A Little E&E B&E

Well, not really… E&E and I really didn’t B&E, we just took an unauthorized tour of an empty building!

After meeting up with Easy & Elegant Life and his family for a summer supper at my house (Toad had a puking puppy in the car, and headed back west towards home), I returned the E&E family to the hotel where they were staying in Baltimore. One of the reasons I’d recommended the hotel to E&E was the adjoining building, also owned by the hotel. It’s a former Masonic Lodge, and I remembered it from a previous visit to be quite extraordinary. So we wandered over to that building, expecting someone to stop us at any minute and question our motives, but luckily, they didn’t!  So E&E and I had the entire building to ourselves to explore. We walked down every hallway, we opened every door only to gasp in amazement at what lay behind it. Some rooms were Moroccan in their decoration, and others were Jacobean. Behind each door was a new adventure. We started out in some of the more mundane marble pillared rooms. Although they were quite amazing, as we went up, floor by floor, the rooms became even more ornate. I am guessing that when it was the Masonic Hall, the super decorated rooms were the ones which the public never saw. There were Doric, Ionic and Corinthian rooms, there were occidental and oriental rooms. The room above must be used for weddings, since the little room where the painting is, seems to be set up as a small chapel, with symbols of love all around the paneling. There were more coved and coffered ceilings than I could count, and each one was different.   I had remembered that the men’s and women’s lounges in this place are pretty amazing, and E&E and I discovered what we think is the quintessential bathroom for our friend Dusty. It comes complete with a French maid, a footed chest and a Baltimore chair. The ladies lounge was even more incredible with chandeliers, columns of several types of marble, marble sinks with rock crystal legs and more luxe that you could ever want! I think that it was voted one of the most amazing bathrooms in America!

We would up our adventure in the library, actually one of my favourite rooms because of it’s understated scale. I loved the glass doors on the book cases! And the urns stating when the building was originally built, and then when it was restored.

I am pretty certain that my pal, David Wiesand did a lot of the restoration work on this building. I’ll have to get him to tell me about it.

When we finally finished creeping around the building, we celebrated our adventure with E&E’s charming wife and a great bottle of wine.

Thanks to the E&E family for including me in your trip to Baltimore!  I know Connor’s well pleased with his new portrait! He’s having a gallery showing for all of his “babies” on the left!