page_title: Henry Davis Sleeper
section_title: Beauport
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Davis Sleeper / Career / Beauport
caption_attribution_description: English: Interior view of the Octagon Room at Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House, as it appeared during Henry Davis Sleeper's lifetime. Watercolor on paper. Painted wood frame.
context_page_description: Henry Davis Sleeper was a nationally noted American antiquarian, collector, and interior decorator best known for Beauport, his Gloucester, Massachusetts, country home that is "one of the most widely published houses of the twentieth century."
context_section_description: In the fall of 1907, construction of Beauport, Sleeper's relatively modestly scaled Arts and Crafts-style house, began and was sufficiently finished to receive A. Piatt Andrew as a house guest in May 1908.  As property flanking Sleeper's became available, Beauport was expanded several times until 1925, often in response to events or important experiences in his life.  He constructed the house with pieces of old buildings, including paneling from an 18th-century house in Essex, Massachusetts that he used in his entrance hall and dining room.  He salvaged Gothic windows from a church, various fireplaces and doorways from homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and a 3 and one-eight inch thick "Indian-repelling door" from Deerfield, Massachusetts.
  Beauport served as Sleeper's escape, a backdrop for summer parties, and became not only a home, but a major showcase for Sleeper's interior design and decoration business.  Clients could choose wallpapers, window treatments, or entire rooms to have reproduced in their own houses.  Sleeper had a specialty in "Puritan Revival", the Jacobean-American architecture and decorative arts of the original American colonies, but his tastes and interests included French decor of several centuries and a great deal of orientalia.  Sleeper decorated the (ultimately 56) rooms to evoke different historical and literary themes.
caption: Octagon Room, Beauport, Sleeper–McCann House, 1928
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