A Visit to the Mount, Edith Wharton’s Berkshires Estate

The great writer was also a great designer and decorator of houses, and her beloved ‘cottage’ is a work of art.

O ver the weekend, I visited the Mount, the lovely Berkshires cottage — read “country estate” — that Edith Wharton designed and in which she lived from 1902 to 1911. Wharton (1862–1937) wrote The House of Mirth there, sitting up in bed, as well as some of Ethan Frome, a tragedy set in the Berkshires. Happy endings weren’t her thing. She was an elegant, canny, razor-sharp writer, and the Mount elevates the mind and soul.

Wharton is best known for her stories about love, hate, struggle, spite, deceit, and betrayal among New York’s old and new monied classes. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921 and was, in her day, the queen of short stories. Most of her 40-or-so books are still in print. Wharton was a grande dame, which makes her seem, here and there, too refined, too arch, for our day. She was, after all though not above all, from New York’s Jones family, so grand that “keeping up with the Joneses” refers to Wharton’s father’s clan.

To Wharton, the Mount was her great work of art. She created it from scratch with some involvement from her husband, and she did indeed have a husband, Edward, called Teddy. It’s a grand slam of an American Renaissance house, garden, and landscape, in Lenox in rural western Massachusetts. The Mount’s a homage to Wharton as a classy, smart, and courageous woman and to her writing but also to Gilded Age escapism and a revolution in high-end house design that Wharton abetted. The Mount, as a not-for-profit house museum, survived a near-death experience or two or three. That’s a tribute to couth and grace — Wharton’s, the staff’s, and the Mount’s donors.

It’s been open to the public since 2002 after a well-done renovation of the house and garden. It’s one of the jewels in the crown of a culture-rich part of the world along with Tanglewood, also in Lenox and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Clark Art Institute, 40 miles north in Williamstown.

The Mount’s a 17,000-square-foot pile set on what was originally 113 acres of garden, parkland, and woods with a sweeping view of a lake and hills. That view, still pretty and open from the wide, deep terrace in back of the house, is the one thing about the Mount that Wharton considered thoroughly American. It’s copious, lush, and pristine. Americans loved their big views and skies. We still do. Otherwise, the house is a little English, a little French, and a little Italian.

The Mount descends directly from Belton House, an English house built in the late 1680s. Wharton had visited it. Country Life, the English home and living magazine loved by aristocrats on both sides of the pond, had just featured it as Wharton was starting to think seriously about a new home. Like the Mount, it’s got three pavilions, the central one looking pinched. Set on a rise, the front of the Mount looks like a stern Greek temple, very tall, very white, and very symmetrical. Visitors enter a vast hall with rusticated stucco walls and a red terracotta tile floor. It’s meant to suggest a grotto.

Up a French Rococo-feeling staircase, not majestic but open, light, and airy, you come to a wide, deep gallery and the piano nobile, which is Italian-inspired. At the center is the drawing room, nearly 40 feet wide and flanked by the dining room and the library, a more exclusive space. Visitors can access the terrace, running much of the length of the back of the house, from those three rooms so the house has an indoor-outdoor feel. And the Mount wasn’t simply a summer place. The Whartons lived there eight months out of the year. During the winter, they either went to New York or traveled abroad.

The house was Wharton’s vision, but she hired the up-and-coming high-society architect Ogden Codman and, later, Francis Hoppin, while laying down Edith’s Law in every detail. Many of the Mount’s rooms seem to have a love affair with light. Ten-foot-tall glass doors open to the terrace, inspired by Italian villa terraces.

In 1897, as she was thinking about what would become the Mount, she published, along with her co-author Codman, The Decoration of Houses, a call to banish smug, fussy, suffocating Victorian design, in her view a kind of barbarism. She wrote Italian Villas and Their Gardens while the Mount was under construction. The Decoration of Houses is still a rich read and still has to be regarded as weirdly pioneering. The Mount is the book in the flesh, or rather, brick, wood, plaster, stone, and flora. As a house museum, the place handles this effectively. Visitors learn about good design without being beaten over the head. It’s the best teaching.

