At midpoint in her life, Theodate had shown that she could design and oversee the completion of a large building on her own; she was involved with charitable activities in both Farmington and New York; and she continued to participate in séances organized by the Society for Psychical Research. As she matured, she became a person of striking appearance, not just because she was impeccably dressed, but because of the liveliness of her expression. Her gaze was penetrating; her blue eyes usually sparkled except when she was displeased. The formidable side of her character was tempered by her enjoyment of wit and humor to which she responded with laughter that was infectious in its warmth. In his description of Theodate, her cousin Brooks Emeny tells us that "Her capacity for love was infinite and her friendship, so long as it lasted, was all-embracing."¹ Her ardent affection encompassed children, animals, and people from all walks in life but generally settled more strongly on women than on men.

July of 1910 found Theodate, now forty-three, in England. This time she was without Mary Hillard or her parents but hardly alone, being accompanied by a trained nurse who presumably was helping her to recover from a bout of depression, a chauffeur and car, and eventually by a chow puppy she called Jim Jam. It is possible that she had already been asked to design a country house for the Joseph Chamberlains in Middlebury and that one purpose of her trip was to seek inspiration from English architecture, especially old village cottages, in preparation for this venture.

Theodate's base in London was Brown's Hotel from which she made excursions to the Cotswolds, the Lake District, and up into Scotland. She was collecting material for later use, and sent her mother a slew of architectural postcards - of cathedrals, castles, cottages, barns, almshouses, and old inns - urging her mother to keep them in the order sent. In the first, dated July 11th, from the Grand Hotel in Lyndhurst, New Forest, she wrote that she had seen four flying machines in the air at Bournemouth and then gone on to Salisbury and Stonehenge. She also took some photographs of material not available in postcards. Together they not only furnished her with visual mementos of her trip but also gave her a store of architectural motifs upon which she could draw, and she added to this collection in subsequent trips to England. Most likely it was on this trip that Theodate began to buy books on old English houses, including several of the marvelous Batsford publications written by architects and profusely illustrated with excellent photographs.²

Theodate's friends in psychical research, the William Jameses, were also in London, having come to England hoping to ameliorate Henry James's bleak depression. William James was debilitated by a heart condition, and the brothers had sought relief in the curative baths at the German spa, Bad Nauheim, before Theodate's arrival. Henry James was beginning to recuperate, but his brother had only become weaker.³ On July 18th Theodate paid Alice James an afternoon call at the James's small hotel in London, a visit interrupted by the arrival of the sixty-seven-year old novelist whom Theodate had not previously met. The meeting began with tension. Theodate describes the scene in her memoirs. Mrs. James excused herself, and Henry James, indignant at seeing a stranger unexpectedly, looked at her sharply, his eyes "like the barrels of a gun." But after poking at the fire and grumbling about some physical complaint, he turned into a delightful host. James took to Theodate - her wit, her generosity, and her car. She chauffeured him to the Army and Navy stores on a wet afternoon. And with all three Jameses she motored out to Chelsea to look at houses of literary figures.

On their first encounter, Henry James had suggested that they drive the very next day to Hill-Hall, near Epping, northeast of London, to have tea with Mrs. Charles Hunter. Mary Hunter, the wife of a wealthy coal mine owner, was one of five Smyth sisters, the best known being the composer and militant suffragette, Dame Ethel Smyth. Theodate relates that she and James almost missed tea, as Mrs. Hunter was out when they arrived, Henry James not having notified her of their coming. However, Mr. Hunter caught them as they were leaving, invited them to tea, and they stayed on for dinner where Theodate met another Smyth sister who became a close friend. This was Nina Hollings. She invited Theodate to lunch at her house, Watchetts, in Frimley, Surrey, asking her to bring along Helena Gleichen, a painter of horses and landscapes.⁴ Thus Theodate was launched into a society of strong-minded, professional women. She became such an Anglophile that her Farmington friend Anna Cowles admonished her not to think of staying in England since there was much to do for her own country.⁵

The paths of Theodate and Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), the greatest English architect of the time, almost crossed. Lutyens, whose designs for country houses and their gardens were in great demand, arrived at Hill-Hall two weeks after Theodate's first visit to discuss the possibility of creating a garden. In a letter to his wife, he described the Hunter's house as "a delightful old house round a courtyard ... arranged in an amusing way," and having on the interior "Sargents galore, Mancinis and other modern artists. Italian furniture and silks."⁶ Lutyens had just finished reconstructing and enlarging Temple Dinsley in Hertfordshire for Mr. and Mrs. H. G. Fenwick, Mrs. Fenwick being the Hunters' niece.

