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Chapter 1 - Long Island

Westbury House, Old Westbury, NY

                 

All sites in this chapter:
  : Westbury House, Old Westbury
  : Coe Hall,  Oyster Bay
  : Jones Beach State Park,  Oyster Bay
  : Sagamore Hill,  Oyster Bay
  : W. Bayard Cutting Estate, Islip
  : Benjamin Huntting House, Sag Harbor
  : Montauk Pt. Lighthouse, Sag Harbor


 

W hen John Shaffer (“Jay”) Phipps (1874-1958), financier and sportsman, married Margarita C. (“Dita”) Grace (1876-1957) in England in 1903, he asked her to move to America where Jay's father, Henry Phipps, was a partner with Andrew Carnegie and largest stockholder in Carnegie Steel Company (later U.S. Steel). Dita––daughter of Michael Grace, who with his brother William founded Grace Steamship Company––was so reluctant to leave her beloved England that Jay promised her a handsome English country house with fine English furnishings and a proper English garden. Phipps bought 200 acres in Old Westbury and hired the London designer George Abraham Crawley, assisted by American architect Grosvenor Atterbury, to design the house, which was completed in 1906. It is a magnificent Charles II-style country house evocative of stately 18th-century Georgian architecture––a three-story mansion of red brick and limestone with an unusual cluster of chimneys spanned by open decorative arches and situated in the center of the roof. Seventy of the estate's 200 acres are elaborately landscaped into a series of splendid English gardens. There are grand early-18th-century wrought-iron gates created by Robert Bakewell and imported from England, making them arguably the finest English iron gates in America. The lavishly carved and sculpted interior, today a house museum, retains the entire Phipps collection of English antique furniture, artifacts, sculpture, and paintings, including such master painters as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Henry Raeburn, John Singer Sargent, and John Constable. The house is so authentic and splendid that it is often a setting for Hollywood motion pictures, including The Age of Innocence.