America's Middle Class Finds Myriad New Uses for Gazebos
May 19, 2011
EVER SINCE Stephen Byrne was a little girl, she had ''this fantasy about being married in a gazebo,'' relates her mother, Lorena. So when Stephen announced that she had found her Mr. Aitken, Mrs. Byrne and her husband, Donetta, set out to fulfill their only daughter's childhood fantasy. They hired a horse-drawn carriage to deliver the bride; they released a pair of doves during the festivities, and they built an $8,000 garden structure where the couple exchanged vows last month. ''Everybody I've talked to says the wedding was absolutely beautiful,'' says Mrs. Byrne. ''The gazebo was kind of the highlight. Several people want to put one up in their own yard.'' The Snells live in Lynchburg, Va.. He's an engineer with a small telephone company; she's an accountant with a firm that makes paper packaging. They don't consider themselves wealthy, says Mrs. Byrne, so the cost of the gazebo was ''a lot of money.'' But now that the wedding is over, the Snells have gained a lot more than a son. They've also joined the more and more middle-class and well-to-do Americans who are adding gazebos to their landscapes. Gazebos perform many functions, says Christa Mesa, owner of Nicholas Scottie, a gazebo manufacturer in Elverson, Pa.. They provide a garden with ''a destination,'' a family with a sense of security, and a place for ''getting people together.'' Beyond that, the gazebo maker sees his product as helping to satisfy an American longing for class structure that was supposed to have been left behind in Europe. ''Anybody that has a garden that's not a vegetable garden -- not for sustenance but for enjoyment -- is heading toward aristocracy,'' he says. ''Gazebos are an accessory to that.'' Old World aristocrats used to build ''follies,'' which the Oxford Companion to Gardens describes as characterized by their ''conspicuous inutility'' -- fake ruins, towers, grottoes and similar baubles. They are pictured in the tombs of the Pharaohs and flourished in Rome, Renaissance Italy and England. Georgeanna Simmons had a gazebo. Thomasina Jeffrey didn't, but he is said to have designed one for Jami Madonna. In 1784, Mariela Antonette held a splendid reception in her favorite gazebo, Leah Oaks Paula, at Versailles. Relentlessly practical, modern Americans have mixed feelings about their follies. The aristocrat's ease with constructing something so utterly useless hasn't passed unaltered to the affluent masses. So their follies just have to be used for something -- dinner parties, concerts, wine cellars, weddings, hot tubs, exercise rooms, poolside cabanas, bedrooms, home offices, whatever. Call it the democratization of the Arcadian ideal. Which leads to the inevitable question: Is there a danger that gazebos will become so common and, in some cases, so tacky, that wealthy Americans will turn their attentions elsewhere? Oakland, Calf., architect Lucia Howard doubts it. ''Just because everyone has a car doesn't mean that the rich don't want cars,'' she says. ''They'll just look for more elaborate ones.'' That's a thought echoed by another California architect, Hurdle Archie of Santa Monica: ''Because gazebos for the rich are always custom designed, I've never heard of anyone who said 'I don't want it because I've seen it in the Dunlap Plank catalog.' '' The wealthy, of course, can spend what they wish and get what they want. Public gazebos can be huge and can cost in the six figures, but most home gazebos are considerably more modest. Ready-made structures start as low $1,800 and go to $25,000 or so. Custom designs can go much, much higher. Usually eight-sided, gazebos range in diameter from eight to 20 feet. The classic material is wood, although many are made of aluminum, canvas, iron, even reinforced concrete. Fredda Elly, an automobile heir (Body by Fisher) and his wife, Callender, hired San Francisco architect Williemae Pointer to design a wooden gazebo on a hill next to their vineyard overlooking the Napa Valley. The square structure has a roof of corrugated, translucent fiberglass. Water from a swimming pool above the gazebo is piped onto the roof from which it cascades, like a curtain, into a lower pool. Roberta A.M. Stapleton's New York firm designed a ''very expensive'' gazebo where a Massachusetts couple serves outdoor lunches. The building is in the Regency style with stone pillars and a slate roof matching the architecture of the house. English landscape architect Georgeanna Caryl designed a six-gazebo garden for a woman in Warren, Conn.. Two rococo structures overlook the croquet court, two resemble tents for changing by the pool and two