Though Theodate didn't meet Lutyens, she did seek out his work. On a postcard showing the gateway of Battle Abbey, she remarked to her parents that she had seen a house by Lutyens and asked them to remind her to tell them about it.⁷ What is significant is that from this point on, Theodate would seek inspiration from both the charming, anonymous architecture of English villages to which she had been drawn earlier and from houses by contemporary English Arts and Crafts architects who were motivated by that same vernacular tradition.

After she returned to Farmington in late September, she began to concentrate on designs for the Chamberlain House. Theodate probably owed the commission to her friendship with Mrs. Chamberlain, formerly Elizabeth Stillman, who was also a close friend of Harris Whittemore's sister Gertrude. In 1909 Joseph Chamberlain, a law professor at Columbia University, had acquired almost six hundred acres of orchard and farmland outside of Middlebury, Connecticut, for his country estate. As landscape architect, he called in Warren Manning who most likely chose the serene and isolated house site.⁸ Beyond existing apple orchards, the house was placed on the summit of a hill which rose above Lake Quassapaug. Unlike the Popes or the Whittemores, the Chamberlains did not require a grand setting for prized paintings and furniture or for entertaining. Nor did they place any stylistic restrictions on Theodate. The house was to be capacious but functionally simple with furniture built-in where possible, or at least that is how the furnishings turned out. Theodate was free to choose her own idiom, to interpret in her own way ideas about houses that she had absorbed in England and had tempered with American Arts and Crafts variants.

To be sure, there was a demand for a progressive, modern architecture based on the social needs of an urban environment. It was recognized that a modern style was especially suited to factories and office buildings or skyscrapers where there were fewer models to draw upon.⁹ But when it came to domestic architecture, houses were eclectic, the taste of the patron generally dictating the style. This was especially true on the east coast, although in the Chicago area and in southern California, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Greene brothers developed new domestic styles suited to specific regions. English styles of all periods were preferred, it being argued that English examples had inspired the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses on the east coast and that this was therefore our architectural heritage. It was thought that one could not do better than to adapt good English models to American needs. By 1910 English vernacular architecture, which appealed so much to Theodate, was extensively published in American periodicals, such as The Craftsman, Architectural Record, American Architect, and Country Life in America. The articles were illustrated abundantly with photographs of traditional half-timbered structures with brick nogging, casement windows clinging to the eaves, steeply pitched roofs, and uneven roof lines - features deemed the ultimate expression of the picturesque, the most poignantly romantic, and thus suited to a suburban or country house. A major example of such an adaptation was Harrie T. Lindeberg and Lewis Colt Albro's Mondeanne, designed in 1907 for James Stilman's estate in Pocantico Hills, New York. Lindeberg even managed to give the effect of a thatched roof with shingles.¹⁰ Other major eastern architects who were creating American country houses based on the English vernacular tradition included Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) and Frank Chouteau Brown (1876-1947). Both helped to publicize this style - Eyre as founder of House and Garden in 1901, and Brown as editor of Architectural Review from 1907 through 1919. It was not just the original models of English vernacular styles that were advocated. The work of such contemporary English Arts and Crafts architects as Voysey and Baillie Scott, whose houses were based on older English vernacular styles, were published in American journals.¹¹ What one associated with English vernacular and its modern derivatives above all was a snug coziness. The hearth was the heart of the house. It was thought to be a "virtuous" architecture, emphasizing both the closeness of family and the continuation of an Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Theodate Pope, fresh from her English peregrinations had therefore made a fashionable choice in giving an English cast to the Joseph Chamberlains' Connecticut country house, which they called Highfield (Figs.32, 33). Yet Highfield does not have the appearance of a transplanted half-timbered English house, many of which were sprouting like mushrooms in the northeast. Gray stucco for the exterior finish, for instance, is more in keeping with American Craftsman houses; and shutters on casement windows with their multiple panes follows a New England tradition. Nevertheless, Highfield's dominant feature, its steeply pitched roof - which would become Theodate's trademark - and its decorative chimney pots are associated with English houses. The long sloping roof, pierced by dormer windows, masks the second story so that the house looks smaller than it is. That two wings flanking the main entrance block are recessed, also contributes to this impression. Totally unexpected are the jovial faces of Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain appearing at the ends of the beams that support the overhanging eaves (Fig.34). Another personal touch was a brass plaque that Theodate proudly added over the front door with her monogram and the date 1911.¹² Nature began to take over when vines crept up to the chimney tops.