In the book, Wharton challenges American Victorian design for its “labyrinth of dubious eclecticism.” I don’t take this personally. My house decor is eclectic and a labyrinth but I’d call it cryptic rather than dubious, and Wharton, as far as I know, never set a dainty toe in Vermont. She’s hardly a minimalist though she does tend to think less is more. Wharton prescribes symmetry and logic, the annihilation of clutter, and a union of architecture and furnishings. Here she’s cutting edge and an advocate of Gesamtkunstwerk, the German, Austrian, and English Arts & Crafts concept that walls, windows, furniture, art, and textiles ought to be unified — or at least harmonious — in conception and look.

Her chapter “Bric-à-Brac” is a call to arms in a war against knick-knacks, trifles, bibelots, “too many things,” and “things out of proportion.” On the one hand, the chapter made me chuckle. I thought of Wharton, her ghost supervising a thousand dumpsters, each filled with Hummel figurines, decorative plates from the 50 states, Pez dispensers, and ugly lamps. I knew someone once who collected prosthetic devices, among other crazy things. On the other, when decorating it’s good to remember, as Wharton wrote, that “eye and mind are limited in their receptivity to a certain number of simultaneous impressions.”

Don’t expect to see the trappings of Wharton’s daily life at the Mount. It’s not a reenactment or a simulation, though there’s some of that. It’s more of an ambiance or an idea. Wharton, for example, didn’t collect art, so the paintings aren’t distinguished but rather evocative, baskets of flowers and fruit, or a lady in a garden, set in frame-like plaster wall moldings. We don’t know who painted them. They’re art for effect’s sake.

There’s next to no Wharton furniture, either. Photographs from her time at the Mount show comfortable, high-end reproductions. After she died, her things were dispersed but, at that point, she’d lived in France for 25 years, owning different houses and redoing each. The marble fireplaces in the drawing room and the dining room are original. As part of the restoration, the Mount hosted two designer events aimed at selecting period wall colors, settling on pale pink for the dining room, laurel green for Wharton’s boudoir, and a powder blue, cream, and lemon chiffon for other rooms. All were gleaned from The Decoration of Houses. Wharton abhorred dark, saturated reds, greens, and blues, the default palette in Victorian design.

Some of the rooms are used for small exhibitions. There’s a good timeline in one room and, in a long hallway, wall panels with thoughts on why Wharton is relevant in the 21st century. Sex and power, passion and self-control, and money and class are always topical.

“The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it,” Wharton wrote in The House of Mirth, and a wall panel in a room focused on her husband itemized the wealth and income of each. I’d never seen this in a house museum, though it’s tasty, handy information. Of the two, Edith was by far the richer. Between her inherited trust — in the millions in today’s dollars — and her income as a writer — $704,000 in 1906, in today’s dollars — Edith was doin’ dandy. Teddy’s mental collapse around 1910 is treated honestly. Wharton divorced him in 1913 but never felt any rancor toward him.

There’s also a group of wall panels on Edith’s comings and goings during World War I. Unlike most of her American friends, she stayed in France. She first reported on the war for Scribner’s Magazine but, as a refugee crisis ripened, she raised a ton of money for housing, a TB clinic, and a cooperative putting unemployed seamstresses to work.

The library, with dark oak bookcases and moldings, is the soul of the house. The shelves are filled with calf-bound books. They’re hers, collected over a lifetime, and the trove that nearly got away. Wharton might have been from a rich, old, not particularly intellectual family, and she might have been a debutante. She might have married in accordance with the mores of her tribe, to a rich WASP from old Boston money, who went from eccentric to insane. That said, she always sought the life of the mind. She was always a writer, mostly a frustrated, unencouraged one who didn’t publish anything until she was in her mid 30s. She wanted to move to the Berkshires for many reasons. In New York and in Newport, R.I., she lived near her despised mother. The Berkshires was a place for escape. In Lenox, Wharton had a social life among her upper-crust peers but it was both modest and under her control.

