Wheatleigh: A Gilded Age Gift

In the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, the Gilded Age left behind a remarkable collection of summer cottages built by New York and Boston money, and among the finest is Wheatleigh, an Italianate villa completed in eighteen ninety-three. New York financier Henry Harvey Cook commissioned Boston architects Peabody and Stearns to design a sixteenth-century Florentine palazzo, reportedly as a wedding present for his youngest daughter and her husband, Carlos de Heredia. Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York's Central Park, laid out the grounds sweeping down to Lake Mahkeenac.

The countess lived here for decades, and the estate passed out of the family in nineteen forty-six. It opened as a hotel in the nineteen seventies and remains one today, a rare Gilded Age interior still largely intact, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.