The Mount

Edith Wharton was born into old New York society in 1862 and became one of the most important American novelists of her era, a sharp and unsparing chronicler of the wealthy world she came from. She was also a passionate expert on design. In 1897, before her literary fame, she co-authored The Decoration of Houses, a book that argued for classical proportion, simplicity, and harmony over the cluttered fashions of the Gilded Age.

When she built The Mount around 1902, she got to prove her theories in three dimensions. She based the house on principles she admired in English and Italian architecture, insisted on light, symmetry, and a graceful flow of rooms, and treated the gardens as outdoor rooms extending the house into the landscape. The result is a rare case of a great writer's aesthetic ideas made physical, a place you can literally walk through to understand how she thought.

Inside, the house reflects Wharton's belief that a home should feel ordered and serene, with well-proportioned rooms opening onto one another and out toward the gardens through tall windows and French doors. The rooms have been restored and interpreted to reflect how she lived and worked here, giving a sense of the disciplined, book-filled life she led.

The emotional center for many visitors is Wharton's restored library, home to a large portion of her personal book collection, reassembled after decades apart. For a writer whose whole life revolved around reading and language, the library is as close as a museum can come to a portrait of her mind, a room lined with the volumes that shaped one of America's finest novelists.

Wharton considered the gardens as important as the house, and she designed them as a sequence of formal outdoor rooms in the Italian and French manner she loved. A grand allee, a walled Italian garden, and a French flower garden step down from the terraces, linked by hedges, gravel paths, and carefully framed views out to the lake and hills beyond.

Restored over years of careful work, the gardens today bloom much as she intended, and in high summer they are the highlight of a visit, formal in their bones but soft with flowers. Wharton wrote that she was a better landscape gardener than a novelist, a characteristic overstatement, but standing among the hedges and borders she planned, you understand the pride behind it.

The Mount is now a lively cultural site as well as a house museum, hosting a full season of author talks, garden tours, outdoor performances, and events that keep Wharton's love of ideas and company alive. Beyond the formal grounds, quiet woodland trails wind through the property, offering peaceful walks with occasional views over the lake and the surrounding Berkshire country.

The estate is at its most glorious in summer, when the gardens are in full bloom and the events calendar is busiest, fitting for a place built as a summer home. Autumn wraps the grounds in Berkshire color and is beautiful for the woodland walks. The site keeps a seasonal rhythm, quieter in the cold months, so it is worth checking the calendar and the garden's state before planning a trip.

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