LIENAU, Detlef (1818-1887), a leading architect in New York City, N.Y. who was credited with extensive additions and alterations to the mansion of Matthew Wilks in Galt, Ontario in 1872-73. Located at the Cruickston Park Farm on Blair Road outside the town of Galt, Lienau transformed the house, which had originally been built in 1856, into an Elizabethan masterpiece for Wilks (1816-1899), a wealthy New York City business man who spent his summers in Ontario, and for his wife who was the granddaughter of John Jacob Astor (1763-1848). This property still stands today as of 2020.
It is particularly interesting that the design of Cruickston bears a remarkable resemblance in style and appearance to 'Bulstrode Park', Gerrard's Cross, Buckinghamshire, the mansion of Lord Edward Seymour, built in 1861-70 and designed by Benjamin Ferrey (1810-1880), a prominent architect of London. It is uncertain if either Wilks or Lienau had visited this country house before the design of Cruickston in Ontario was prepared in 1871-72. A full suite of 13 original architectural drawings for this, Lienau's only Canadian project, have survived, and are now held at the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University in New York City within the extensive Lienau collection of drawings.
Born in Uetersen, Holstein, Germany on 17 February 1818, Lienau studied architecture and engineering at the Royal Architectural School in Munich, and in 1842 he left for Paris where he studied architecture under Henri Labrouste, a leading figure in French architecture in the 19th C. He emigrated to the United States in 1848, and settled in New York City where he formed a partnership with Henri Marcotte, but their collaboration was brief, lasting only four years. From 1852, Lienau worked under his own name until 1873 when he was joined by his son J. August Lienau, and their office designed a wide variety of landmarks including commercial, industrial, ecclesiastical, institutional and residential buildings for wealthy clients in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and in Georgia. Lienau was credited with introducing the fashionable French mansard roof to the architecture of New York City in 1850 (for the Shiff mansion on Fifth Avenue), and he was adept at using French and Italianate styles for his residential work including that for “Elm Park”, the sprawling mansion for LeGrand Lockwood (1864-68) at South Norwalk, Conn., reputedly costing $2 million dollars and still standing today.
Lienau was one of the founding members of the American Institute of Architects in 1857, and later nominated as a Fellow of the Institute. He died in New York on 29 August 1887 (obituary American Architect & Building News [New York], xxii,, 17 Sept. 1887, 129; biog. and photographic port. in the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 1941, vol. xxix, p. 16-17; biog. in American National Biography, vol. xiii, 1999, 642-43; biog. H. Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects, 1956, 371). A full monograph on the career and work of Lienau was published in 2006 entitled The Domestic Architecture of Detlef Lienau: A Conservative Victorian, by Ellen Weill Kramer. Additional information on his residential commissions in Long Island can be found in Robert B.MacKay et al, Long Island Country Houses and Their Architects 1860-1940, 1997, 255. After the death of Lienau in August 1887, he was succeeded by his son J. Henry Lienau.