Ten Chimneys was the summer home and gentleman's farm of Broadway actors Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, and a social center for American theater. The property is located in Genesee Depot in the Town of Genesee in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, United States.
Ten Chimneys was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2003, for the significance of its owners to the history of performing arts, and for its distinctive architecture and decoration.
History
Lynn Fontanne was born in 1887 in England. From childhood she wanted to be an actress, starting as a chorus girl in Cinderella in 1905. In 1916 she came to the U.S., and hit real success playing in Dulcy in 1921.
Alfred Lunt, Jr. was born in 1892 in Milwaukee, the son of a Wisconsin lumberman. He was interested in the theater from the age of three, and enjoyed summers working on his aunt's farm in Neenah. In 1906 Alfred's Swedish-born stepfather moved the family out to the village of Genesee Depot, where he practiced as a physician. But within a few years financial problems forced the family to move to Finland, then a Russian possession, to live with the step-father's family. Alfred spent summers in Finland, learning a fondness for the culture. During the school year he attended Carroll College Academy back in Waukesha, then started at Carroll College, where he majored in oratory, appeared in college plays, and designed, built, and painted scenery. In 1912 he left Carroll and headed east to join a theater company in Boston, where he eventually became a successful stage actor, achieving acclaim in Booth Tarkington's play Clarence in 1919.
Despite his successful, cosmopolitan career, Alfred remained fond of his childhood home in Wisconsin. In 1913 he bought three acres near Genesee Depot that would become Ten Chimneys. In 1915 he had the first section of the house built, described by a visitor as "one enormous room with staircases leading up to a gallery which had doors leading to bedrooms." Alfred's mother Hattie and his half-siblings lived there year-round, and he joined them in the summers.
Lunt and Fontanne fell in love in 1919 when they met backstage at a rehearsal in New York, and they married in 1922. The couple's first summer at home with Alfred's mother was strained and in 1924 they set about expanding the chicken coop into a cottage for themselves to live in. The resulting cottage has many details drawn from traditional Swedish farmhouses: corner brick and stucco fireplaces with sloping chimney wings, folk paintings (some painted by Lunt himself), and inscriptions in Swedish throughout the cottage. The exception is Lynn Fontanne's room upstairs, which is white on white, with a carpet of stitched sheepskins.
In 1923 Lunt and Fontanne appeared in their first play together, Sweet Nell of Old Drury. The following year they appeared together in the play The Guardsman, which was highly acclaimed and which they later made into a movie. Over the years they starred together in over 140 Broadway plays, and were considered the first family of American theater.
In 1932 Lunt and Fontanne swapped houses with his mother and sister, with Lunt and Fontanne moving into the main house and his mother and sister moving to the Cottage. With that, Lunt renamed the Cottage the "hen house."
Over the years Lunt and Fontanne continued building and developing at Ten Chimneys. In 1936 they added the L-shaped swimming pool and the cabana. In 1938 they began remodeling and expanding the house, adding quarters for the cook and housekeeper and extra living space. The design was a collaboration between Lunt and architect Charles Dornbusch of Loebl, Schlossman and Demuth of Chicago, who helped with most of the structures on the estate, including the cottage fourteen years before. In 1939 they added the metal gate around the auto court. In 1947 they completed the new chicken coop (designed with advice from a specialist at the UW Ag Department) and greenhouse, and the gatehouse. Also in 1947 they reconstructed the Studio, a traditional hewn-log building that was taken apart in Sweden, shipped to America, and reassembled for use as a rehearsal space. Flagstone paths and retaining walls were added later to tie the estate together.