House of misery

You won’t find a grander monument to failed marriage than the Mount, the New England picture-book palace built by Edith Wharton a century ago. Wharton was a house and garden designer first, a novelist second. She wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897, almost a decade before she embarked on the novels.

Belton House in Lincolnshire, a Christopher Wrenesque gem built in about 1685, was Wharton’s model for the Mount. With its accentuated centre bays and wings, dormer windows and cupola, Belton is the inspiration for the brown country-house symbol on motorway signs. Wharton kitted out this distinctly English house with French shutters and awnings to keep the Massachusetts sun — stronger than Lincolnshire’s — at bay. The Mount’s front entrance and forecourt are French, too, borrowing from the Petit Trianon at Versailles. She added an American feel by painting the whole thing in Colonial Revival white. The white is particularly striking against the turning leaves of autumn, here in the prime leaf-peeping country of the Berkshire Hills.