Staatsburgh: Stanford White's Beaux-Arts Masterpiece
New York
The mansion at Staatsburgh is one of the grandest Gilded Age houses in the Hudson Valley and one of the largest buildings designed by the architect Stanford White. Ruth Livingston Mills inherited this property in eighteen ninety, and she and her husband Ogden Mills, a noted financier whose father had built a fortune in banking and western mining, commissioned the firm of McKim, Mead and White to transform it.
Work began in eighteen ninety-five. White took an existing twenty-five-room Greek Revival house and expanded it into a sixty-five-room Beaux-Arts mansion with fourteen bathrooms, sitting atop a broad lawn that slopes to the Hudson. It was finished in eighteen ninety-six. The scale was designed for entertaining on the level of European aristocracy. Ogden Mills died in nineteen twenty-nine. His daughter Gladys Mills Phipps donated the house and one hundred ninety-two acres to New York State in nineteen thirty-eight as a memorial to their parents. It is now a state historic site open for tours.
