The Isabella Stewart Garner Museum, originally called Fenway Court when it opened in 1903. It was founded by Isabella Stewart Garner, whose will called for her art collection to be permanently exhibited ‘for the education and enjoyment of the public forever’. The building was constructed between 1896 and 1903.

I have to start off by saying I did not expect what I saw at Winterthur. I had initially thought it would be a nice gilded age house museum, where you tour and admire different rooms filled with paintings and antiques. Instead, what I experienced in the former home of Henry Francis du Pont, was an extensive collection of American decorative arts in 175 rooms with over 90,000 individual objects on an estate with 1,000 natural garden acres of rolling hills, streams, meadows and forests.

Beauport, also known as the Sleeper-McCann House, was the shingle-style summer home of one of America’s first professional interior designers, Henry Davis Sleeper.