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An important contribution to understanding the development of modern New York, focusing on elite domestic architecture--in particular the James B. Duke House--within the contexts of social history, urban planning, architecture and interiors, and adaptive reuse for new functions.

A NEW book due out this fall reviews the career of Horace Trumbauer, the Philadelphia mansion architect who built grand country places for the very rich. But he also created some of the most sumptuous town houses ever seen in Manhattan, and the author Michael Kathrens hopes that his book, ''American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer,'' will reclaim the reputation of one of America's most successful residential designers. The next year, Adelaide Douglas, whom Mr. Kathrens identifies as the mistress of J. Pierpont Morgan, used Trumbauer's design to build 57 Park Avenue near 38th Street in the Louis XVI style, and in 1912 the tobacco merchant James B. Duke finished his $1 million new house at 78th Street and Fifth, the most expansive and probably the best known Trumbauer building in New York. Set well back from the street, the three-story house appears to have only two stories. With eight bedrooms, it housed Duke, his wife and daughter, and 14 servants. Trumbauer died in 1938, but his office, under its head designer, Julian Abele, lasted until the 1950's, although the market for grand French-style houses was by that time extremely lean. Later, Trumbauer's reputation fell into the shadows for several reasons. The sophisticated French houses at which he excelled seemed irretrievably irrelevant at a time of aggressive modernism, without even the patriotic associations of the Georgian and Federal styles.

\"American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer\" by Michael C. Kathrens is reviewed.