In one of the warmest and fuzziest moments in historic preservation, in 2005 the Mount managed to buy, and bring home, her library, a thing of beauty that, for decades after her death, bounced from place to place. It could easily have been divided volume by volume, and lost.

Wharton left part of the library to her godson, Colin Clark, the son of art historian Kenneth Clark, who was a close friend of hers. It’s safe to say that in watching Clark’s TV show Civilisation, made only 30 years after Wharton’s death, we’re experiencing a touch of Wharton’s voice and views. The Mount bought what Colin owned for $2.6 million from a British rare-books dealer. Expensive, yes, but for the sake of history and righteousness, the library had to come home to the Mount.

The immense, 2,700-volume library includes Hugo, the Brontes, Ruskin, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Vernon Lee and Walt Whitman, both of whom Wharton adored, Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Longfellow, Wilde, Trollope, Tolstoy, Proust, Renan, Stendahl, Shakespeare, of course, her buddies Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt, Goethe, Hardy, Bret Harte, Dumas, George Eliot, and Darwin.

For Wharton, and for many of us with serious accumulations of books, a library is a diary. It reflects shifts in taste, mood, and friends. It’s an index for the mind of a writer, artist, scholar, inventor, king, and, really, anyone who’s done something with that gray matter gifted from God. Wharton annotated many of her books as she read them, and many have meaningful inscriptions to her from their authors. My favorite margin note is a haiku she wrote in a book about Asian poetry. It’s about dogs, of which Wharton had many. “My little dog / A heartbeat / At my feet.” It’s not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it’s very sweet.

In 2008, the Mount, for all its lovely view and garden, for all its solidity, was at the edge of the abyss — of bankruptcy. The nonprofit was $8.5 million in debt to various lenders and had missed a payment to a local bank. The Wharton library purchase had only deepened and widened a hole dug during the Mount’s renovation.

Though having many virtues, Wharton’s work wasn’t made for the ’60s and ’70s, and not for the middle-class, striving, baby-laden ’50s or the wartime ’40s or the down-and-out, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” ’30s. She was out of style. From 1942 to 1976, a private girls’ school occupied Wharton’s former home, and after that it went to a developer. It might very well have been razed. Happily for the Mount, love of big money and lifestyles of the rich and famous made hearts flutter in the 1980s. Wharton was back, her novels were turned into movies, and a local nonprofit organized itself to buy and to restore the house, with a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and money raised through a fundraising drive.

To visit so unique a place is a breath of fresh air, which leads me to the garden. Wharton designed it with a bit of an assist from her niece, Beatrix Farrand, who created Rockefeller family gardens, but it’s almost entirely Wharton’s. Restored and renovated along with the house, it’s very pretty.

Wharton wrote that a garden doesn’t exist for the flowers but, rather, as ornaments in a total architectural assemblage. Much as a house shelters, so do allées of trees with paths underneath. The sound of garden fountains refreshes. Flowers soothe as do interior textiles. Wharton’s two gardens sparkle in the sun but are framed by green lawn much as moldings frame paintings in the house. Big projects in the Mount’s future are more landscaping work aimed at recovering more of the original view. Better walkways are in the works, too. A bigger auditorium and winterizing the visitor center, in a former barn, will allow more off-season programs.

The Mount’s open from May through October and got 75,000 visitors last year. It’s having a good 2024 season, too, exceeding its 2019 numbers, before the Covid mass hysteria. Most house museums and art museums are still clawing their way back. Its budget this year is $3.9 million, and it has gathered $10 million in endowment money.

As much as Wharton loved the Mount, and it was very much part of her, in 1911 she walked away, moving permanently to France and never seeing the Mount again. It’s sad and poignant, like one of her stories, and it’s part of the Mount’s story. Today, as in Wharton’s time, it’s exquisite and essential to a good, uplifting Berkshires visit.