Old Westbury Gardens

The land here was part of a stretch of Long Island's North Shore that, in the decades around 1900, filled with the country estates of America's wealthiest families. Historians call it the Gold Coast, and it later inspired the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Fortunes made in steel, railroads, and finance built hundreds of mansions across these rolling hills, many of them since demolished or converted.

John Phipps commissioned the English architect George Crawley to design both the house and its gardens as a gift for his English-born wife, Margarita Grace Phipps. The result blended English tradition with American scale. The family lived here for decades, and it is a mark of how carefully the place has been kept that Westbury House still holds the family's own furnishings, so a walk through it feels less like a museum and more like a home whose owners have just stepped out.

The gardens are the heart of the visit. The Walled Garden is a formal composition of clipped hedges, seasonal plantings, a lotus pool, and a columned garden temple, laid out on an axis so that vistas open cleanly from one point to the next. Nearby the Rose Garden and the intimate Boxwood Garden reach their peak in high summer, and long green allees of hemlock and linden draw the eye toward statuary and reflecting water.

Westbury House anchors the whole design. Built of red brick with tall chimneys and generous windows, it looks out over a broad lawn to a lake at the foot of the grounds. Inside, paneled rooms hold English portraits, antique furniture, and the comfortable clutter of a family home, and the scale is human rather than overwhelming. The house and gardens were conceived as a single work, and they still read that way.

Beyond the formal gardens, the estate spreads across broad lawns dotted with magnificent old trees, including copper beeches, lindens, and cedars planted more than a century ago and now grown to great size. Woodland paths and a rowing pond give the grounds a softer, more naturalistic feel, a deliberate contrast to the geometry of the walled beds.

The land also draws wildlife into a suburban corner of Long Island. Songbirds fill the trees, waterfowl work the ponds, and the mix of open lawn, woodland, and water makes for good, quiet birding. It is easy to spend an afternoon simply walking the grounds, sitting by the water, and watching the light move across the lawns.

Spring brings the first great show, with flowering trees, tulips, and the beds coming into color as the estate opens for the year. It is a fresh, green season and a favorite for photographers. Summer is the peak of the roses and the walled garden, warm and lush, with the long allees at their fullest. Concerts and evening events fill some summer nights.

Autumn turns the great trees gold and copper, and the estate takes on a quieter, more reflective mood as the growing season winds down. Fall color along the ponds is a highlight. Winter is the off season, and the gardens generally close, though the estate marks the holidays with decorated interiors and special events, so it is worth checking the calendar before you plan a cold-weather visit.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.