A Novel Interpretation

Edith Wharton, the first female author to win the Pulitzer and an influential interior and landscape designer, would be pleased to know that The Mount, the home she designed in 1902, is being restored to its original splendor. The house was an autobiography of sorts for Wharton. It embodied her beliefs about living space and the relationship between gardens, landscape and house, and was where she wrote The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, two of her best-known books.

Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862 in New York City and grew up in a society that did not value intelligence in women. As a young girl she retreated to her father's library, where she read extensively in English, German, Italian and French on architecture and European landscape design and formed the vision that would lead to The Mount.

At twenty-three, she married Boston socialite Teddy Wharton and, in 1902, she and her husband bought 113 acres in Lenox, Massachusetts. With help from architect Ogden Codman Jr., Wharton directed her considerable energies into designing and furnishing her dream house.

She rebuked the Victorian excesses of the time and turned instead to the clean elegance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English, French and Italian architecture. With Codman, she had already published The Decoration of Houses, the book credited with establishing interior design as a profession, and The Mount incorporated her five principles: symmetry, harmony, proportion, simplicity and suitability.

Wharton, her marriage failing due to her husband's mental illness, had to sell the house in 1911. “She invested everything she had in this house and it broke her heart to leave it,” says Betsy Anderson, a member of the restoration team. Wharton spent the rest of her life in France, dying in Paris in 1937.

Faced with the daunting task of restoring a house that had no original furniture and lots of damage from careless tenants, the foundation hunted for clues. Scraps of wallpaper remained in bathrooms and bedrooms. There were remnants of plaster, letters and newspaper stories and, best of all, the many photographs Wharton took of the house.

For the furnishings, dispersed when the house was sold, the foundation came up with a creative solution: have today's designers imagine the rooms anew. The results are mixed. The abstract contemporary paintings on the wall in the dining room are passionately defended by some and passionately reviled by others. Would Wharton like the artwork, so different from the classical motifs she loved? It's impossible to know, but she would probably enjoy the debate.

Today the three-story, white stucco house shines again with the design principles Wharton held dear, starting with the plain entrance. The Mount begins with a stonewalled dirt courtyard that screens the main house from the noisy servants' wing and frames a simple wood door. A glance through the window above the door seems to lead the eye straight through the house and out a window on the far side. But it's an architectural illusion, which Wharton loved, created by a mirror on the main floor that reflects the landscape back to the viewer.

In keeping with the Italian concept of piano nobile, the important rooms of the house are on the floor above. The first floor is simply an entrance, leading to a staircase with an ornate wrought-iron banister that seems to float to the next floor, inviting each visitor to ascend to the heart of the house. Because the house is built into a ledge, the main, or second, floor is also on ground level. Here sits the foundation's prize: Wharton's books, purchased from an English bibliophile who kept the collection largely intact. The return of 2,600 volumes to Wharton's oak-walled library, where she and friends such as Henry James would read aloud, is the restoration's pièce de résistance.

A bright and airy drawing room, the largest room in the house, adjoins the library, with French doors framing a stone terrace that dips gracefully to the gardens below. Wharton designed the gardens to merge into the rocky landscape, framing Laurel Lake in the distance, though towering evergreens screen the lake today.

The next floor is devoted to bedrooms and Wharton's boudoir. Those two rooms have been restored, but the other bedrooms still bear the marks of the ill-usage they received before the foundation entered the picture.

More than $12 million has been spent to restore the gardens and forty-plus rooms. Items trickle in—a volume with Wharton's bookplate in it, discovered in a library in Morocco, is one of the latest—from people who have read of the restoration.

EDITOR'S NOTE  The Mount, corner of Route 7 and Plunkett Street, Lenox, Massachusetts, (413) 637-6900. Open daily May 1 through November 1 and on weekends November 7 through December 20. Admission $16 adults, $8 students, free to children under twelve.