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Nick Churton of Mayfair International Realty feels right at home in New York, visiting a most lovely house on the market with Houlihan Lawrence.

Sting sang it well, “An Englishman in New York”.  Well, I wonder if an Englishman has ever been made to feel quite so at home in New York as I was at Linden Drive, Purchase, NY, just 35 minutes from Manhattan. The outside could not have been more New England but the gardens were very much old England and did remind me of home.

The exceptional pedimented front elevation with lantern tower topped by an ogee roof and rather fetching weather vane is both attractive and impressive – words that do not necessarily sit together in architecture.  All this presides over a dramatic approach.

The interior reflects this home’s colonial beginnings in 1922, but has been brought fully up-to-date in the English country house style.  No argument there, but then everywhere are the American decorative twists that are so becoming, elegant and well thought out – ask to see the cufflink cupboard!  All is neat, organised, unstinting and ready-to-move-into, I would say.

But for a real taste of home I went into the garden which was just preparing itself for spring but, sadly for me, it was too early in the year for the banks of azaleas and rhododendrons to put on their magnificent annual show.  There are acres of lawns and the view to the house from there reveals a rear elevation as elegant as the front. But closer to the house are landscaped garden ‘rooms’ in the English tradition.  And who better to create and execute these than Simon Johnson the renowned English landscape architect.   There is the most lovely boxwood parterre garden, an impressive series of deep terraced steps that include a ornamental pool – the fountain, a piece of fine architectural salvage found up-State, is a master stroke – and there is a pool garden with two lovely matching pavilions with pyramid roofs serving as elegant pool houses.

My colleague, Annette Reeve, and I were welcomed by the owner and had coffee in the most beautiful kitchen where we were made to feel part of the family.  And that is just what this house does: it folds you in warmth, security and comfort which, put together, says home no matter where or who you are.  The buyer of this house will be coming home.