Gatsby’s Party Pad Is Ridiculous, And So Are Its Real-Life Influences

The West Egg mansion of doomed hero Jay Gatsby is almost a character in its own right. Preposterously ostentatious, it’s a honey trap for just one bee: Daisy Buchanan. But since Scott Fitzgerald died believing his novel was a flop, nobody asked him which real places inspired him. Like the erstwhile James Gatz, Gatsby’s house is a pastiche of fantasies.

“On the one hand, it’s a sad, lonely Gothic house, but it’s also a house of great wealth and beauty,” says The Great Gatsby production and costume designer, Catherine Martin. “It had to encapsulate Gatsby’s extraordinary ambitions and his optimistic, romantic soul.”

Martin’s and Baz Luhrmann’s vision of the house in the film looks ridiculous, like a Disney castle.

That’s no accident. Disney’s fantasy castles actually share architectural DNA with the house of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination, and also with real-life mansions in Long Island and Europe. Who’s ready for a historical nerd-out?

The French Connection: Fitzgerald’s Renaissance Fairytale

In the novel, Fitzgerald describes Gatsby’s house as:

“… a colossal affair by any standard – it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.”

In Australia, town halls and other civic buildings are often built in the Neoclassical style with porches and Greek columns. That’s the ‘establishment’, old-money look of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s East Egg house.

But in France, town halls (hôtels de ville) such as Paris’s famous city hall are often built in a distinctive style known as French Renaissance. Best seen in the châteaux of the Loire Valley, it blends the turrets, crenellations and pointed arches of medieval Gothic architecture with the round shapes and ornamentation of the Italian Renaissance.

The look is quintessentially ‘fairytale’; in fact, Charles Perrault modelled the castles from his Tales Of Mother Goose (1697) on real-life châteaux he knew.

Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, popularised a ‘Châteauesque’ style in the homes he built for super-rich tycoons. And he wasn’t alone. During America’s late-19th century Gilded Age, there were so many grand homes in northwestern Long Island that it was dubbed ‘the Gold Coast’.

Doesn’t Matter Who You Are When You’re Moving Up To Alcázar

Around the same time, Ludwig II of Bavaria — you know, that eccentric German king — commissioned Neuschwanstein, a grand, romantic, faux-medieval folly that in turn influenced Walt Disney’s close friend, artist Herbert Ryman, when he designed the Sleeping Beauty Castle attraction (1955) at Disneyland.

Ryman’s second theme park edifice, Disneyworld’s Cinderella Castle (1971), borrowed stylistic elements from the Spanish alcázares (from the Arabic ‘al-qasr’ meaning ‘fortress, castle or palace’), especially the Alcázar of Segovia. Not all these castles were built during the medieval Moorish occupation of Spain, but they combined Gothic and Islamic design elements.

The Long Island mansion Beacon Towers (1917-18) is often claimed as the definitive ‘Gatsby house’. Displaying many fanciful Spanish flourishes and sleekly coated in white stucco, it was a late work by Hunt & Hunt, the New York architecture firm run by Richard Morris Hunt’s two sons, Richard and Joseph.

“Looking at images of Beacon Towers, there’s something that gives it the feel of the Disneyland castle, and Baz referenced that – the idea that Gatsby was building a fantasy,” Martin says.

Beacon Towers was built for Alva Belmont, a socialite, suffragette, and something of an amateur architect; at one point she owned nine mansions. Years earlier, while married to industrialist William K Vanderbilt, Alva had previously helped Richard Hunt, Snr to create the French-style Petit Chateau on Fifth Avenue.

She didn’t keep Beacon Towers long; she sold it to newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst (himself no stranger to fanciful castles) in 1927. He onsold it in 1942, and it was demolished in 1945, narrowly missing out on become a tourist attraction for the former GIs who were to popularise The Great Gatsby after the war.

Recreating A Jazz-Age Party Palace in Australia

Beacon Towers may have inspired the nutty, gauche glamour of Gatsby’s mansion, but the parties were at Oheka Castle, a French-style château perched at the highest point on Long Island on Cold Spring Harbor.

Even today, it’s the second largest private residence ever built in the United States. Its name is an acronym of its original owner, Otto Hermann Kahn, a German-Jewish investment banker and philanthropist, who hosted lavish, star-studded parties there throughout the 1920s. Celebs still get married on the estate.

But where to replicate such a place in Australia? The exterior scenes of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby were filmed at St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly, now the International College of Management. Construction began in 1885 in the Perpendicular Gothic style, and it opened in 1889. Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban got married there in the Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel.

The film crew coated the first two floors of the old seminary in fake ivy, and installed a fountain in the courtyard. The turrets were added digitally in post-production.

Gatsby and Daisy’s ‘Real’ Houses Were Much More Modest

But the location that may be truest to Fitzgerald’s vision of West Egg is King’s Point Estate. Fitzgerald actually lived nearby while writing the book, much like Nick Carraway.

Originally built in 1854 and named for lawyer and state senator John Alsop King Jr, this sprawling 20-acre property (which includes several houses and six acres of water) sits at the very tip of the point, with stunning 180-degree views… including east across Manhasset Bay to neighbouring Sands Point.

In 1900, baking soda tycoon Richard Church bought the property and renamed it The Point. In this relatively modest house, Church was notorious for hosting huge, debaucherous parties.

Later in the 1920s, Fitzgerald himself attended parties at the ‘real’ East Egg: Land’s End, a 1902 house on Sands Point. A graceful neoclassical mansion once owned by Herbert Bayard Swope, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and publisher of The New York World, it’s been left to grow dilapidated, until it was finally bulldozed in 2011 to make way for a new luxury gated community.

To end in Fitzgerald’s words: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She is the founding editor of online pop-culture magazine The Enthusiast and the national film editor of the Thousands network of city guides.