A história
Hill-Stead sits on a hilltop farm in Farmington, Connecticut, and it was designed by the daughter of the family. Theodate Pope, one of the first women to work as an architect in America, drew up this large Colonial Revival house around 1900 for her parents, working with the famous New York firm McKim, Mead and White, and she insisted the design stay hers.
Her father, Alfred Atmore Pope, an Ohio iron industrialist, had been buying French Impressionist paintings early, when few Americans wanted them. So the walls of what looks like a comfortable country home hold two of Monet's grainstacks, work by Degas and Manet, and Whistler, all hung as private pictures rather than museum trophies.
When Theodate died in 1946 she left the house to become a museum on one condition, that nothing be moved. The rooms stay as the family left them, down to a sunken garden below the terrace laid out by the landscape designer Beatrix Farrand.
