Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Planting Fields

William R. Coe, an English businessman who married the daughter of a Standard Oil founder, purchased the former James Byrne estate of roughly 350 acres in Oyster Bay in 1913. After adding more property to make the estate more than 400 acres, and after a fire destroyed the original Grovsner Atterbury designed house, the Coe's commissioned the firm of Walker & Gillette in 1919 to design a replacement. The Coe's were already familiar with Walker & Gillette, they had been contracted to design the estate's stables, barn and garage. Click HERE to see Planting Fields on google earth.

The "Carshalton Gates", made in 1712, were purchased by Coe and installed in 1926 here after he had the road widened to accommodate their immense size.

The gate house (1926).

The main house is a Tudor Revival (1918-1921), done in an attempt to evoke Coe's English background. The interior is full of 16th and 17th Century wooden paneling, stained glass from the home of Anne Boleyn, and immense fire place mantles.




The view from the front lawn.

The Camellia House (1917-1922), designed by Guy Lowell. Today the estate is run as an arboretum, open to the general public. Coe was a collector and breeder of rare plants, and the estate continues to carry on the tradition. There are numerous gardens, nature trails, fields, rare trees, rare plants, you name it and Planting Fields pretty much has it. At first Andrew Robeson Sargent, an associate of Guy Lowell, was in charge of landscaping, but after his death the Olmsted Brothers were brought in. What is left today has to be one of the finest examples of landscape architecture on Lond Island.

The 'Italian Blue Pool Garden' (1918) and tea house (1915). This was originally a tennis court but was remodeled by Lowell and Sargent into its current incarnation. This area is currently undergoing restoration.

The hay barn (1915).

The stables, the Coe's took their horses seriously (1915).

Click below to see 'Planting Fields' as it looked in a 1966 aerial shot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

in case anyone is not sure of why the "carshalton gates" are named so, it is because they were orginally from carshalton park, surrey, england, i know this as i live 15 minutes from the park. the park was orginally around 92.8 hectares, but is now sady only a tenth of that size. it began to be sold off for housing development in 1892. there were deer in this park up until 1898. plans in the 18th century to build a new mansion in the park involved the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni who was chosen to design the building and carry out landscaping. only the orangery and grotto were built, although architectural drawings for the mansion were published. orginally it was to be buit for the scawen family.