Edith Wharton, one of the great writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, chose to live in Lenox, Massachusetts. This area of the western part of Massachusetts is known as The Berkshires. She named her home The Mount.
Wharton actively participated in designing and building her home. Built in 1903, The Mount presents a well-thought-out compilation of French, Italian, and English artistic traditions, but Wharton adapted the design to complement the 113 wooded acres on which it sits.
She wrote “The Decoration of Houses” (1897) with Boston architect Ogden Codman Jr., who then came on board to assist the author in designing her home with an eye for order, scale, and harmony. Wharton wanted practicality rather than extravagance, and wrote, “[Codman] shared my dislike of these sumptuary excesses, and thought as I did that interior decoration should be simple and architectural.”
The home’s elegant yet eclectic elements come out in the grand exterior staircase undergirded with local stone. And, although some marble is used, the main presentation is white with black shutters instead of a lavish exhibition of myriad materials.
Besides Codman, also assisting Wharton on the finalization of the exterior architecture was architect Francis L.V. Hoppin, from Rhode Island. He drew inspiration from Belton House, a still-preserved, 17th-century English country house in Lincolnshire, UK.
The Mount’s gatehouse and stable are Georgian Revival and were designed by the firm Hoppin & Koen to hold the author’s horses and carriages, and later her vehicles.
Wharton envisioned the grounds as a series of outdoor rooms. Her niece, Beatrix Jones Farrand, who became a well-known garden designer and landscape architect in the early 1900s, assisted with the grounds’ plans.
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A 30-plus-year writer-journalist, Deena C. Bouknight works from her Western North Carolina mountain cottage and has contributed articles on food culture, travel, people, and more to local, regional, national, and international publications. She has written three novels, including the only historical fiction about the East Coast’s worst earthquake. Her website is DeenaBouknightWriting.com