electrical systems without changing the original fabric of the 30,000 square foot house. Moreover, all changes were designed to be reversible.

On the third and fourth floors the original staff quarters were reconfigured and enlarged to become guest suites, continuing the scale, materials and details of the original architecture. On the first and second floors, we concealed all sprinkler heads in the pattern of the room moldings and rewired the original light fixtures to provide ambient light and emergency lighting. We also installed a new heating system, sprinkler system and fire doors.

New furniture selections parallel the spirit of the original design, while the refurbished picture moldings, door and window trim sustain it. We chose new nickel-plated plumbing fixtures to simulate the old, and carefully fitted fire-rated doors, exit lights, emergency horns and lighting into the existing architecture, leaving the historic fabric of the house apparently intact and undisturbed.