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Nick Churton of Mayfair International Realty touches heaven on a recent visit to Milbrook, New York.

It is a perfect combination of great architecture, harmonious interior design and wonderful landscaping that makes an inspiring home which is so hard to beat.

A good designer can achieve all of these elements in some measure.  But some things can’t be trumped.  When the house architecture is truly classic; when the owner has the individual taste and the means to create an immediately welcoming interior of great warmth and sophistication; and when the Great Architect has produced a landscape no man could conceive – never mind create.

I think Linley House in Millbrook, New York achieves all these things.  The exterior is a lesson in a Georgian style that moved so quickly and confidently from its British roots to its distinctive and much admired American colonial incarnation.  The landscape is divine.  It ends at the Catskill Mountains with their humpback tops in the blue distance.  Between house and hills is the wide but deeply cut inner Hudson Valley.  When I was there the scenery had just been freshly painted from the ravishing fall colour chart.  It was breathtaking.

So the interior had a great deal to live up to.  But it certainly rises to the occasion.  It is a space of great charm and intimacy put together by an owner with a very sure touch.

The house, standing in almost 200 acres, is only 90 miles from New York City and is certainly very hard to beat.  But it may have never been like this. On its own the house is quite outstanding. But it wasn’t always in this location.  The mid-nineteenth century building was moved to its present magnificent site from a secondary position in 1990. Now house and landscape are in perfect harmony.

I have mentioned several times the current owner who is responsible for the lovely interior.  She is Blaine Trump – making this house Trump Heaven!