New York magazine’s “Curbed” real estate section has turned its spotlight on Westport.
On the market for the first time, Berthold Nebel’s studio on Roseville Road “looks less like a house than a tiny English church with thick stone walls and a vaulted ceiling.”
Berthold Nebel’s studio. (Photo/Realty Plans)
It includes a great room at the center the sculptor worked; wings with a study, a small kitchen and basement.
“With one bedroom and one bathroom across 1,500 square feet, it may be an oddity in today’s Westport,” the piece says. It’s listed for $1.495 million.
When Nebel arrived in 1928, and won a major commission in 1928 to build a set of bronze doors for a building in Manhattan, he bought an 1883 farmhouse with 9 acres of land (including an apple orchard), and built the studio.
“The floors are reinforced. The ceilings are 17 feet high. A pulley system allowed him to wheel a heavy piece out from the main room to a terrace, through high double doors, where he could look at his work in daylight.”
The main space has a platform loft (left) and plaster casts Nebel made for architectural commissions. (Photo/Realty Plans)
Nebel — who came to the US from Switzerland with his parents when he was 1 — “left his mark across Manhattan, from the sea nymphs in the ceilings of the old Cunard Building at the foot of Broadway to the limestone reliefs at the Hispanic Society up on 155th Street.”
He was hired as James Earle Fraser’s studio assistant in Gramercy Park, New York City. Fraser designed the buffalo nickel, the “End of the Trail” sculpture of a Native American slumped over a tired horse, and the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the Museum of Natural History.
Nebel moved to Westport on the advice of Fraser, who already lived here. He soon built a studio much like Fraser’s. Nebel lived and worked there with his family, until his death in 1964.
The back of the house today. The central door leads to the basement level. (Photo/Realty Plans)
Here he worked on commissions that included 2 sets of bronze doors for the Museum of the Americna Indian, and the Museum of the National Geographic Society.
Among Nebel’s other works: a statue of Confederate General Joseph Wheeler for the rotunda of the US Captiol, and another of General John Sedgwick for the front of the Connecticut Capitol in Hartford.
Berthold Nebel, with his sculptures in his studio.
Six months before atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, Nebel designed a metal called “World Unity or Oblivion.” It shows a US soldier aiding a wounded companion. The reverse side says:
One of Nebel’s last works was called “Adventure.” It showed a man and woman on a farm horse, riding toward a new life. The renewal of the human spirit was one of his favorite themes.
“The Adventure” (Berthold Nebel)
Curbed says his wife Marietta “entertained the local art crowd with big Italian meals and fresh-baked bread. They had two children, and after Berthold’s death in 1964, their son took over the main farmhouse and cared for his mother.”
Their daughter — photographer Lucia Nebel White — was “a bit more bohemian.” She married an architect who subdivided the orchard and built 6 homes.
In the 1970s, the family moved into the studio. White lived there until her death in 2017, age 93.
“Her eldest son moved in during the pandemic and nursed the orchard’s last remaining tree back to health,” the “Curbed” piece continues.
“Selling the place was impossible until the siblings could figure out what to do with their grandfather’s stuff, which wasn’t the usual matter of donating a few boxes and holding an estate sale. One of Nebel’s major works was still there —
“The Wrestlers,” a huge plaster work of two sinewy men locked in combat, which had been his thesis as a student. Moving it out would cost thousands.”
It’s now been donated to the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. The few remaining pieces of art are also being removed.
“The Wrestlers,” being moved to Lyme. (Photo/Maria White Keogh)
“As for the house itself, ‘The interest is keen,’ said broker Kelley Long Thrush. ‘Buyers know you’ll never find this architecture here again.'”
(To read the full New York magazine “Curbed” story, click here. Hat tip Jeff Mitchell)
(“06880” regularly covers Westport’s real estate and arts scenes — and occasionally, their intersection. If you like stories like this, please click here to support our work. Thank you!)
Members of most of Westport’s non-elected boards, commissions and committees are appointed by the first selectman.
