The James Merrill House Visitors Center​
This space, once home to Doug Radicioni’s beloved Village Barbershop for nearly 50 years, has been thoughtfully renovated to serve as both a Visitors Center and an administrative hub for the James Merrill House.
Today, the Visitors Center hosts community events celebrating poets and writers, offers a curated selection of books by James Merrill and our past writers-in-residence, and features other unique items for sale. Visitors can also catch a glimpse of the iconic dining room where Merrill and Jackson once communed with the spirits during their famed Ouija board sessions.
Hours:
Thursdays 1-4pm
Saturdays 11am-3pm
CURRENT EXHIBIT
James Merrill's World: The Stonington Circle
James Merrill’s World: The Stonington Circle invites visitors into the vibrant creative community that surrounded poet James Merrill during his years in Stonington. This intimate exhibition explores the friendships and collaborations among Merrill, his lifelong partner David Jackson, Robert and Isabel Morse, Grace Stone, and her daughter Eleanor Perenyi.
The Surly Temple by Robert Morse
Together, the six friends shared an artistic bond that shaped Merrill’s life and work. The group’s dynamic spirit is captured in Robert Morse’s painting The Surly Temple, which portrays all six members. Through photographs, letters, and personal objects drawn from the James Merrill House archives and special collections across the country, the exhibition reveals the warmth, humor, and creative energy that defined Merrill’s world.
PAST EXHIBITS
James Merrill's World: fans and clouds and bats––
In the early 1970s, James Merrill and his partner David Jackson decided the old wallpaper in the sitting room of their apartment at 107 Water Street "had to go." An old friend, Hubbell Pierce, whom they knew as a cocktail lounge crooner of Cole Porter songs, had taken up wallpaper design.
One evening after a soufflé dinner, the three men had an idea for a fantastical new wallpaper, taking the theme of fans and clouds and bats from the images in their old Chinese carpet. After commissioning Pierce to make it, Merrill and Jackson returned from a winter in Greece to find the extravagantly weird, hand-printed wallpaper, named "Summer Palace," installed on the walls of the third-floor parlor.