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The Great Barrington Historic House Tour Invites You Inside

By Amy Krzanik Many of us enjoy paging through House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Dwell and other design and decorating magazines looking for inspiration and basically ogling how other people live. Luckily for us, the folks at the Great Barrington Historical Society (GBHS) share our interests. On Saturday, May 2 from

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Kinderhook's Spring Home & Garden Day: A Breath Of Fresh Air

Speakers and presentations, clockwise from top left: Centerpiece by Isabelle Bosquet-Morra of Fleurisa; Thomas Burak of Thomas Burak Interiors; home on historic house tour; kitchen in house tour; tabletop by Michael Devine Home; Amy Crane of Amy Crane Color. Kinderhook, NY has its own fascinating history: a visit by Henry

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Community

The Dish On Dining At Downton Abbey

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By Lisa Green

Community

Groundswell at Olana: A Site-Specific Artistic Revelation

By Jamie Larson For just a single afternoon, Saturday, September 13, the unparalleled viewshed at the Olana State Historic Site will serve as both muse and canvas for the site-specific sound and transmission focused artwork that is Groundswell. It's the second installment of the unusual yet wonderfully balanced

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Historic House Tour Offers Glimpse Of Hillsdale's Past

By Amy Krzanik Interior design tomes are one way of getting a feel for how other people decorate their spaces. And history books offer a glimpse into the past, but sometimes photographs can be sparse. But to be invited into someone's historic home to look around at all

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Community

The Rock Star of Stockbridge: Daniel Chester French

By Dan Shaw Although sculptor Daniel Chester French is less well-known than his Berkshires neighbors Edith Wharton and Norman Rockwell, he was as influential as they were and more of a rock star. After all, French often worked in stone, most famously when he designed the iconic 19-foot-high statue (carved

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Why The Colonial Style Was Revived, At The Litchfield Historical Society

By Lisa Green Litchfield may look like the archetype of the perfect Colonial village — white clapboard Congregational meetinghouse, big white homes with black shutters, a pastoral town green. Yet there’s more to it than meets the eye, because the picturesque place you see now evolved from a Victorian setting.

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Guerilla Knitting Bursts On The Scene At Clermont Estate

By Lisa Green Sheeptaculars — those community-wide events in which large acrylic sheep are painted, installed around the town and auctioned off for a good cause —are so yesterday.  These days, in Rhinebeck, it’s all about wool and whimsy. Enter the Yarn Burst at Clermont State Historic Site. A cross

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New Deal for a New Generation: The FDR Library and Museum, Renovated and Rededicated

By Robert Burke WarrenFranklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, and his wife, Eleanor, in 1962, but modern technology at the recently renovated FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park comes thrillingly close to revivifying these icons. In its first major facelift since FDR himself dedicated the library in 1941, state-of-the-art,

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At The Not So General Mills Mansion: A Gilded Age Holiday

Once upon a holiday, the Mills Mansion — now the Staatsburgh State Historic Site, near Rhinebeck, NY — was home to some of the most exclusive Christmas parties in the country. This Downton Abbey-styled household, flush with Gilded Age cash and helmed by ambitious socialite Ruth Livingston Mills (portrait below by Francois

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Bunny Williams Opens Her House for Historic Holiday Tour

Bunny Williams is used to greeting hundreds of people in a single day as they troop through her famous Falls Village garden that she opens for charity events several times every summer. The New York-based interior designer lets visitors poke their noses inside her Adirondack-style pool house as well as

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Wilderstein: A Grand Middle Ground

Despite the brickbats of revisionist history, FDR was a great president and his wife Eleanor a towering public figure. But their taste in architecture and design were rather lacking in, shall we say, devil-may-care fun. In fact, this deficiency, if it is one, was quite deliberate. The statement made by

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