The Robin Hood Cottage in Short Hills is Challenging the Rules of Historic Preservation

Bernhardt Muller is considered one of the first American architects to take a work of literature and craft it into a building. He is best known for what is called storybook architecture and some of his greatest works can be found in his hometown of Short Hills.

This evening, Thomas Baio, an architect living in a Muller-designed home at 1 Nottingham Road, will open the doors to the Robin Hood Cottage, which has proven somewhat controversial in the preservation world.

When the home was built in 1925, it was considered a reproduction of an actual thatched-roof cottage in Nottingham. The slate shingles, half-timbered walls, and high-pitched roof recalled the homes of the English countryside near Robin Hood’s fabled hideout in Sherwood Forest.

A number of Muller’s homes in Short Hills have landmark designation, however, Baio’s home sits just outside the borders of the nearest historic district, which is a sore point for many local preservationists.

In 2023, Millburn’s Historic Preservation Commission commissioned a study to designate the first new historic district since Short Hills Park listed on the National Register in 1980. It was to be called, rather whimsically, Merrywood Nottingham.

“Through history, it’s always been at the top of our list to designate,” said Alison Canfield, HPC chair. “This is one of the first planned neighborhoods in the state.”

The 35-acre tract planned community was called Nottingham and the 2023 architecture study even included a sales pamphlet from the 1920s. Baio’s home was central to that neighborhood as it served as the sales office for Nottingham’s builder Donald Leavens.

However, residents fought vehemently against the efforts to landmark Merrywood Nottingham. “I tabled all the designations for a later date,” Canfield said. “What we recognized is that a lot of education needs to happen.”

The same year as the study, Baio bought the home on Nottingham Road for $750,000. But after sitting empty for six years, it badly needed work. The lack of landmark designation gave Baio more liberty to renovate the property.

Baio considers himself a preservationist, but he isn’t a purist. Typically, the owner of a landmarked property is forbidden to alter any part of the home visible from the street and is required to use traditional materials, Canfield said. “We often say, ‘If someone came back from the early 1900s, would they recognize the home,’” she said.

But Baio, the former president of the Millburn-Short Historical Society, believes that preservation and modernity can coexist. The $1.4 million renovations, which included a dragon-scale-inspired zinc roof and large picture windows, reflect that philosophy.

“You can take a historic element, preserve it, and juxtapose it against modernity,” Baio said. “In Europe, they constantly put glass right up against the traditional stonework and they show the contrast between old and new in such a beautiful way.”

Canfield admits that had the home been landmarked, Baio would have been more restricted. “When Tom was redoing this house, a lot of people were upset — the same people who didn’t want the designation to happen,” she said. “But he took a difficult property and brought it back to life, so we’re grateful for that.”

In Howard Pyles’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood published in 1883, the protagonist would flee the unjust authorities into the Sherwood Forest outside Nottingham. The Robin Hood Cottage became a real-life refuge for Baio. He left Mendham with his wife, Monica, after a political ordeal that got national attention, largely because it involved one of Mendham’s most famous residents — former Governor Chris Christie.

In 2022, Baio, hoping to regain his seat on the Township Committee, alleged that illegal mail-in ballots had thrown off the true count. Two of those ballots belonged to Christie’s children.

Baio ended up dropping the lawsuit, but he still takes pride in the story as if he had stood up to his own version of the Sheriff of Nottingham. “I had a knee on my neck,” Baio said. “I told my wife, ‘We’ve got to get out of Mendham.’”

Along the way, Baio has become a champion of Muller, who left behind some of his best designs in Short Hills, including the cottage where Muller lived with his wife called the Elf House at nearby 2 Woodcrest Avenue and the Stone House at the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum. Baio can rattle off every resident who ever lived in his home.

Muller’s other best-known example of storybook architecture is called Opa-Locka, a development near Miami that originally comprised dozens of buildings with Moorish details taken straight from the pages of Arabian Nights. The 20 that remain are listed on the National Register.

While Muller is the original “author” of the Robin Hood Cottage, Baio believes he merely penned a new chapter. “It’s an important final chapter in the narrative,” he said.