Olana State Historic Site

Frederic Church spent his last forty years building Olana into a single composition: the house, the 250 acres around it, even the lake, dug and shaped so its surface would mirror the house exactly. He designed the mansion himself, using architect Calvert Vaux only as a consultant. "I am building a house and am principally my own Architect," he wrote to a friend, and it shows: stone and brick worked into a style he called "Persian, adapted to the Occident," with stenciled patterns and tile drawn from a trip he and his wife Isabel took through Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus.