Americana: Farmhouses and Manors of Long Island

Product Description

Set between the sound and the sea, Long Island is home to some of America’s most intriguing country houses. This book highlights the best examples, telling the story of each through outstanding contemporary color photography. The dwellings, which began as 17th-century homesteads and 18th-century, high-style plantation manor houses, embody centuries of ownership and building activity―an aesthetic evolution shaped by both Dutch and English colonial influences and proximity to the cultural crossroads of Long Island Sound and New York City. These many-layered homes, both large and small, have anchored successive generations engaged in living well amid evolving American taste, each generation expanding, altering, and redefining them in accordance with popular trends and personal eccentricities. Representing the best of maverick Americana, their charmed interiors exude warmth, comfort, and familiarity and contain wonderful old objects and materials that will satiate all who hunger for old houses.

Book Description

This is an atmospheric lifestyle book chronicling a distinctly American aesthetic and architecture that will appeal to those interested in artistic interiors, architecture, gardens, the history of the American country house, Long Island’s fabled North Shore and vibrant East End; surprisingly, no book featuring color photography has been published which showcases the best extant
examples of these houses and interiors. This, then, is an insider’s view of an important, little documented aesthetic phenomenon.

From the Back Cover

“According to Horace, a picture is a poem (
ut pictura poesis), inasmuch as it tells a story. Kyle’s book on a subject heretofore relegated to obscurity tells the many stories of Long Island farmhouses and manor houses vividly and compellingly. Though his focus employs the long lens of looking back, this is no dry recitation of dates and places, nor a reveling in the dewy-eyed nostalgia of bygone times. Rather, it’s a collection of vignettes and musings, and through this exercise he demonstrates, with verve and vibrancy, how the past is always present–that far from being dusty artifacts, these places remain as buoyant and alive today as they were in yesteryear.” 

From the foreword by William Miller

About the Author

Kyle Marshall is a designer based in New York City and the Long Island hamlet of Locust Valley. He is the creative director for Bunny Williams Home and was formerly a furniture designer for Ralph Lauren Home. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design.