The Receiving Gallery

The Receiving Gallery is just on the north side of the Antechamber. Once you step foot through the Beaux Arts stained glass grand entrance door, you have entered the heart of the cottage. In this gallery, HSH Mikhail greets all his visitors to his home. On your right is a mirrored door that takes you into the Bell Room; this is where the phone table and chair from the turn of the last century are kept with the telephone. Alexander House had one of the very first phone systems in Waseca. The phone calls coming and going must have been of the utmost importance to render it, its own room. The prints above the phone are original Charactures of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Sir Richard Owen. On your left is a walnut inlaid demi loon gallery table, and on it sits an antique Chinese Rose Medallion Bowl in between two cast brass sitting camels from the Middle East. Below on the lower shelf is a large hand-carved black alabaster bowl and two blue mouth-blown hand-painted enamel glass vases. On the wall above are two English oil paintings of gun hounds. In the center of the wall sits a small walnut Etagere with a bronze called Improvisateur by Ferrand from the 1800’s. 

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Further down the gallery, in axis with the Withdrawing Room and Ellipse Tower on the newel post, sits a spelter statue of a Jacobean Falconer, which is a statement to the Jacobean architecture of the home. On the right, just beyond the Grand Staircase, is a small sitting alcove and built-in bench once used to put on overshoes before leaving the cottage. The north wall is appointed with an early 20th-century German Black Forest Cuckoo Clock, a hand-carved 1800s English Barometer, and a small Ram-Horned dinner gong. The watercolor of Alexander House is an original by a local artist in residence, Grace Lord Galvin.