Photos by Frank McMains
Hunt Slonem's Lakeside Plantation
Driving across the raised roadway of the Morganza Spillway, one is provided a rare, elevated view. Louisiana is, by and large, a flat, deltaic place with few rises to give one any vantage. Water, fields, and woodlands hem in the thin strip of roadway; but the perspective is just high enough to see that this part of Louisiana is more empty, more vacant, than most of the state.
The spillway controls the amount of water that flows from the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya Basin. During high water, the area west of the crenelated, Art Deco locks at Morganza is flooded to reduce strain on levees further south. The result is that much of the area feels even more depopulated and less utilized than most of the rest of the state’s agricultural zones—the risk of regular, purposeful flooding warding off all but the hardiest of inhabitants. Towns like Lettsworth and Batchelor are now little more than the names given to crossroads. But a certain adventurous disposition seems to guide a few people to graze a couple of cows, raise some sugarcane, or even restore the magnificence of an aging plantation house (or two).
Hunt Slonem is not a planter or a cattleman. He is a widely admired artist whose paintings hang in some of the world’s most prestigious museums and collections. He is also an architectural dreamer, gardener, exotic bird collector, and keeper of old things. Over the past few decades he has brought Albania and Lakeside plantations back to their former splendor and filled them with nineteenth century portraits, perfume bottles, period furniture, and expansive collections of the things that appeal to his eclectic, artistic fancy. He is a man driven to preserve and luxuriate in a very particular sort of place and among very particular sorts of items. When a homeowner can talk at length about sourcing antique wallpaper from Havana, Cuba, it’s clear he is serious about presentation. These days, the last remnants of the people who brought Pointe Coupée into the Victorian age may be little more than an abandoned and sagging clapboard store along a rail siding and a collection of weathered sharecropper’s lodgings; but Slonem is doing what needs to be done. He is preserving the past so that it can be savored in the present.
The interior of Lakeside Plantation reflects an older way of doing things; it exists in a pre-Minimalist world where stainless steel, clean lines, and a phobia of clutter are alien ideas. It is the land of the parlor, the staging place of the salon; and its profusion of oil paintings, hand-carved breakfronts, and decadent, many- patterned armchairs intoxicate the visitor. It is a subtle hand that can fill an ancient home with this many treasures and not leave one feeling as though he had entered a delicate museum, or worse, some affected place where nostalgia goes to linger in the hopes of once again becoming fashionable. Lakeside, even if it may have a full, formal dinner setting for eight on display, does not feel precious or contrived. Instead it feels like an artist’s dreams and imaginings have been laid open so that they can be delighted in and enjoyed rather than simply admired.
It is tempting to try to establish some sort of parallel between Hunt Slonem the artist and the layout of a home that is almost operatic in its ambitions. You want to see a line from what inspires his work to the tastes that drove him to gather up this physical elegy for the past. But, if one exists, it is not immediately clear to the visitor. Slonem’s own art hangs on some of the walls; but the subject matter is rabbits, flowers, or birds—not antebellum life or the heyday of British empire. If there is some common theme between Slonem’s art and his home, then maybe it is delight in small variations on a theme.
Among his better-known artistic phases is Slonem’s “rabbit period.” The shape and detail of rabbits is repeated over and over as the artist seems to be exploring how slight changes in the weight of a line or the curve of the animal’s features lead to a heightened understanding of its form. It is much the same with Lakeside. Dozens of colored glass perfume bottles cover a table top, the waves and layers of color in each bottle holding a faint echo of its companions. Faces peer out at you from every wall, portraits of prosperous men and women of their day, all of them sitting in a similar position and girded with the conventional badges of wealth—a pocket watch, an enamel brooch, ringlets petrified into position with fire-heated curling tongs. If there is a parallel aesthetic between these items and Hunt Slonem’s art, it could be that knowing and appreciating a thing only comes by the concentrated attention to that thing in all its infinite variety.
There are probably few places better suited to this quietly obsessive approach to living than the green solitude of Pointe Coupee Parish. Each item in Slonem’s collection echoes its partner much as the material remains of the past are a not-so-distant mirage of the people who once used them. These faint, but resonating, relationships may be part of a unifying theme: that connections matter, that subtlety is admired best when it is scrutinized, and that maybe it takes an empty, quiet place—like the head of the Atchafalaya River—to be able to find a perch from which all of life’s tiny differences make up a dazzling whole.
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