How to Tour the Vanderbilts' Hyde Park House
- 1). Start your tour by getting tickets and the visitor's center, then proceed up the drive to the main house. You'll see that it consists of three main stories with a basement. Each side features a portico with enormous columns with Corinthian capitals, the portico on the west side being semi-circular. Enter the vestibule and straight ahead into the oval reception hall. To the right is a powder room and to the left is the office or study where Fred Vanderbilt handled his business affairs.
- 2). Walk clockwise around the reception hall and to the left is the library or den, which served as Fred and Lulu's family room. It is finely paneled and contains 700 beautifully-bound books. Proceed through the south foyer into the drawing room, which measures fifty feet by thirty and has walls covered with tapestries. Exit the drawing room and continue on to the Louis XV Gold Room, a formal parlor with numerous mirrors. Next up is a fireplace, supported by caryatids. Beyond this you can see the west portico. After passing the stair hall, the walls of which are lined with busts, you'll come to the dining room, which has the same proportions as the drawing room and which has a table that seats thirty, two huge Renaissance marble mantelpieces, and a forty-foot Isfahan carpet and Italian ceiling, both purchased by architect Stanford White. The dining room is served by a butler's pantry, which is closed to tours and connects with the basement kitchen by means of a dumbwaiter.
- 3). Proceed upstairs to the second floor. In the second floor hall you'll notice an octagonal opening that looks out over the first floor reception hall and which has a skylight above it. Continue clockwise and the first open room to the left is Lulu's French boudoir.
- 4). Enter the south foyer to see Lulu and Fred's separate bedrooms--hers to the southeast, his to the southwest. Lulu's bed is a reproduction of one found at Malmaison, the country estate of the French Empress Josephine. It is separated, in the style of the eighteenth century, from the rest of the room by means of an ornamental railing. Servants would have to stand at this railing in the mornings to receive their orders for the day from Lulu. The Savonnerie rug here weighs 2,300 pounds. The walls are of pale green and gold. Fred's room is paneled in Circassian walnut, with deep red being the keynote color for the furnishings. Flemish tapestries hang on the walls and columns stand on either side of the regal bed. The red carpet came from India.
- 5). Go back into the hallway and take a look at the Red Rooms, a two-room guest suite, to the west and the Blue and Mauve guest rooms to the north. The Blue room was occupied by Margaret Louise Van Alen, Lulu's niece, who inherited the house after Fred's death. The bathrooms, linen room and another bedroom on this floor are closed to tours, as is the third floor and basement.
- 6). Exit the house and explore the grounds, which include formal gardens, trails, gatehouses, guest houses, a power plant and a coach house.
