Toward the end of her life in Wilderstein, Miss Margaret “Daisy” Suckley had shrunk her domain down to one room of the Queen Anne-style mansion above the Hudson River. Once a close confidant and friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Miss Suckley lived a long and storied life, dying in 1991 in her hundredth year. Wilderstein was built for her grandfather, Thomas Suckley and his wife Catherine Murray Bowne, in 1852 as an Italianate country home by John Warren Ritch. The house was transformed and enlarged in 1888 by Thomas’s son and Daisy’s father, Robert.
The mansion was recreated as a grand expression of the naturalistic Queen Anne style, with a third story added and a romantic tower raised high above the grounds, providing some of the most exquisite views of the Hudson that can be seen. The family flourished in the years following this reimagining of Wilderstein; but alas, the family’s fortune did not. In the aftermath of the disastrous panic of 1897, the family moved to Switzerland where they managed to live far more cheaply (the mind boggles at the prospect of a Swiss habitation being sought out as a cost-cutting measure, but we suppose things were different in the past). The family returned to Wilderstein in 1907.
The family’s dwindling fortunes were uncomfortable for the family, but it meant the fantastic survival of the home’s historic interiors. When rooms became too shabby to be put to their intended use, as spaces to entertain polite company, they were closed up rather than being redesigned. This has left some of the most pristine Victorian interiors in an “average” American home to survive to today. Further, as Daisy Suckley grew older, her ability to access portions of the house diminished. These, too, were shut away. Bedrooms and hallways were closed off and abandoned, and, ultimately, preserved because of it.
Wilderstein is now maintained as a not-for-profit historic house museum, and can be visited today. The team working at the house has overseen extensive work cataloguing and digitizing a massive collection of archival materials, and is currently raising money to restore the estate’s glorious carriage house to its former glory as an interpretive center and events space.
We have had the great pleasure of working with the staff and trustees of the home a number of times over the years, and most recently we were able to arrange a private tour of the house for our friend Kate Wood of Worth Preserving and Scott Hanson, preservation consultant and author of “Restoring Your Historic House”. We were taken on a fabulous tour of the historic home and grounds. The house has a strict “no interior photos” policy as a protective measure for the fragile interior elements, and so we cannot share as many sights as we would have liked. However, the tour is well worth the trip and we cannot recommend a visit more emphatically.
