The walls of “ Upwey ” are of local stone and stucco, with touches 
of half-timber work 
From one corner of the living-room opens the ombra, which 
displaces the living-room in summer 
“ Upwey,” a Distinctive Country Home 
MR. ERNEST E. CALKINS’ HOME AT ELMSFORD, NEW YORK—A GROUP OF BUILDINGS ON AN 
UNUSUALLY PICTURESQUE SITE MARKED BY INDIVIDUALITY OF DESIGN AND FURNISHING 
by Gardner Teall 
Photographs by Jessie Tarbox Beals 
T HE quality of picturesqueness 
in a Surrey cottage, a Breton 
farmhouse, or a Swiss chalet is much 
a matter of Architecture wedded to 
Landscape. This tendency, fortu¬ 
nately, has entered America, and 
our modern American country houses 
are coming to add the element of 
picturesqueness, almost extinct in 
the land when the nightmares in 
lath-and-plaster of 1850 were trying 
to banish the Colonial dwellings of 
our forefathers. 
American country house archi¬ 
tecture has long since found itself 
on a foundation of taste and good 
sense ingeniously welded by our 
now well developed appreciation of 
the beautiful, and our understanding of the fitness of things— 
of the relationship of any building to the site it has been 
designed to occupy. 
There is hardly a more successful example of such a country 
house than one may find in “Upwey,” the attractive home of Mr. 
Ernest Elmo Calkins at Elmsford, New York, built on the crest 
of a rocky wooded hill, and looking down over the valley across 
to the hills that flank the Hudson river. It is not a large house, 
but a wonderfully well arranged one, beside which stands the 
gardener’s cottage and stable, all connected by walls of massive 
native stone bringing the buildings into harmonious relationship 
one with the other. 
“Upwey” is distinctly an expression of the individual taste 
of its owner, and every line and nook and corner of .it indicates 
the careful thought that he has given to its conception. From 
northern France, and again from England he has brought back 
with him a suggestion of their architecture, which one finds in the 
delightful arched and recessed doorways, as well as in the over¬ 
hanging roofs. When the ivy has grown in great patches to cover 
From the ombra one looks out onto the tree-tops and over 
the valley beyond 
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