Houses of the Berkshires, 1870-1930 (Architecture of Leisure)

Houses of the Berkshires, 1870-1930 (Architecture of Leisure) by Gilder, Cornelia Brooke. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780926494824.

Houses of the Berkshires, 1870 1930, chronicles the distinctive social and literary colony of Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Illustrated with over 300 photographs and floor plans, the volume surveys 37 of the great country houses, including Naumkeag, Wheatleigh, Tanglewood, Blantyre, and the Mount. The resort area s pioneer visitors, in the 1840s, were intellectuals: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the actress Fanny Kemble and the painter Thomas Cole, among others. Patrons soon followed, hiring the best architects from New York and Boston, along with some remarkably able local practitioners, to build magnificent cottages and elaborate gardens and greenhouses. "There are not many places in America that combine architecture, ambition and nature in such abundance," writes Samuel G. White, a great-grandson of Stanford White, in his foreword. This revised, expanded edition reflects new research since the original publication in 2006. With two additional chapters and almost two dozen new photographs, Houses of the Berkshires is an informative architectural history of the great American resort, an elegant photographic tour of some of the region s most beautiful houses, and an unmatched chronicle of this distinctive social, artistic, and literary colony and now vanished way of life.