Henry Davis Sleeper

Henry Davis Sleeper (March 27, 1878 – September 22, 1934) was an American antiquarian, collector, and interior decorator best known for Beauport, his Gloucester, Massachusetts, country home that is "one of the most widely published houses of the twentieth century." who later married Elisa Cushing. He was the grandson of Jacob Sleeper, one of the founders of Boston University as well as a clothier and manager of a real estate trust. Henry's education appears to have been by private tutors due to ill health as a child, and it is unclear as to whether he was ever formally educated.

Sleeper was much taken by the location and immediately decided to build a little further along the ledge from Red Roof. He purchased the land on Eastern Point in Gloucester on August 13, 1907. He constructed the house with pieces of old buildings, including paneling from an 18th-century house in Essex, Massachusetts that he used in his entrance hall and dining room. Clients could choose wallpapers, window treatments, or entire rooms to have reproduced in their own houses. Sleeper had a specialty in "Puritan Revival", the Jacobean-American architecture and decorative arts of the original American colonies, but his tastes and interests included French decor of several centuries and a great deal of orientalia. Sleeper decorated the (ultimately 56) rooms to evoke different historical and literary themes. While Andrew served in the battle zones, Sleeper crisscrossed the Atlantic with supplies and funds, and worked closely with the French military. France awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. He maintained a townhouse in Boston, which was published in Country Life in 1930.

Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2003. In 2008, due to new information on Sleeper's life emerging, the decision was made to acknowledge his homosexuality in tour guides of Beauport, "not to define Sleeper but to contextualize him."