In 1884 Joseph H. Choate commissioned the young architects Charles McKim and Stanford White to design a country home for his family. The result was Naumkeag—a Shingle Style cottage with a sweeping vista of the Berkshire Hills that Choate called "our Perugino view."
Choate (1832-1917) was a distinguished lawyer and diplomat; he served as Ambassador to the Court of St. James from 1899 to 1905. His wife Caroline was an artist, an activist for women's rights, and a co-founder of Barnard College.
The Choate's second daughter, Mabel, inherited the property in 1929 and devoted herself to the development of a series of gardens designed by Fletcher Steele.
Upon her death in 1958 Mabel Choate bequeathed Naumkeag and its contents to the Trustees of Reservations, which maintains the estate as a house museum offering a remarkably intact look into the life of a prominent family of the Gilded Age.
