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AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



April, 1913 



'Wye House," an attractive country home in Garden City, Long Island, New York 



"Wye House," Garden City 



By Harold Donaldson Eberlein 

 Photographs by T. C. Turner 



EREDITY is a very real thing. It matters 

 not how much we habitually disregard it, it 

 matters not how much some folk scoff and 

 make light of its potency, it is a force that 

 has to be reckoned with sooner or later. It 

 not only affects us and our outlook upon life, 

 it also influences the styles we follow and even the very pat- 

 tern of the houses we live in. 



"Wye House," a singularly attractive and engaging home 

 in Garden City, Long Island, designed by the late Luther 

 Birdsall, happily unites in its make-up several strains of 

 heredity, tradition or whatever you may please to call it. 

 In its general outward aspect, and also in some of its fea- 

 tures within, it combines the traits of at least two older 



houses, one of them the ancient homestead of the occupants, 

 an ample dwelling built at Oyster Bay about 1663, the 

 other also a family house in the same place, scarcely less 

 venerable in age. Even the base of the sundial in its garden 

 of deliciously old-fashioned flowers was once a highwater 

 mark by the Sound. Its name comes from the older "Wye," 

 deservedly famous on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. 



The grounds of "Wye House" are bounded on the north 

 by a dense row of lofty spruces, pines and hemlocks while 

 beyond and high above their tops rises the graceful shaft 

 of the cathedral spire. East, west and south the outlook 

 is comparatively open and the view unobstructed over a 

 wide stretch of the dun-colored Hempstead Plain — it were 

 much better called Hempstead Heath or give^ its old 



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V£/?ANBA 



First floor plan 



Second floor plan 



