Two Remaining Pieces of the Chateau

A Discovery

A carved oak overmantel and a wrought-iron chandelier, pulled out of the Castle in the Pines before the wrecking crews arrived — what they are, how old the carving is likely to be, and what happens to them now

For most of the last twenty years, the story of the Chateau La Boheme has been a story of subtraction. The knights went first — the two six-foot wooden generals, Liska and Veliky, who had guarded the dining room since 1928 and who were, by every account we have, genuinely of the seventeenth century. They were stolen in 2004, the year the Normandie Inn closed its doors, and they have never been recovered. Then the roof went. Then the failing wing, under a blue tarp. On May 16, 2022, the rest of Winnie Benedict’s magnum opus came down, and the pine barrens got a little more ordinary.

So it is worth saying plainly what this article is about: for once, something came back.

Two objects have been identified in private hands here in Bohemia, both salvaged from the building in the weeks before the demolition, both stored ever since and never publicly shown. The first is a monumental carved oak overmantel — the decorated upper structure that stood above a fireplace opening. The second is a wrought-iron chandelier, and it can be matched to a photograph taken inside the building. The chandelier has been donated to the Historical Society. The overmantel is going to a conservator.

Object One

The Overmantel

It is roughly seven feet wide and six feet tall. The surface is dry, grey-checked and soiled; several elements at the outer edges are broken away, and the left-hand return has lost a section of its lower rail. Structurally, it is sound.

Read from the top down, it is a textbook Northern Renaissance composition. A dentil cornice runs the full width. Below it sits a frieze of three panels, each holding a carved head: a woman’s bust in a plain roundel at the left, a long-haired female head ringed by a heavy annulet at the right, and at the center a bearded face flanked by outspread feathered wings. Scrolled consoles divide the three.

The middle register is the piece’s real event. Two large panels are each carved as a round-arched arcade with radiating voussoirs, springing from square blocks worked in a diapered lattice ground. The left arch closes on a grotesque mask with a wide foliate beard; the right on a many-petalled rosette above a tulip and a spray of acanthus. Both drop to a second, smaller grotesque at the base of the panel. Between and outside them stand four term figures — half-length human figures whose bodies dissolve into tapering, strapwork-decorated pedestals. Two bearded men hold the outer corners; two long-haired women, arms folded across the breast, stand at the inner divisions.

Below all of this, a dado of geometric strapwork panels is punctuated by lion mascarons carved as small corbels, each on a scrolled bracket, each with a slightly different expression. They are the most confidently cut passages on the whole piece.

The 1931 newspaper account of the Chateau’s dining room called its chimneypiece “Italian-style,” which was how writers of that generation said Renaissance generally. The vocabulary on this piece is more specific than that. Term figures, roundel heads, jewelled strapwork and lion masks in exactly this arrangement are the working language of Flemish and North German joiners, and of the English carvers who learned it from them.

Object	Carved overmantel, three registers
Material	Oak; joined and pegged construction
Idiom	Northern Mannerist; Flemish or Lower Rhenish
Date	Estimated c. 1600–1640, on style. Not yet examined in person
Condition	Dry, weathered, surface soil; losses at outer edges and lower left return; joinery sound
Source	Salvaged prior to demolition, 2022; private hands since
Disposition	Remains privately owned; conservation cleaning planned

Object record — overmantel

Dating the Carving

So How Old Is It?

Ornament of this kind can be dated reasonably closely, because the motifs came into fashion and went out of it. The whole grammar here — the term figures, the diapered grounds behind the arches, the round-arched panels treated as little portals, the medallion heads in the frieze — belongs to the Northern Mannerist style that spread out of Antwerp from the 1570s, travelled up the Rhine into Germany, and crossed to England, where we call its descendants Jacobean. That gives a broad working range of roughly 1580 to 1650.

Two details narrow it. The lozenge-and-jewel bosses on the term pedestals are at their height between about 1600 and 1630. And on the right-hand panel, above the rosette, there is a tulip — a flower that barely exists in Northern ornament before the 1590s and then becomes ubiquitous in the decades on either side of the Dutch tulip mania of 1634 to 1637. Put together, the best estimate this Society can offer is the first half of the seventeenth century, most probably between about 1600 and 1640, from a Flemish or Lower Rhenish workshop.

It is worth sitting with what that means locally. Southold and Southampton, the first English settlements on Long Island, were founded in 1640. If this estimate is anywhere near right, the oak was carved in Europe before there was a single European building standing anywhere in Suffolk County — and it is among the oldest objects ever documented in Bohemia.

