Beauport National Register of Historic Places Listing

Henry Davis Sleeper started building Beauport in 1907 on a rocky ledge in Gloucester. He began with a small cottage. Then, he went wild. Over the next twenty-seven years, Sleeper, one of America's first professional interior decorators, expanded the structure into a chaotic forty-room labyrinth. The house sits right on Eastern Point. It is not a typical historic home. Sleeper used the space to showcase his massive collections of colored glass and salvaged colonial paneling. Take the Golden Step room. Giant windows look out at the harbor, framed by shelves of amber glass that catch the late afternoon sun. He grouped objects by color, not by historical era. It was a radical idea for his time.

But Beauport is more than a design experiment. It served as a social hub for a quiet, bohemian circle of artists, including Isabella Stewart Gardner. Sleeper was a gay man living in a restrictive era. His house offered a sanctuary. He sourced entire rooms from old houses slated for demolition, like the 1728 paneling from Whitehall, Maryland. This wasn't preservation in the traditional sense. Actually, it was stagecraft. This theatrical approach to design basically invented the profession of interior decorating in America. Prominent clients like Henry Francis du Pont took one look at Beauport and hired Sleeper to design their own estates. So, this strange house on the coast fundamentally shaped how twentieth-century Americans decorated their homes.