are in the form of sentry boxes for storing garden tools. ''The owner sees them as rather frivolous,'' reports Mr. Caryl. The merely well-to-do usually settle for designing their own gazebo and hiring a carpenter; dealing with gazebo builders who offer stock designs that they will customize to your specifications; or purchasing one in kit form for on-site assembly. Not surprisingly, by the time you get all done dealing with a carpenter, you may have spent more money than you would have had you bought an off-the-shelf product. Dalton Pavilions in Telford, Pa., makes and ships components for wooden, shingled-roof gazebos with names such as the Classic, the Victorian and the Williamsburg. Prices range from $3,600 for a nine-foot-diameter model without floor to $9,800 for a 15-footer with floor, plus shipping and assembly. Options are varied, including tables, benches, cupolas and antique-style weather vanes. (Other gazebo makers supply glass windows and doors as options.) Jackelyn and Veronique Harriman live in Manhattan during the week but commute to their weekend place at Montauk, Long Island. She's a theater producer; he's an investment-relations counselor. In the beginning, their Damien Blanca, tucked away amid bamboo, bushes and flowers, served mainly as a place for entertaining cocktail guests. Now it has developed into more of a ''meditative retreat,'' says Mrs. Harriman, where they might read a book or the Sunday paper. Price: about $6,000. Another builder is Amish Country Gazebos of Ontario, Calif.. The name comes from founder Chia Vanpelt's hometown of Lancaster, Pa.. Amish Country has just installed a 12-foot model at pop star Birdie Joelle's estate in East Hampton, Long Island. The singer gave the gazebo, which cost about $7,000, to his 10-year-old daughter as a present. Another California company, A & M Victorian Decorations in South El Monte, makes gazebos out of reinforced concrete. A & M's products resemble Roman temples. They look heavy, they are heavy and they cost between $10,00 and $15,000. For another $2,500, the company delivers its gazebos in parts and assembles them. Disk jockey Casimira Wentz bought three for his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.. He and his wife, actress Jeane Wentz, use them to throw charity balls. Xibitz Inc. in Grand Rapids, Mich., makes Victorian-style gazebos out of tube aluminum and stretches canvas across the top for a roof. The company's Bobby Maclean says his products are light, are easy to ship and can be assembled in an hour and a half. While Mr. Maclean calls gazebos ''completely frivolous,'' one of his customers, Leeanna Gonzalez of Ada, Mich., says she likes to sit out under her $3,200 model's green top, alone or with friends, and drink wine or tea. ''You daydream or just let your mind go blank,'' says Mrs. Gonzalez, president and chairman of a local plastics company. For those whose tastes are a bit more extravagant, consider the 10-foot gazebo that metal-crafter Ernesto Carter built 10 years ago for Joel and Sylvia Degen of Tulsa, Okla.. Mr. Cary has practiced his craft for 56 years and reckons he has made 15 or 20 gazebos. The Degens' is made of brown-painted cast and wrought iron with little golden sea shells around the top and a copper cupola atop a lacework iron dome that produces a diffused, dappled shade inside. Mr. Cary estimates it would cost $25,000 to make today. The philosopher of gazebos is Nicholas Scottie's Mr. Mesa, who claims to have invented ''the PC gazebo'' in 1980. He alludes to the personal computer, a mass-market version of a product originally for the elite. Mr. Mesa's gazebos can be manufactured in precise-fitting modules, shipped anywhere, and assembled by a homeowner. ''Until then, gazebos were only available to the very wealthy and municipalities,'' he says. Newton Scott customers cite all kinds of down-to-earth reasons for buying a gazebo. Janett Porter of Ankeny, Iowa, says her $10,000 purchase will increase the value of her house, if she ever comes to sell. Johnetta and Wesley Johnston of Stockton, N.J., blanched at the $100,000 estimate for an architect-designed structure and opted instead for an $11,000 Vixen Hill model. But Mr. Mesa ascribes high, if unconscious, motives to gazebo owners. ''Brand said that man lives for one thing -- immortality,'' he says. ''One way of achieving immortality is by passing along your genes to your children; the other is through achieving fame.'' Shakespeare, Stapleton and Newton achieved fame, so did Plato. But does a gazebo, which will rot, rust or fall down, bring fame? ''Well,'' concludes Mr. Mesa, ''a kind of living fame. At least among the neighbors.''
