As the world of fashion paid homage to the life and legacy of polarizing fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld at the 2023 Met Gala and its accompanying exhibition, it appears that Lagerfeld’s influence will long continue with The Karl Lagerfeld Macau scheduled to open in the summer of 2023.
The Gilded Age Lives On At Wheatleigh In The Berkshires
07.08.2023 - 16:41 / forbes.com / Lake Como
In the Gilded Age, Boston and New York grandees flocked to western Massachusetts. They built scores of homes called Berkshire Cottages that were, in fact, cottages in name only. Many of these impressive villas and grand estates are thankfully still there, some thriving under new guises.
Built more than a century ago on a rise outside of the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge, and with Berkshire peaks in the distance, the property of Wheatleigh is today a Leading Hotels of the World member. If the look and dimensions of the Wheatleigh landscape feel Olmsted-ish, that’s because it was indeed graced by the hand of the legendary Frederick Law Olmsted. As was the norm for grand estates of the day, what is today woodland seen beyond the great lawn was originally farmland. Some things haven’t changed though: A commanding marble fountain in the horseshoe entrance is still there.
As for the home itself in which you’ll lay your head over several days, Wheatleigh was built in 1893 by the notable Boston architects Peabody and Stearns, and was added almost a century later to the National Register of Historic Places. From front to back and at every turn, it’s a villa imagined right out of Italy—decidedly Palladian, and part Florentine, or a slice of Lake Como, depending on how you choose to interpret its mien.
In a wise and welcome aesthetic choice for the hotel, designers Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown eschewed a lobby reception desk in their 2002 restoration. Much as those Gilded Age Brahmins would have, you simply enter under the weathered Parisian Beaux Arts-looking glass, wrought iron- and copper-canopy and the main hall opens right up. It might not look as it once did packed with chintz and tchotchkes and thick rugs from a fussier era, but neither did the 19-room hotel get burdened with any fancy schmancy modernization rethinking. The Tiffany stained glass windows, with their curious central bulges that counter cold weather contraction, are still there on the stairway.
If he was a lesser known of the Gilded Age railroad and banking barons, the property’s original owner, Henry H. Cook, is known to aficionados of those long lost Fifth Ave mansions for his fine home that stood for a mere 28 years at 78th Street, before it was replaced by a Duke heir villa. Cook’s daughter Georgie, with her Cuban (supposedly) aristrocratic husband in tow, inherited Wheatleigh, but by the time of her passing in the 1940s, the estate had moved out of Cook family hands.
Then things got really animated. Briefly in the fifties, outbuildings were turned into an inn and a jazz school, while a music barn hosted legends like Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, and Gillespie. Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson sang too, while Langston Hughes read poetry
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