I love the left-hand turn off ORLANDO Avenue in Maitland, just before a rusty railroad overpass, that spins me out of the traffic, through the looking glass and onto the shaded, brick-paved two-lane that leads to Winter Park. If ever a real-life thoroughfare lived up to its Monopoly-board name, it’s this one: Park Avenue. There’s a lazy row of vintage mansions, a short stretch through the middle of a golf course, a park, a train station, a rose garden and an elegant thicket of boutiques and sidewalk cafes. Today I bypass all of them in favor of a muddy construction site that has nothing more to offer than the smell of freshly turned earth and the sight of a backhoe at work. But if ever such a place deserved a Park Avenue address, it’s this one. I circle around to the far side of the work site to take a seat on a park bench next to a fashionably rumpled man with dark-rimmed glasses, thick white hair and a copy of Herman Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener tucked under his arm. He seems to be enjoying the view. Halfway through our conversation, he turns to me with a conspiratorial smile and gestures toward the far side of the muddy rectangle. “Soon,” he says, “there will be a wall right there. You can come in and the rest of the world will just... go away.” The construction site is at the rear of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art at the corner of Park and Canton Avenue. The fashionably rumpled man is its director, Larry Ruggiero. And the muddy lot he holds in such high regard will soon become home to a $5 million Morse expansion meant to provide a picture-puzzle evocation of one of the most fabulous art-deco mansions ever built: Laurelton Hall.

The eight-level, 84-room mansion was both a home and the culmination of a life’s work for Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the jewelry-store magnate. The younger Tiffany spent a lifetime traveling the world, designing the parlors of wealthy patrons and overseeing the creation of the luminous stained-glass lamps and windows that brought him international fame. He built Laurelton Hall in the early 1900s on a lush hillside overlooking Long Island Sound, filling it with his collection of exotic artifacts, decorating it with his favorite stained-glass windows and devoting the entire, elegant 600-acre enterprise to the theme that inspired him throughout his life as an artist: his love of natural beauty, and his quest to capture it. “I think he wanted people who visited Laurelton Hall to feel like they just walked inside one of his stained-glass windows,” says Tiffany scholar Richard Guy Wilson, professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia. The sprawling mansion fell into disrepair after Tiffany’s death in 1933 and was severely damaged by a fire in 1957. Its ruins were salvaged by a Winter Park couple, Hugh and Jeanette McKean. They protected their treasure for years, showing some of the priceless windows they were able to save in a small museum just off the avenue, and storing the larger architectural elements, like marble columns decorated with blown-glass flowers, in a warehouse. When they died, they left behind a multimillion-dollar endowment to provide for the establishment of the Morse, now home to the most important collection of Tiffany windows and artifacts in the world. The $5 million expansion, which is scheduled to be completed by this time next year, is meant to give visitors a sense of what it must have been like to step inside the middle of a work of art. “We just want to do right by Louis Comfort Tiffany,” says Ruggiero.

That effort has involved equal measures of imagination, scholarship and detective work. The salvaged ruins of Laurelton Hall ranged from the 10-foot marble columns to stained-glass fragments the size of a wallet. It took decades of research for restoration experts, working from fuzzy vintage pictures and written accounts, to begin reassembling what was left of Tiffany’s live-in masterpiece. The undertaking got a boost three years ago when the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, borrowing heavily from the Morse, staged its own six-month exhibit devoted to Laurelton Hall. But even the Met’s extensive resources struggled to capture the feel of Tiffany’s lavish enterprise. It was, after all, a country estate. Its mastermind went to great pains to open the mansion up to the great outdoors and to blur the line between the beauty outside and the beauty within. Many of Tiffany’s favorite windows depicted daffodils in bloom; he surrounded the mansion with fields filled with them. When he noticed a wisteria vine outside his dining room, he mirrored it with a set of stained-glass windows depicting wisterias in bloom. Tiffany believed that nature reflected the divine. It was the obligation of the artist, using nature as a guide, to follow suit. So it makes perfect sense that one key design element in the Morse’s evocation of Laurelton Hall will be a glass gallery that will connect to the museum and the Laurelton Hall galleries, giving visitors a sense of seeing the mansion from both within and without. The gallery will shelter a 32-by-18-foot terrace that was adjacent to Laurelton Hall, featuring an elaborately designed coffered ceiling supported by eight marble columns topped by bouquets of glass daffodils. Tiffany, who was fascinated by the beauty of moving water and the challenge of capturing it as an artist, surrounded Laurelton Hall with it. A 40,000-gallon water tank pumped an endless stream of water that coursed through a chain of fountains, pools and hanging gardens, then snaked through the mansion itself. The Morse’s exhibit will evoke that with a fountain and a channel of water just outside the glass gallery. A path of hammered metal, meant to represent the indoor course of that ingenious waterway, will snake through interior galleries. Those galleries will be filled with furniture, stained-glass windows, and hundreds of other artifacts salvaged from rooms that survived the Laurelton Hall fire. Refugees from a gilded era, creations of one of its most inspired minds, they’ll be together once again, at an address that suits their style.