Olana State Historic Site Frederic Church
— — the house a painter built to keep the view.
Not only on a wall.
“Frederic Edwin Church bought the hill in 1860 for the south-facing prospect — the bend of the Hudson where the Catskills meet the river — and spent thirty years shaping the 250-acre landscape and the Persian-fantasia house at its crown into a single composition. Olana is the painting he could not finish on canvas. Every road on the property was cut to frame a view he had already painted somewhere else.
Olana State Historic Site Frederic Church, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Olana sits on a 250-acre hilltop in Columbia County, New York, five miles south of the city of Hudson and directly across the river from the Catskill village where Thomas Cole lived. Frederic Edwin Church, Cole's only formal student and the most celebrated American landscape painter of the nineteenth century, bought the land in 1860 and built the main house between 1870 and 1872 with architect Calvert Vaux, the co-designer of Central Park. The site became a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and a New York State Historic Site in 1966.
The house is a Persian-Moorish villa that has no real equivalent in American architecture. Church travelled to the Middle East in 1867 and 1868 and brought back the pointed-arch arcades, polychrome brick, and stencilled interiors he had seen in Damascus and Beirut. The exterior is rough Hudson Valley stone trimmed in ochre and slate; the third-floor studio he added in 1888 looks out over the same river bend painted in his 1872 canvas of the property. Vaux executed the architecture, but every elevation answers to Church's eye.
Grounds open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset and are free to walk; the five miles of carriage roads Church laid out are the unhurried way to see what he saw. House tours run from late April through October and require timed tickets, with a small admission fee that supports the Olana Partnership. The view from the south porch is the painting; the view from the studio window is the next one. Park at the hilltop lot, not the gate, on a first visit.