Stormfield

Stormfield was the mansion built in Redding, Connecticut for author Samuel Clemens, best known as Mark Twain, who lived there from 1908 until his death in 1910. Clemens derived the property's name from the short story "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The building was destroyed in a 1923 fire, with a smaller replica built at the same site the following year.

After meeting biographer Albert Bigelow Paine in 1906 while living in New York City, Clemens decided to purchase 195 acres of land in Redding where Paine lived, purchasing his first parcel there March 24, 1906, and buying additional acreage in May and September that year.

Clemens hired as architect John Mead Howells of Howells & Stokes, stipulating the house be built in the style of a Tuscan villa after having spent time in La Quercia outside Florence, Italy. Construction commenced in 1907; the project was nearly abandoned later that year due to cost and Clemens' misgivings about Redding's relative isolation, but Howells convinced Clemens he would suffer a financial loss on work already underway. The house was completed in June 1908, built on elevated land known at the time as Birch Spray Hill on the west bank of the Saugatuck River.

The exterior of the house featured a gray stucco finish and green-colored roof, with the foundation measuring 70 feet by 40 feet, flanked by wings measuring 20 feet by 18 feet. Howells designed the interior ground floor to include a central dining room, opening onto garden terraces and a fountain. In one wing was a drawing room opening onto an outdoor seating area; the other wing contained a billiards room decorated with caricatures of Clemens. The hand-carved mantel for the billiards room fireplace was a gift from the Hawaiian Islands. Twain had purchased a second, ornate mantel from Ayton Castle in Scotland that was installed in the living room; that mantel was damaged in the fire but restored, and is located today at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, where Clemens lived from 1874 to 1891.

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