He might not broadcast it, living as he does in bourbon country, but Lee W. Robinson is a martini guy. The evidence glints on the counter of his home bar: a sterling silver Tiffany & Co. vermouth dispenser shaped like an oilcan; an olive grabber from the 1930s with a button that releases a delicate silver claw.
“When you grow up in Kentucky, you’re weaned on bourbon, so the older you get you kind of taper off,” admits Robinson, a Louisville-based interior designer who maintains clients in New York City, Palm Beach, and beyond but who’s as Bluegrass-blooded as they come. Drink preference aside, he owns more than two hundred julep cups, gleaming vessels that cradle flowers, toothbrushes, and scented candles when they’re not beaded with the frost of an ice-cold beverage. He and his wife, Babs, are known for hosting multiday Kentucky Derby parties, and if you’ve already guessed that he owns a silver muddler, just multiply that by a couple dozen and you’ve begun to understand his love for entertaining and for a certain lustrous metal.
That metal glitters on practically every surface at Malvern House, the 1921 estate the Robinsons call home. Situated on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River, surrounded by gardens laid out by the Olmsted Brothers, the house belonged to Babs’s great-grandparents—scions of banking, rail, and ready-mix paint titans who rubbed shoulders with the Vanderbilts—and passed through the generations, along with the silver treasures inside: serving pieces from family weddings, a sterling pitcher honoring an ancestor’s world champion saddle bred, a pair of Georgian tea services.
Robinson himself hails from a family that marked birthdays with monogrammed silver, and he’s supplemented his and Babs’s heirlooms with auction finds— attracted, magpie-like, not to shiny things but to stories. “I love anything with patina, with a history,” he says. He recently acquired the dressing-table set of Marylou Whitney, a late friend of the family, and was delighted that it included a handheld mirror etched with AGV—for her husband’s grandmother Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt. Other items with provenance, to borrow a word he uses often, include a 1923 cigar cutter owned by the Prince of Wales, a cigarette case the socialite Slim Keith gifted a bridesmaid in 1949, and a pre–World War I crown that adorned a sculpture of the infant Jesus in a Prague cathedral.
Except for a few prized pieces, the Robinsons aren’t too precious about using their precious metal. “Some things get messed up,” Robinson says. “You can’t worry about it.” A salver once owned by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney—a tray perhaps wielded by a butler’s gloved hand—catches car keys and phones. Wine bottles rest on vintage coasters, and silver flatware goes in the dishwasher. “It’s either that or leave it in the vault,” he says, referring to a closet-sized room off the kitchen that stores pieces earmarked for entertaining.
The silver vault is a throwback to the house’s original service wing, which also contained a flower room,
a butler’s pantry, a larder, and a flurry of staff to answer the buzzers that still work today. (The current occupants mostly “buzz each other,” Robinson says with a laugh.) Behind glass and iron doors, the blinding quantity disguises the meticulous organization—a shelf for tureens, others for trays and candelabras, all lined with Pacific Silvercloth to prevent tarnishing.
Robinson sees the upkeep as part of silver’s charm, though a walk through Malvern House might prompt a quiet salute to the pair of cleaners who help keep everything spiffy. Rivaling the shine of it all is the specificity—a trove of superspecialized objects to thrill any steampunk fan. One cabinet of curiosities holds a pillbox shaped like a walnut, a tiny crab that doubles as a rouge case, and a pocket-size container of numbered silver balls once drawn by Victorian-era hunters to determine shooting order. There’s a side table devoted to antique snuffboxes. While Robinson enjoys these niche artifacts, he doesn’t necessarily romanticize an age obsessed with gilt and gadgetry. “I think people just had a
whole lot more time on their hands,” he says.
In a world of bottomless inboxes and constant pings, an engraved letter opener seems quaint. Still, it’s hard to leave Malvern House without finding a tiny and beautiful object to covet, be it a novelty bar toy, a silver-handled hairbrush, or the matching mirror, in which the face reflected may ask when you last slowed down to appreciate the ceremony of an everyday task.
Elizabeth Florio is digital editor at Garden & Gun. She joined the staff in 2022 after nine years at Atlanta magazine, and she still calls the Peach State home. When she’s not working with words, she’s watching her kids play sports or dreaming up what to plant next in the garden.
