A decade or so ago, the owners of the Pleasantdale Chateau noticed a shift in the wedding industry. There was a demand to have both the ceremony and reception at their event hall in West Orange. With only one ballroom on the premises, it was a challenging feat to pull off.
“The guests leave the ballroom and the Chateau has one hour to completely transform the ballroom from the ceremony space into the reception space,” architect Donald Fiori, principal at Heintz & Fiori, told the Planning Board in 2022.
That year, the Knowles family, who previously owned the Highlawn Pavilion, devised a plan to build their first major addition since buying the property in 1995. This week, Kurt Knowles led a small tour of the conservatory, completed in 2023.
Although the space is used for events, it certainly earns its name as a conservatory as the structure is surrounded on all sides with windows, letting guests admire the 40-acre grounds, which include historic gardens and a forest that the owners go to great pains to care for. The Pleasantdale Chateau became part of the DEP’s prestigious Forest Stewardship Program reserved for private landowners of woodlands.
When the initial awe of entering the new room subsides, visitors can begin to enjoy the minute details — from recycled elements to hand-crafted metalworks.
The metal chandeliers were forged by Zbiniew Lunicki, the resident metalworker (not many wedding venues can boast having a resident smith), and century-old roof tiles were recycled from the four-car garage that was demolished to make room for the addition. The exposed timbers were partly made from storm-felled hardwood trees on the property. Wood from the demolished garage was recycled as support beams for the wine press. Lunicki is currently working on a sculpture made from an out-of-commission 1930s hay baler.
“It was unrecoverable because it’s been ravaged by time and weather, but we’re trying to repurpose it as an art piece and use it to educate people about the history of farmland in our state,” said Keith Sly, director of public relations.
Most people walk away from a visit to Pleasantdale Chateau with both an admiration of the property and the ethos of historic preservation that informs the owner’s vision for it. That began from the earliest moments.
“When we approached the CEO of Allied Corporation to buy the property, we explained to him that we wanted it as is,” Knowles said. “We said “Please don’t have an auction and sell off everything. We want to keep it all original — from the art pieces to the tapestries.”
The home was originally the estate of Charles Walter Nichols, an industrialist who spurred innovations in waste incineration. Nichols hired architect Augustus Allen to design the Norman Revival home completed in 1933. Before then, the land was part of a Dutch Colonial farmstead. In 1963, the Morristown-based Allied Corporation — Nichols was a major stockholder in that company — acquired the property and used it as a retreat and training facility until the Knowles family bought it in 1995.
A visit to the Pleasantdale Chateau is a series of discoveries — and that is even more true with the conservatory. There are fascinating easter eggs hidden around the property from 16th-century mosaic tiles sourced from Seville, Spain to a holly oak sapling gifted from Florence’s Boboli Gardens. It is little surprise why the venue gets booked up years in advance.
“Most people see the gatehouse and have no idea of what goes on at the property,” Sly said. “There is always something else to discover.”
