J. Stewart Barney (October 12, 1867-November 22, 1925) was a New York City architect with a practice in other states as well. Trained at Columbia University and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he was a master of the Beaux Arts mode and had many prestigious clients. Beyond New York, he was involved in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg including Bruton Parish Church. He retired from architectural practice in 1915 to focus on painting. His only known architectural work in North Carolina is a grand country house known as “The Bungalow,” also known as “The Lodge,” built in 1913-1915 for Pembroke Jones at Jones’s Pembroke Park estate near Wilmington, North Carolina.

Pembroke Jones (1858-1919) was a native of Wilmington who became an immensely wealthy financier in New York and with his wife Sarah (Sadie) Jones was part of the city’s “Gilded Age” society and became acquainted with leading architects such as John Russell Pope. Pope, who became the Joneses’ son-in-law in 1912, provided designs for the family’s country estates near Wilmington. Also likely through New York connections, Jones commissioned from architect J. Stewart Barney an extraordinary residence on the estate he called Pembroke Park.

The story of the commission is told by writer Samuel Howe in his book, American Country Houses of To-day (1915), in which he featured and illustrated “The North Carolina Estate of Mr. Pembroke Jones” and identified J. Stewart Barney as the architect of “The Bungalow.” Howe wrote that Pembroke Jones had planned to build a “little rest house” in Pembroke Park, a “simple house” such as seen in books, to cost perhaps $1,500. But according to Howe, Jones was “interrupted” by his “artistic architect friend,” Stewart Barney, who assured him that he was losing a great opportunity for getting something just a little more expensive but ever so much more beautiful.” Barney drew up the plans, “and the result was a wonderful French pavilion” with a central living room, bedrooms in one wing and a kitchen in the other “fit to cater to twenty guests.” Howe speculated that “The doorknobs alone probably cost more than the bungalow of the book.” The name, “The Bungalow” was retained “to indicate the rural simplicity of the life which can be led there if one wishes to lead it.” Dominating the composition, the central block contained the large living room which extended the full depth of the house and was lighted by immense, arched windows front and back. When grand parties “alight with the glow of modern electricity” were held there, the house must have gleamed through the surrounding live oak trees.

The “Bungalow” was vacant for a time and burned in 1955. Pembroke Park was later sold and developed as a gated residential community, where Pope’s little Temple of Love still stands.

“John Stewart Barney,” Wikipedia.

“Airlie (and Lodge), Hugh Moreton Collection of Photographs & Films,”