The Met has installed a new porch, just in time for winter. It is enormous and luxuriously decorated, a hundred-year-old artifact the size of a house. It is Louis Comfort Tiffany’s famous Daffodil Terrace.

Or at least a faithful reconstruction of it. The real terrace belonged to Laurelton Hall, the magnificent Long Island estate that was Tiffany’s masterpiece, his museum, and his home. Laurelton and its grounds were destroyed by a fire in 1957, but the current exhibit at the Met has rendered anew the design and décor of its Daffodil Terrace. Also included in the exhibition are pieces from Tiffany’s collection of African, Asian, and Persian art, as well as a generous sampling of the glass creations for which he is best known.

A Thanksgiving Day review in the New York Times calls it “a strange and lovely exhibition” and concludes, “While Tiffany is available to us mostly in bits and pieces, objects like these seem to carry whole worlds within them.”

“Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate” will be at the Met through May 20th. It was arranged by Alice Cooney Freylinghuysen, curator for American decorative arts, who has also co-edited a beautiful catalog (Yale University Press 2006) for the exhibition.