This Gilded Age Berkshire estate hides a blue staircase in its garden

Naumkeag’s famous steps are just the start

Stockbridge, Massachusetts, sits in the Berkshire Hills, and on a hillside above town, eight acres of terraced gardens step down through woods, meadow, and pasture.

Naumkeag is a National Historic Landmark, and it doesn’t look like anything else in New England. The house alone would be worth the trip, but the gardens are what people come back for.

One feature in particular stops nearly everyone cold. You’ll know it the moment you round the corner.

A summer cottage with 44 rooms

New York lawyer Joseph Choate built Naumkeag in the 1880s as his family’s summer home.

Architect Stanford White designed it in the Shingle style, with a wood-shingled exterior, brick and stone towers, and gables pushing up at every angle.

When Choate’s daughter Mabel inherited the place, she spent the next several decades reshaping the grounds with landscape architect Fletcher Steele.

Their collaboration ran about 30 years, and what they built together turned a family retreat into one of the most important garden estates in the country.

A recent multi-year restoration brought the grounds back to what they originally looked like.

Walk down the Blue Steps toward the cutting garden

Concrete stairs cut down a steep section of the hillside, flanked on both sides by white birch trees.

The pale trunks mirror the white railings, and a water channel with blue fountain pools runs alongside the steps all the way down.

Fletcher Steele built them so Mabel could walk comfortably to her cutting garden without fighting the slope. Today, the Blue Steps rank among the most recognized images in American garden design.

In photographs they look almost unreal. Standing at the top, looking down through the birches, they look even better.

Start in the Afternoon Garden, right off the house

The first garden Steele designed at Naumkeag sits just outside a side door of the house, and it works like a room with no roof. Brightly painted Venetian gondola poles ring the perimeter.

Clipped boxwood wraps around a small pool at the center. Look out from here and you’ll see Monument Mountain rising in the distance.

It’s a compact space, but the poles give it a showiness that catches you off guard. This is where Steele started, and you can see in it the confidence that would define everything that followed.

Step through the moon gate into the Chinese garden

Set in one corner of the property, a round opening cut into a brick wall leads you into the walled Chinese garden Mabel built after traveling through Asia.

Nine ginkgo trees grow inside, along with broad-leaved butterburr plants that spread low to the ground. A stone dragon relief decorates one wall, and a Chinese-style pagoda anchors the far end.

It’s one of the quieter sections of the estate, set apart from the more open terraces. The enclosure gives it a completely different feel from the rest of the grounds.

Follow the serpentine curves of the Rose Garden

Pink gravel paths wind through the Rose Garden in long, snaking curves, and the shapes read best from the terraces above.

Roses in red, orange and yellow were part of the original planting, sometimes edged with purple salvia, sometimes giving way to tulips in spring.

Steele drew these beds with loose, flowing lines that move the eye from one end to the other without stopping.

The garden doesn’t announce itself the way the Blue Steps do, but once you’re looking down at those curving paths from the upper terrace, the design makes perfect sense.

See the tree peonies on the terraced hillside

Below the house, a steep slope that could have gone to waste instead became a series of planting terraces.

Mabel filled them with Chinese and Japanese tree peonies, the woody kind that come back year after year and grow taller than most people expect.

When they bloom, usually in May, you see them best from the lawn below where the terraces stack up the hillside.

Steele turned a problem slope into one of the garden’s most dramatic moments, and the peonies themselves do the rest.

Walk the long allées for sweeping Berkshire views

Two tree-lined walks run through the property, and both give you room to breathe.

The Linden Walk, laid out before Steele ever arrived, was brought back to life when dozens of linden trees were replanted along its length.

The Arborvitae Walk runs a different line through the grounds, shaded and quiet. The South Lawn curves along the bottom of the formal gardens.

On a clear day, standing anywhere along these walks, you can see across the Berkshire Hills and down toward the Housatonic River Valley.

Find the art that Steele tucked into the landscape

A bronze sculpture called “Young Faun with Heron” stands at one of the overlooks, watching the view the same way you do.

Steele’s approach throughout the grounds was to use everyday materials, concrete, brick, wood, paint, and to avoid copying European models or importing marble.

Many of the features blend so naturally into the hillside that you have to look twice to notice them. He borrowed ideas from Italy, China and other places Mabel traveled, then made them fit the Massachusetts landscape.

The result feels deliberate without feeling forced.

Tour the Gilded Age rooms inside the house

The exterior gives you plenty to look at: shingled walls, stone and brick towers, a wide porch, gables stacked up along the roofline.

Inside, the house still holds the family’s original furnishings. On select dates, a one-hour guided tour takes you through the main living and entertaining rooms.

The tour explains how the household ran during the Gilded Age and what life looked like for a family wealthy enough to spend summers in a 44-room cottage.

It adds a layer to the visit that the gardens alone can’t give you.

Come back in every season for something different

Spring brings the Daffodil and Tulip Festival, with designer tulips in shapes and colors that fill the beds across the property.

Fall means the Incredible Pumpkin Show, when more than a thousand hand-carved jack-o’-lanterns cover the grounds at night.

In winter, Winterlights turns the whole estate into something else entirely, with thousands of lights wrapped through the gardens and trees.

Each season changes what Naumkeag looks like so completely that a visit in May and a visit in October feel like two different places.

The views hold everything together

The formal gardens are the reason most people come, but the setting is what makes them land the way they do.

Naumkeag’s terraces look out over Monument Mountain and the Berkshire Hills. Woods, meadow and pasture push up against the garden edges.

Pick up a self-guided landscape tour brochure at the entrance and take your time moving from one section to the next.

The estate covers eight acres, and every part of it connects back to that hillside view. The Blue Steps go down. The mountain sits there.

The whole place holds.

Visit Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts

You can find Naumkeag at 5 Prospect Hill Road in Stockbridge. The Trustees of Reservations owns and operates the property.

The estate is open seasonally, typically from late spring through early winter, with extended evening hours during Winterlights. Admission runs around $20 for adults, with lower rates for children and Trustees members.

The guided house tour costs extra and runs on select dates, so check the official website before you go to confirm hours, tour availability and current pricing.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

Read more from this brand:

• Massachusetts best towns for early leaf peeping
• Writers and artists have been escaping to western Massachusetts for 200 years and here’s why
• Western Massachusetts has a 60-foot waterfall and a world-class art museum in the same valley