The house was very practically laid out with an entrance hall leading to the dining room and the recessed kitchen wing on the left and to a living room on the right. Behind the living room, an enclosed terrace led to guest quarters jutting out at the right. In all there were eighteen rooms. These were furnished very simply with built-in bookcases, cupboards, and window seats in the living room. The paneling was painted a soft, creamy yellow in the dining and living rooms.

As at Hill-Stead, there was a sunken garden for which Theodate designed a summer house. This one was far more substantial than Hill-Stead's, with a quaint English style roof and a large fireplace. Simulated dovecote openings in the truncated gables of the hipped roof aided in the ventilation of the structure, which was enclosed by removable glass panels (Figs.35, 36). In 1916 the landscape architects, Lay and Wheelwright, added a rustic pergola and a potted plant terrace to link the house with its outdoor refuge.¹³

Although this spacious retreat was not to be filled with children, Mrs. Chamberlain being fragile in health, there was, at least, one frequent young visitor - their goddaughter, Florence Martin Chase. As a college student, she remembered the architect arriving in her Pierce Arrow and offering to share a pipe of opium, alas too dry to be effective.¹⁴

Early in 1913, while she was still involved with Highfield, Theodate designed another country house, this one in Locust Valley, Long Island. Just how she received this commission remains a mystery, nor does one know much about her patron, Mrs. Charles Gates.¹⁵ The red brick house, crowning Tulip Tree Hill, is reached by a long winding drive that originally passed through a brick gateway to circle past the house and out through a second gateway. In order to preserve the tall tulip trees, which were as important for maintaining scale as for their shade and texture, Theodate chose a long angled plan. She oriented the house towards the south, jutting the kitchen wing forward on the left to take advantage of the sunlight.¹⁶ That the roof line of this wing is lower than the main block produces the appearance of having been added later. She chose a steeply pitched roof to create the appearance of "a low rambling English type of house, homelike yet stately" (Fig.37).¹⁷ Such a multitude of dormers pierce this roof that the name Dormer House seemed almost inevitable. An outstanding feature is the subtle emphasis on texture and color. The rich red of the brick, the gray slate of the roof, and the dark green shutters create a formal harmony with the landscape; the house does not beg for flowers as does the cottage like Highfield. Over the entrance porch an escutcheon bears the date, 1913, and a motto, "Sine fuco intro" (I enter without pretence), which emphasizes the straightforward dignity of this red dwelling. There is a play upon the word "fuco" which refers literally to red dye (and thus to the color of the house) and figuratively to pretence.

In addition to the main house, she designed a gardener's cottage and garage at the entrance to the driveway. Here, too, there is a steeply pitched slate roof and bricks varying in color from shades of orange to dark red. The bust of a figure attached to the chimney looking up at the sky adds a touch of whimsy.

A puzzling question about Dormer House is the identity of the landscape architect who worked so carefully with Theodate in planning the site, in preserving the tall trees, and in creating such natural surprises as a pond reached by a cascade of stone steps from the side of the house. The most likely candidate is Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959), who had landscaped the inner courtyard and small garden attached to the headmistress's apartment at Westover and who, in 1914, was nearby at Glen Cove planning a garden and summer house for George D. Pratt's Killenworth.¹⁸

Henry James probably introduced Theodate to a group of professional women in New York in the spring of 1911. His base there was the house of Beatrix's mother, Mary Cadwalader Jones, where he was the center of a group of adoring but keenly intelligent and independent women.¹⁹ With wit and humor Mrs. Jones presided over a salon at her Sunday lunches. And like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower, James exchanged dry wit for the group's gentle adulation. On March 18th he called on Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder, the wife of his former editor at Century Magazine. She had commissioned the author's portrait from Cecilia Beaux. That evening he dined with Theodate at her hotel, the St. Regis. On a subsequent day he called on Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer who lived one street away from Mrs. Jones and who, like James, had been a contributor to Century Magazine in the mid 1890s.²⁰

Theodate, who knew Mariana Van Rensselaer at this time, shared many interests with this older woman. Her writings included articles on American domestic architecture, the art of gardening, a series on English cathedrals, and a book on the architect Henry H. Richardson. She had become an honorary member of both the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects. After her only son died in 1894, she taught courses at the University Settlement, then called the Neighborhood Guild, on Delancey Street. Having become interested in educational reform, Van Rensselaer joined the Woman's Association for Improving Public Schools (later the Public Education Association), and then became its president from 1898 until 1906.

That this network of creative women in New York was helpful to Theodate, who preferred to work with women, is evident in her choice of Beatrix Farrand as her landscape architect. Besides the courtyard at Westover, Beatrix Farrand created a new planting design for the sunken garden at Hill-Stead sometime after 1916. In 1919, when Theodate submitted a rendering to a competition for a reform school for women in East Lyme, Connecticut, Farrand was to do the landscaping (Fig.38).²¹

The reform school has many elements in common with Dormer House, including the long sloping roof (here with hipped dormers), chimneys capped by chimney pots, an added wing with a lower roof line, a red brick exterior with green shutters for the first floor windows, and a setting among tall maple trees to create scale. Theodate made this reform school as gently domestic as possible, with the only barrier separating it from the sidewalk being a low hedge. Unfortunately, her plan was not chosen.

Dormer House, designed in 1913, was probably not Theodate's first endeavor in brick and slate in an English idiom. In 1912 she had gotten Cass Gilbert to recommend her, on the basis of her work at Westover, to the competition for the Loomis Institute in Windsor, Connecticut. The competition was already weighted towards three architects who had been given special invitations. Theodate was among the other nine selected from the open field. Needless to say, her plan was not selected, nor has it come to light.²²

There were yet other school projects that Theodate undertook. One, also an abortive effort, was a plan for Mount Vernon Seminary, a school for young ladies in Washington, D.C.²³ There are scraps of evidence in two letters that refer to Theodate's commission. However, the credit for the school went to another architect, Wesley Sherwood Bessell, who had been Theodate's draftsman and who drew up the final plans.²⁴

Mount Vernon Seminary was founded in 1895 by Mrs. Elizabeth Somers. By 1910 she had started to purchase land on Nebraska Avenue with the idea of moving the school to the outskirts of Washington. In search of an architect, she visited schools with her assistant Mrs. Adelia Gates Hensley and was impressed by Westover. A letter from Mrs. Pope to her daughter, written in December 1913, informs us indirectly that their choice had fallen on Theodate.²⁵ Nevertheless, the permit to build the school was not acquired until 1916, and then it was Bessell who drew up the plans, which are signed and dated 1916.²⁶ What happened in between?

When Mary Hillard discovered Bessell's authorship of Mount Vernon Seminary after Mrs. Hensley (who succeeded Mrs. Somers as principal) had sent her photographs of the recently completed school, she wrote to Harris Whittemore:

Whether Theo knows of Mr. Bessell's perfidy I do not know. My impression is he was her draftsman when she made the plans for Mt. Vernon Seminary. The history of her plans was that by the time they were drawn, war had broken out and Mrs. Somers decided it was not a propitious time to build. She was shrewd enough to tell Theo she would like to pay her then for the work she had done. Theo named a good round price which Mrs. Somers promptly paid without returning the plans which were in her possession. It is my impression Mr. Bessell was Theo's draftsman and would naturally have known about all that. He probably approached Mrs. Somers and offered to execute the working plans and superintend the construction of the building for a low fee, and well he might make his fee low. Apparently Mrs. Hensley does not know there was anything crooked. Neither she or Mrs. Somers are the kind of women who would countenance anything dishonest though each is a very shrewd manager for her own interests.²⁷

Although Mary Hillard sent the photographs of the school on to Theodate, there is no record that she made any protest.

