Landscape Information
Located in Nassau County on Long Island, this 200-acre estate was built as a wedding gift for the English bride of John S. Phipps, an heir to the U.S. Steel fortune. The house and grounds were designed by the English architect George Crawley between 1904 and 1906, in conjunction with Grosvenor Atterbury. The house itself, designed in the Charles II Revival style, sits on a gentle slope. The formal entrance, northwest of the house, is framed by a thicket of lindens that gradually exposes the mansion. Adjacent to the mansion is the elevated South Terrace, which overlooks a great lawn and an allée of hemlock, flowering dogwood and American linden that leads to former polo fields. Garden rooms to the east and west of the allée integrate landscape features from Mrs. Phipps’ family home, Battle Abbey in Sussex, England. Mrs. Phipps was actively engaged in planning the elaborate planting schemes for the Walled Garden and received assistance from Guy Lowell and Mrs. Charles Hoyer Millar. The north allée, intended for horseback riding, is flanked by rows of American beech. The meadows and woodland on the estate’s perimeter evoke the site’s agrarian past. Following Crawley’s death in 1926, White & Allom continued the development of the western edge of the formal landscape. In 1958 daughter Peggy Phipps Boegner established the Old Westbury Gardens Foundation and opened the grounds to the public, preserving 70 acres of the original estate. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
