In the Gilded Age Playground of Tuxedo Park, an 1886 Colonial Revival Mansion Asks $1.92 Million

A planned community for the wealthy, Tuxedo Park was developed in the 1880s as a country playground for the Gilded Age, with massive “cottages” nestled into the foot of the Ramapo Mountains in Orange County, N.Y.

Using family land and his tobacco fortune, Pierre Lorillard IV, along with his architect Bruce Price, began plotting out the vision for a sporting club and exclusive residential community in 1885.

The town would become a second home for New York City’s wealthy, who moved into homes designed by Price or other noted architects such as McKim, Mead & White, Heins & LaFarge and Delano & Aldrich. In the pre-World War I heyday of the community, the elite golfed, sailed, ice skated and held parties at the community club house.

Famously, the town lent its name to what is now classic evening attire, the tuxedo.

One of Price’s original cottages, 107 Tower Hill Loop, is now on the market. It was built in 1886, the date reflecting the fast pace of construction at the development.

In an interview with the Architectural Record in 1899, Price claimed that within six months he had designed 40 houses for the development. While many of his cottages at Tuxedo Park were Shingle Style dwellings with limited ornamentation, the Tower Hill Loop house is a quirky composite of Colonial Revival elements at an exaggerated scale.

The historic image included in the listing, originally published in the book Artistic Country-Seats in 1887, shows a clapboard and shingled facade, not the current stucco. (It has since been enlarged.)

The house is a veritable grab-bag of design elements: Large swags ornament the cornice, a Palladian window is oddly canted into a Queen Anne style tower, and the other windows, decidedly not symmetrically placed, include a scattering of broken pediment lintels as well as bulls-eye and oval shapes.

Perhaps it was this house Price was thinking of when he looked back in 1899 and noted that in country houses of the last decade “everything must be quaint and odd, rooms shooting off at unexpected angles . . . a mixture of all sorts of odds and ends.”

The house is often referred to as the Pierre Lorillard, Jr. residence — delving into Tuxedo Park is a bit of a Pierre numbers game. Pierre IV launched Tuxedo Park, and after his death in 1901 his son, Pierre V, also known as Pierre, Jr., took over as president of the Tuxedo Park Association.

If the building did house a Lorillard, it wasn’t for very long. By 1892 it was appearing on maps as the home of Robert Fulton Cutting. Pierre V had his own estate in Tuxedo Park, the grand Keewaydin, designed by Stanford White.

The 7,066-square-foot house retains some original Colonial Revival style details on the interior, including mantels, moldings and plasterwork.

There are nine bedrooms, four full baths and two half baths spread out over three stories. Outside, there is a pool with a small cabana.

Listed by Barbara F Du Pont of Ellis Sotheby’s International Realty, the house is asking $1.92 million. This may seem like a bargain to some Brooklyn buyers, but the yearly taxes are more than $50,000.

Ready to don your tuxedo and take a look?

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