The mansion was 84-room and sat on of land, designed in the
Art Nouveau style, and combined Islamic motifs with nature. The mansion was completed in 1905 and housed many of Tiffany's most notable stained glass works. On one visit to the Louis Comfort Tiffany mansion, Laurelton Hall, on June 4, 1916, Elizabeth "Bessie" Handforth Kunz wrote in the guest book: “Arabian night’s dreams vanish, at Laurelton a phantom has become reality, eternal.” The mansion was on the North Shore of Long Island, and had at that time 1,500 acres of woodland and waterfront, and was the location of a residential school for artists, the Tiffany Art Foundation, of which Bessie’s father, Dr.
George Frederick Kunz, was a trustee. Laurelton Hall housed a school for artists run by Tiffany and his
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation beginning in 1918. The Laurelton Hall grounds also eventually contained a separate building which housed the
Tiffany Chapel originally made for the 1893
Columbian Exposition and numerous Tiffany windows, and a separate art gallery building. Laurelton Hall eventually fell into disrepair in the years after Tiffany's death and was sold by the Foundation in 1949. It burned down in 1957. The estate cost about $2,000,000 to construct and landscape, and it was sold for $10,000. The majority of windows and other surviving architectural pieces were salvaged by Hugh McKean and Jeannette Genius McKean of the
Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art and shipped to
Winter Park, Florida, after the fire. A major retrospective of Laurelton Hall, ''Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate'', opened at New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 2006. In 2010 the Morse Museum announced that it was building new galleries at a cost of $5 million. The galleries were planned to have of space and display Tiffany work from Laurelton Hall. ==Further reading==