Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
Lenox is a town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is in Western Massachusetts and part of the Pittsfield Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 5,095 at the 2020 census. Lenox is the site of Shakespeare & Company and Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Lenox includes the villages of New Lenox and Lenoxdale, and is a tourist destination during the summer.
The Breakers is a Gilded Age mansion located at 44 Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, US. It was built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family.
The Codman House is a historic house set on a 16-acre (6.5 ha) estate at 36 Codman Road, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Thanks to a gift by Dorothy Codman, it has been owned by Historic New England since 1969 and is open to the public June 1–October 15 on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month. An admission fee is charged.
Ogden Codman Jr. was an American architect and interior decorator in the Beaux-Arts styles, and co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became a standard in American interior design.
Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site is a historic house museum in Hyde Park, New York. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1940. It is owned and operated by the National Park Service.
The Staatsburgh State Historic Site preserves a Beaux-Arts mansion designed by McKim, Mead, and White and the home's surrounding landscape in the hamlet of Staatsburg, Dutchess County, New York, United States. The historic site is located within Ogden Mills & Ruth Livingston Mills State Park. The mansion, a New York State Historic Site, is considered a fine example of the great estates built during the Gilded Age.
Elm Court is a former Vanderbilt mansion located on Old Stockbridge Road, straddling the town line between Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and until July 2012 was owned and operated as a hotel by descendants of the original owners.
America's Gilded Age, the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, from 1865 to 1901 saw unprecedented economic and industrial prosperity. As a result of this prosperity, the nation's wealthiest families were able to construct monumental country estates in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
Vernon Court is an American Renaissance mansion designed by architects Carrère and Hastings. It is located at 492 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, on the Atlantic coast of the United States. The design is loosely based on that of an 18th-century French mansion, Château d'Haroué.
Chesterwood was the summer estate and studio of American sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) located at 4 Williamsville Road in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Most of French's originally 150-acre (61 ha) estate is now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which operates the property as a museum and sculpture garden. The property was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 in recognition of French's importance in American sculpture.
The Wadsworth Mansion at Long Hill Estate is located at 421 Wadsworth Street in Middletown, Connecticut. It is a 16,000-square-foot (1,500 m2) classical revival house situated on 103 acres (0.42 km2) wooded area. It is currently owned by the City of Middletown and is operated by the Long Hill Estate Authority. The mansion is the centerpiece of the Wadsworth Estate Historic District of 270 acres (1.1 km2), which includes the mansion's associated outbuildings, the Middletown portion of Wadsworth Falls State Park, the Nehemiah Hubbard House, and several barns and farmhouses along Laurel Grove Road such as the Harriet Cooper Lane House.
The Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) is located 20 mi (32 km) east of New York City on the former Frick "Clayton" Estate, a 145-acre (59 ha) property in Roslyn Harbor in the heart of Long Island’s Gold Coast. The main museum building, named in honor of art collectors and philanthropists Arnold A. Saltzman and his wife Joan, is a three-story Georgian-style mansion that exemplifies Gold Coast architecture of the late 19th century. In addition to the mansion, NCMA, which receives nearly 200,000 visitors each year, includes The Manes Family Art & Education Center, opened in 2017, as well as a Sculpture Park, a Formal Garden, rare specimen trees and marked walking trails.
The Decoration of Houses, a manual of interior design written by Edith Wharton with architect Ogden Codman, was first published in 1897. In the book, the authors denounce Victorian-style interior decoration and interior design, especially rooms decorated with heavy window curtains, Victorian bric-a-brac and overstuffed furniture. They argue that such rooms emphasize upholstery at the expense of proper space planning and architectural design and are, therefore, uncomfortable and rarely used. Wharton and Codman advocated the creation of houses with rooms decorated with strong architectural wall and ceiling treatments, accentuated by well-suited furniture, rooms based on simple, classical design principles such as symmetry and proportion and a sense of architectural balance. The Decoration of Houses is considered a seminal work and its success led to the emergence of professional decorators working in the manner advocated by its authors, most notably Elsie de Wolfe. The book was reprinted by The Mount and Rizzoli and in a hardcover facsimile in 2007.
The Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio is a historic house museum and former art studio in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The house and studio were home to American Abstract Artists George L.K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen. The studio was built in Bauhaus style in 1930 by Morris and his friend George Sanderson. The house was added in 1941, designed by John Butler Swann. The house and studio were entered onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.
The Foxhollow School was a private boarding school for girls. Founded by Aileen M. Farrell in 1930 on the Foxhollow Farm in Rhinebeck, New York. The school was moved to the Lenox, Massachusetts former estate of the Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt family. The school expanded to the neighboring property, The Mount. Miss Farrell was a British citizen and Oxford University graduate, who never sought American citizenship. She led the school for forty years until 1970. The school closed in 1976 and the property became an inn. In 2017, it was announced the building would be converted to luxury apartments.
The Codman Carriage House and Stable is a historic building located at 1415 22nd Street NW in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The industrial building was constructed in 1907 as a carriage house and stable for socialite and art collector Martha Catherine Codman, who lived a few blocks north in her home, later known as the Codman–Davis House. She commissioned her cousin, Ogden Codman Jr., an architect and prominent interior decorator who also designed her home. He designed it in a Second Empire style.
