Longue Vue — The Last Great American Estate Garden

Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans represents something rare: a complete collaboration between a great house architect and one of America's most celebrated landscape designers, both at the peak of their powers, for clients with unlimited means and genuine taste.

Edgar and Edith Stern, he a cotton broker and banker, she an heir to the Sears, Roebuck fortune, began working with landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman in nineteen thirty-four on their estate gardens. The gardens proved so transforming that the Sterns decided their existing house didn't do justice to the grounds, and in nineteen thirty-nine they commissioned architects William and Geoffrey Platt to design a new Classical Revival house in its place. It was completed in nineteen forty-two. Shipman had designed hundreds of gardens in her career and eight interiors; Longue Vue is the only place in the country where visitors can experience both her landscape and interior design together. The eight acres of gardens, the Palladian house, and the collection within make it one of the finest intact American Country Place estates, a style of living that the Second World War effectively ended everywhere else.