Chuck Royce to be honored for his years of historic restoration at home and beyond
By Anne W. Semmes
Next Wednesday evening Greenwich financier and preservationist Charles “Chuck” Royce will be honored by the Greenwich Historical Society at its annual meeting at the Riverside Yacht Club with the Society’s David Ogilvy Preservation Award for Royce’s dedication to the advancement of historic preservation and revitalization. The award will be presented by Society Honoree Trustee Peter Malkin, who will interview Royce in a “fire-side” chat about his remarkable preservations regionally and throughout the country.
“Its an honor to be presented this award by Peter Malkin,” says Royce. “He’s a fantastic preservationist.” Also special was being given an award named for his “good friend,” the late David Ogilvy.
Royce’s honoring comes as a historic first for the David Ogilvy Preservation Award to be given for preservation efforts that include historic sites outside of Connecticut.
As chairman and portfolio manager of Royce Investment Partners Chuck Royce has been recently recognized for his investment acumen, and now for his generous support of the Historical Society’s recent reimagining of its campus. But it was his restoring of Stamford’s Avon Theater in 2001 that appeared to have kicked off decades of historic preservation elsewhere, primarily in Rhode Island where he’d spent summers from the 1980’s in Watch Hill and nearby Westerly.
But starting in the 1990’s Royce was, during those Rhode Island summers, helping to preserve the Avondale Farm, part of the Westerly Land Trust, that would lead to his purchasing and restoring the Farm’s 18th century Colonel Pendleton House as the Royce family home. “We actually got married across the street from Avondale Farm,” tells Royce’s wife Deborah. “And then after we were married in 2002, we bought the house and what was remaining of a barn…And we restored the barn and brought a barn down from Canada…And then didn’t do much with the property in the years that we were doing the Ocean House.”
So, beginning in 2005 the Royce’s were busily restoring the historic but dilapidated 19th century and now five-star seaside Ocean House hotel also in Watch Hill. And lastly, in 2019 came the restoring of Westerly’s United Theater.
Further afield, there was the 2013 restoring of a Catskills classic turn-of-the-century Deer Mountain Inn with its mountain views, now a coveted getaway in the village of Tannersville, N.Y. The Catskills were Royce’s stomping grounds far longer than seaside Rhode Island. Living back then in Washington, D. C., Royce was looking for a second home, “which could be a really important part of your life,” he shares, and “I came across this wonderful place in the Catskills called Onteora, an artist community that had been started in the 1880s.”
Also drawn to the Catskills for decades was Deborah Royce. “We met there, not at the Deer Mountain Inn, but in the area. We have a house there, and we had done a lot of projects in the area, and we were having dinner at the Deer Mountain Inn one night and decided to buy it.”
“What’s most remarkable,” shares Debra Mecky, executive director of the Historical Society, “is that these are all buildings that very likely would’ve either been torn down or just eventually moldered away. They were all in very poor condition. They were great buildings of their time and era. I just have so much admiration for Chuck Royce in his commitment to save these great beauties.”
“There’s time involved here,” she continues. “These projects took many, many years of careful, tedious, loving work and care to restore. Obviously, the finished products are evidence of that, and the fact that they found viable uses for each of them, because buildings just can’t be preserved to sit there as museums. In each of these cases, they’re theaters, they’re world class inns.”
Mecky points particularly to the Ocean House hotel in Watch Hill that was first demolished and rebuilt though listed on the National Register of Historic Places site. “Not only did he save a building that was going to be demolished because it was threatened by development, but over 5,000 architectural elements were harvested and stored before the old building was destroyed to be reused in the new structure…so that when you walked into it, you very much experienced the old building.”
“It’s a beautiful hotel,” agrees Peter Malkin. “He took one of the last great hotels that had been along the beach there, really rivaling in a different way, Newport. But instead of the great Newport so-called cottages, that area was of wooden hotel buildings and some houses on a beautiful beach.” Having seen a model of the hotel early on, Malkin began taking his family there. “The service is extraordinary. The food is wonderful. The beach is beautiful, and everything is done at a really high standard. Since 2011, we have gone every year, first with our children, then with our children and grandchildren and now, with our children and great-grandchildren.”
What strikes Malkin most about restorer Royce is his modesty. “He is someone who’s not looking for recognition and is actually kind of shy about it all. But he’s done not only the Avon Theatre, which he and Deborah created together, she having been a movie actress earlier in her life before she became a novelist…He also redid the movie theater in Westerly.”
In Malkin’s fireside chat with Royce, he’s keen to question Royce as to what led him to be “so interested in preservation.” Was it that Avon movie theater, he wonders. “Obviously, it became a tremendous thing. Chuck has a philosophy of doing good with what he can afford. As he said, ‘When there’s something that has to be done that’s unexpected.’ he responds, ‘Well, I guess the children will get a little less,’ but he will go on to do it.”