Perhaps this was because Bessell had changed the general aspect, if not the layout (Fig.39). Like Westover the plan is quadrangular (except that the back of Mt. Vernon is open) with two projecting frontal wings. A central cupola sets a Georgian tone, reinforced at Mount Vernon Seminary by a red brick exterior. Moreover, the sentiments that Bessell expressed in his article, accompanying the publication of his drawings and photographs of Mount Vernon Seminary, are those of Theodate - the desire to instill an atmosphere of the American traditional past through architectural design and to substitute the warmth of a home for the feeling of an institution. "Think," he wrote "of being privileged to design and create twenty separate and distinct outside doorways, each with its own little idiosyncrasies, of the fun in slipping in little surprises here and there, all tending to add interest and picturesqueness."²⁸

Nevertheless the result is dull. One cannot judge the interior that was renovated to suit the needs of the Navy, which took over the school site in 1942. The exterior, however, does not have the strength of character, the keen and unerring sense of proportion that Theodate gave to every building, or even those very surprises that Bessell advocated. He continued to add buildings to the school complex, including a chapel and, in 1928, a house for Mrs. Hensley.

A school which Theodate did complete in this productive period before America's involvement in World War I was Hop Brook, a grammar school built near a foundry in the immigrant section of Naugatuck (Fig.40). This was Harris Whittemore's contribution to his town. His father, who had died in 1910, had much earlier commissioned McKim, Mead & White to create the Salem grammar school (1892-93) and the Hillside High School (1892-94) and other buildings in close proximity to the green.²⁹ That her longtime friend and former suitor wished to aid immigrant children would have been a sympathetic idea to Theodate, and she drew the preliminary plans in January 1914. These were turned into working drawings by her draftsmen - first Wesley Bessell then Lee Atwood. The final plans were turned over to the contractor in mid-March 1915.

Since Hop Brook was built for children of foreign laborers on the edge of town, Theodate did not feel constrained by any need to instill a sense of tradition through her choice of style. She turned again to a brick and slate combination, but the effect is more streamlined and modern than her earlier work. The roof is not steep; there are no chimney pots; and no shutters grace the horizontal banks of windows that let in the maximum amount of light and air. The school building is rectangular with a projecting auditorium wing on the left. A curving brick wall, which shields the playground at the rear, extends on the right with diminishing height towards a separate, smaller kindergarten. Here a fireplace created a sense of coziness as well as warmth.

The flattened arches of the doors, an oriel over the main entrance, the script of the letters "A B C" over the entrance to the kindergarten, are Gothic in their inspiration (Figs.41, 42).³⁰ There is also an open book over the entrance to the main building (a detail that appears later at Mount Vernon Seminary). At one time, a bust of Harris Whittemore presided from a niche in the facade of the auditorium.

Theodate had a tremendous amount of energy once engaged by a project. But intense work wore her out, and she fell prey to recurrent sieges of depression. As the Hop Brook plans were being finished, she wrote despondently to her mother early in January 1915: "I am still laid up....I suspect that it is the last winter I shall try to pass in New York. That means giving up my New York office. It really does not pay."³¹ On February 3rd she complained again, "I am having such persistent insomnia that my nights are waking nightmares;" although a trained nurse was doing everything she could to help.³² She showed a perspective of Hop Brook at an exhibition at the American Architectural League in New York, but an episode with the Nugent Publishing Company brought home the difficulty of a woman making her way as an architect. She had received a request for her photograph for publication in a book on prominent New York architects. When a representative of the company, who believed Theodate to be a masculine name, called her only to discover incredulously that she was a woman, he informed her that she could not be included. She described the event to her mother, concluding, "so you see, although art has no sex, I am discriminated against, though on the merits of my work they had selected me as one of the architects whom they wished to mention."³³ She closed her New York office in December of 1915, but her largest project was still to come.