Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library

Henry Francis du Pont inherited both a fortune and a discerning eye, and he devoted his life to collecting the decorative arts of early America at a time when many still dismissed them as unfashionable. He bought entire rooms, paneling, mantels, and all, from old houses being demolished, and had them installed at Winterthur, so that his objects could be shown in period settings rather than glass cases.

The scale of his ambition was extraordinary. He expanded the house again and again to hold the growing collection, arranging thousands of objects with the care of a stage designer, matching a chair to a wall color to a piece of porcelain. What began as a private home became a teaching collection, and in time he opened it to the public as a museum, endowing it to continue his work of studying and preserving American craftsmanship.

Winterthur's interiors are its heart, a warren of rooms fitted out with period furnishings and architectural pieces salvaged from historic homes across the young nation. Walking through, you pass from a Colonial parlor to a Federal dining room to a Shaker interior, each assembled to show a particular time, place, and way of living.

The collection ranges across furniture, silver, ceramics, glass, textiles, and paintings, much of it made by American hands in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. It is a resource for scholars and students as much as a museum for visitors, paired with a serious research library, and it remains the standard against which American decorative-arts collections are measured.

Du Pont thought of his garden as another kind of collection, and he composed it with the same care he gave the house. Spread across a thousand acres of rolling Brandywine countryside, it is a naturalistic garden, one designed to look as though nature arranged it, with sweeps of color rising and fading in a planned procession through the seasons.

Signature areas carry the show at different times: a woodland of azaleas and native blooms, meadows and ponds, and quiet garden rooms tucked among the trees. A tram carries visitors through the grounds, and walking paths let you linger where the planting is at its peak. The effect is a landscape that feels wild and effortless but is, in truth, the product of decades of deliberate design.

Spring is Winterthur's grand season, when the woodland garden fills with bulbs, azaleas, and flowering trees in a long, unfolding display that peaks over many weeks. Summer keeps the meadows and garden rooms green and lush, a fine time for a leisurely tram ride and a walk.

Fall turns the estate's hardwoods gold and russet, one of the loveliest times to wander the grounds, and the house takes on a warm indoor glow. Winter quiets the garden, but the museum stays lively with exhibitions and a popular holiday display that dresses the great house for the season.

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