CHILDREN’S PLAYHOUSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 191, 2 November 1927, Page 7

CHILDREN’S PLAYHOUSE

A WONDERFUL BUILDING In the 7,000 acres of ground which surround the Rockefeller home in the Pocantico Hills, John D. Rockefeller, junr., is building a playhouse for his six children, and surely it must be the most wonderful playhouse in the world. It is far enough away from the Rockefeller home to give the young folk the feeling that they are quite on their own, and it is to have a wonderful garden planted .round it. On the first floor there is a beautiful swimming pool, varying in depth from three to nine feet. Round this are the dressing rooms and shower baths and behind it a beautifully equipped little kitchen and pantry and a charming little breakfast room. This floor contains, too, a bowling alley, a dark room, a lounge and a

card room, which will contain every imaginable indoor game, besides cards. The playhouse will cost approximately £ 100,000. What a contrast to the plain frame building where the grandfather of these young people, now the-richest man in the world, spent his boyhood. Tie worked on a farm, making a little money by raising turkeys and climbing wearily to bed | in a room where the snow sifted in ! during the hard, cold winters. It is not easy to see Kij-Kuit, the Rockefeller home in the Pocantico Hills, for no chances are taken with possible Communists i and fanatics, and it is guarded like a stronghold.

The gardens are the most beautiful part of the place, the house having nothing to distinguish it, except its size. Some 200 gardeners are employed, and as the minimum wage of gardeners in the United States is £ 1 per day the cost of the upkeep of the grounds can be imagined. One path leads through the rose gardens to Aphrodite’s Temple cut out of the solid rock, where is enshrined the Venus which was sold to Rockefeller as the original work of Praxiteles. There are countless other statues, a wondrous fountain depicting the beginning of the world, and an avenue of orange trees transported from a French chateau, where they had been for 200 years. Every winter a steam - house is built over them!