The Maine summer home of famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted, known best for designing New York City’s Central Park, is available to rent on VRBO.
The stately eight-bedroom and three-bathroom cottage on the west side of Deer Isle was built in 1897 by Boston architect William Ralph Emerson on the request of Olmsted’s son, according to the National Park Service. Olmsted’s health was declining, and his family opted to move him to Maine away from the bustle of Brookline, Massachusetts, with the hope his condition would improve.
Before his health began to fail, Olmsted was the preeminent American landscape architect from the 1850s through the 1890s, said Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., Maine’s state historian. Before that, Olmsted was a journalist and wrote dispatches about the Southern slave economy before the Civil War.
“It’s viewed to this day as really a classic in American historical writing,” Shettleworth said. “However, his real significant contribution is as one of the first major landscape architects in America.”
Together with his partner Calvert Vaux, Olmsted designed many urban parks around the country including Central Park. He also designed the master plan for many colleges, including the University of Maine in Orono. Around the same time he retired to Maine, Olmsted handed over his firm to his younger sons.
Ultimately, the Olmsteds only spent one summer at the cottage, dubbed “Felsted,” after which the architect was committed to a Massachusetts hospital where he lived until his death in 1903.
From 1925 to 1940, Feldsted was a summer hotel. According to its VRBO listing, it was also the setting for two films: “Man Without a Face,” a 1993 feature directed by Mel Gibson, and “Finding Home,” a 2003 romance. The home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
The home is notable for more than its history and association with Olmsted, Shettleworth said. It’s also architecturally significant as a “major example” of Emerson’s work. He designed many of the prolific shingle-style cottages along New England’s coast, including many in Bar Harbor.
“The theory of the shingle style was that it was meant to blend into the Maine and New England coastal landscape, that they also would be using local traditional materials like shingles and stonework for the foundations,” Shettleworth said. “Of course, the Olmsted cottage is a very successful example of that from an architectural design point.”
The cottage, which sits on 4 acres, blends in with the pink granite ledge it is perched on and boasts more than 600 feet of shoreline and a private beach, according to its rental listing. The listing adds that the home, while beautiful, has “flaws.”
“We work hard to keep up with the work, but there are some cracks in the old plaster and there are always areas that need some paint,” the listing reads. The Bangor Daily News was unable to contact the property’s owners for this story.
Shettleworth suspects that the home being listed as a short-term rental wouldn’t offend the Olmsteds.
“In a way, it is sort of appropriate,” the historian said. “It was built as a summer house, albeit for a private family — a very important and distinguished family.”
