Country houses for sale

OnTheMarket

An amazing home dubbed the 'American Versailles' has come to the market

It might seem borderline outrageous to liken a house – any house – to the great French royal palace at Versailles. But this vast home close to New York City does make a decent attempt at justifying the billing, as Annunicata Elwes explains.

Darlington - The American Versailles
Annunciata Elwes's avatar
By
published
in Features

A country escape for a railroad magnate, ‘praised by architectural enthusiasts as the American Versailles’, say agents, the indomitable Darlington is only 25 miles from New York, in Mahwah, New Jersey, in 12 acres of grounds, framed by mountains.

It covers 50,000sq ft of spectacularly lavish living space that, although modelled on a typical English castle, incorporates a number of different historical eras – for our money, Jay Gatsby springs to mind more readily than Louis XIV. 

(Image credit: Christie's International Realty)

The 58-room pad – the real Versailles has over 700, for what it's worth – overlooks the Ramapo Valley and has just benefited from a seven-year restoration by a skilled team that includes the wood carvers who enhanced the Italian Parliament and the Big Apple’s Ritz-Carlton and Waldorf-Astoria.

Its extravagant features are too numerous to list, but among them is a 15ft-high mural and a his-and-hers master-bedroom wing – yes, an entire wing.

(Image credit: Christie's International Realty - Photo: Evan Joseph Images)

There's also a great hall with a 30ft-high ceiling, wine cellar, cigar room, beauty salon, theatre, eight-car garage, pool, tennis court and, of course, a luxury spa with lap pool, steam room and sauna, massage and exercise rooms.

The Crocker Mansion in Mahwah, New Jersey, a 55,000 square foot single family home built by architect James Brite in 1908. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. Constructed of Indiana limestone and Harvard brick, the home is also named "Darlington."

(Image credit: Christie's - Photo: Evan Joseph Images)

Darlington is for sale via Christie’s International Real Estate – price on application, you can see more details and pictures here.

Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

Latest
You might also like
View More ▸