One qualification belongs in the record, and it is a common one rather than a suspicious one. Large overmantels like this were frequently assembled: the carved panels genuine and old, the frame that carries them built later to fit a particular wall in a particular house. Whether the framing here is contemporary with the carving is a question for someone with the piece in front of them and a good light. The carving is the carving either way.

So the “five hundred years” reported in 1931 was generous by a century or two. But it was reaching for the right idea, and the Baron was not wrong about the important part: this is a genuinely early object, and it had already been old for two hundred years before anyone in Bohemia planted a potato.

Object Two

The Chandelier

The second object is smaller, more fragile, and more securely of its moment. It is a wrought-iron fixture built as an open sphere: a flat circular band, edged with a hand-worked rope twist, crossed by curved iron straps that meet at a central stem. Forged ball finials mark the strap crossings. At intervals around the frame sit candle sockets, each collared in a cuff of repoussé sheet-metal acanthus leaves finished in a soft grey-green. Slim flame-tip lamps are still in the sockets, and a length of cloth-covered wire is still attached.

Everything about it says American period-revival ironwork of the 1920s: the strap-and-ball sphere, the rope-twist edge, the deliberately antiqued verdigris on the leafwork, the candle sockets pretending to be candles. This is the sort of fixture a builder ordered from a catalogue or from a metal shop to hang in a room he had just finished framing in half-timber — which is precisely what Winnie Benedict was doing at the Chateau in 1928. Unlike the overmantel, it does not claim to be older than it is.

And then there is the photograph. Among the interior views the Society holds of the dining room is one looking toward the fireplace wall, tables laid with white linen, a fire going, the knight on duty at the right. Two fixtures hang from the half-timbered ceiling. Enlarge the nearer one and the argument is over.

The flat rim. The cage of curved straps closing on a ball beneath it. The sockets standing above the rim rather than hanging below it, which is unusual and is the detail that clinches it. And at the base of each socket, catching the light, the pale collar of leaves. It is the same object, photographed where it was meant to hang, over tables set for dinner.

That is about as close to confirmation as this kind of research usually gets. It does not date the fixture any more precisely than the 1920s, and it proves nothing at all about the overmantel. What it does establish is that one of these two objects hung in that room, and that the rust in the truck bed is Chateau rust.

Object	Chandelier, open-sphere form
Material	Wrought iron; repoussé sheet metal, verdigris finish
Idiom	American period revival, Spanish–Gothic manner
Date	c. 1920s; consistent with 1928 construction
Corroboration	Matched to an interior photograph of the dining room, Society collection
Condition	Heavy surface rust; leafwork intact; wiring original and unserviceable
Source	Salvaged prior to demolition, 2022; private hands since
Disposition	Donated to the Bohemia Historical Society

Object record — chandelier

2022 — The Weeks Before the Machines

How They Survived

When the 2022 renovation began and the structure was found to be unsalvageable, there was a short window between that discovery and the demolition order. The two objects described here came out of the building in that window, and have been in storage ever since.

It is worth being clear that this was salvage, not looting. The building was condemned, the interior fittings were headed for a dumpster, and the alternative to a porch lattice in Bohemia was a landfill in Yaphank. Every object that came out of the Chateau in those weeks is historical evidence we did not have on May 17, 2022.

Conservation and Display

What Happens Next

The chandelier has been donated to the Bohemia Historical Society and will be accessioned into the permanent collection. Its immediate needs are modest and non-negotiable: dry storage, mechanical removal of loose corrosion, a stable protective coating on the ironwork, and no cleaning whatsoever of the verdigris leafwork, which is a finish and not a fault. It will not be rewired. A fixture on a wall as an object tells the truth; a fixture on a ceiling as a working lamp is a liability and a lie about its condition. When it goes on display, the dining-room photograph should hang beside it.

The overmantel remains in private ownership and will be reconditioned.

The Record So Far

Timeline of the Find

1928	Benedict completes the Chateau La Boheme for Anton Boris Divis.
1931	The Suffolk County News describes the dining-room chimneypiece and the Baron’s collection.
1965	End of Divis ownership; the Normandie Inn era continues.
2004	The Inn closes; the two carved knights are stolen and never recovered.
2022	Interior fittings salvaged; demolition on May 16.
2026	Overmantel and chandelier identified; the chandelier is matched to an interior photograph and donated to the Society.

Sources: Bohemia Historical Society landmark file, Chateau La Boheme; The Life and Legend of Winnie Benedict; Suffolk County News, 1931. Dining-room interior from the Society’s collection; photographs of the recovered objects by Jesse Bennett, 2026.