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"View Slideshow\n\nIf it weren't for the writing of Theodore Dreiser, we wouldn't have H. L. Mencken's barbed criticism of it, such as the following pearl: \"A work of art with ideas in it is as sorry a monster as a pretty girl full of Latin.\" And if it weren't for Dreiser's writerly instinct to escape Jazz Age Manhattan for the softly lapping shores of Westchester County's Croton Reservoir, Michael and Judy Steinhardt would not today enjoy, at the center of their 51-acre property in Bedford, New York, a perfect pair of garden follies in the Romantic mode: the arched and chimneyed ruins of the Dreiser home and, just over a dome-topped hill, the log cabin where he wrote.\n\nAnd, apparently, dallied: One day, while hosting a tour of the couple's encyclopedic gardens (which include an orchard with 300 fruit trees, no two alike, and a collection of Japanese maples that brings tourists to gape twice a year), Judy Steinhardt met an 80-year-old woman who, after identifying herself as Dreiser's teenage mistress, proceeded to fill in some of the more delicate gaps in the lore of the place. \"With her sister, she spent a long time arguing over where in the cabin he kept his daybed,\" she remembers. \"It was one of the nicest visits we've ever had.\"\n\nThere are places where everything comes together. Here, an enchanting piece of land has come together with a pair of adventurous and expert connoisseurs of nature who have demonstrated the good sense not to overwhelm it with architecture. And not to keep it to themselves, either: Fellow bird enthusiasts are regularly welcomed in the Steinhardts' aviary, and as many as 800 friends have joined the couple for a biennial party to celebrate the pressing of their homegrown varietal ciders.\n\nAmong the other things that come together at the Steinhardts' uniquely inclusive weekend retreat are the porcupine and the zebra, the antelope and the wallaby, the Egyptian ibis and the Siberian crane, the ostrich and the emu, even the Seussian smew (a dashing Russian duck in harlequin plumage) and the snuffling capybara (a handsome South American rodent as big as a pig)\u2014though not, as yet, the lion and the lamb. In what Michael Steinhardt refers to as \"the grand experiment,\" weather permitting, this intercontinental collection of fauna is let loose to pad and race and hop and lumber at will through the waist-high grasses of the property's three generous ha-ha-bound paddocks. Conflict between animals is rare, but there has been the odd case of a spirited camel or an over-curious kangaroo engaging human visitors; with a retired Wall Streeter's knowing look, Michael Steinhardt says he offers tours of the menagerie in \"various degrees of risk.\"\n\nIt was to house this zoo with dignity that the Steinhardts first convened the design team that has put such fitting exclamation points on their natural wonders: architects Jaquelin T. Robertson and Andrew B. Ballard (of Cooper, Robertson Partners), David H. Abelow (of Abelow Connors Sherman Architects) and the interior designer Victoria Borus (principal of New York's B Five Studio). Judy Steinhardt took control of this team; it was her decision to begin this new phase of construction with the service buildings, while the couple continued to use another house on the property, built for them by their friend Myron Goldfinger in the 1970s. \"I wanted to make the mistakes down there,\" she says, gesturing toward the group of flawless ground-hugging wood-and-stone structures. These include two barns for the animals (convertible to horse stables), a conical watchtower hayloft, a potting shed with an adjoining greenhouse, various garages, an office for the caretaker, a romantic enclosure for a mating pair of owls and a two-story \"head house\"\u2014which has been used as a study, a party room for 40 four-year-olds, a rest stop for tour groups, and guest quarters. Conceiving the grouping as a farm, albeit one with unorthodox livestock, was of particular interest to Robertson. \"I spent a lot of time on farms when I was growing up, and I've been obsessed with the practical logic of farmyards\u2014the turning radius of tractors, where the chickens and ducks might go,\" he says. \"It's not a place where stand-alone aesthetic decisions make a lot of sense.\"\n\nStill, such decisions had to be made. And the team developed a fitting if somewhat deracinated \"regional\" palette of fieldstone walls, pitched shingle roofs, heavy lintels and prominent, exposed chimneys. \"I'm interested in the gene bank of how Americans have built in different regions in different times,\" Robertson says. \"At first I didn't understand what the language would be here: It's too far south to be the Adirondacks, and it's not New England.\"\n\nThose questions were resolved in the Lodge\u2014now the main house (the Goldfinger was given over to grandchildren and their toys)\u2014sited up and away from the service yards and barns, overlooking the paddocks and the reservoir from the brow of Dreiser's hill. The building is an exercise in integrating almost-lost craftsmanship: in wood (there's no structural steel anywhere\u2014all the connections are slotted and pegged the old-fashioned way in repurposed ship timbers and Alaskan cedar); in metal (every fixture and hinge bears the marks of a blacksmith's hammer); and in stone (each one, as in the service buildings, was sourced in Pennsylvania, selected for shape and laid by a local Italian mason, working with his sons and brooking no dissent). \"We used so much stone,\" Victoria Borus says dryly, \"that Pennsylvania got lighter and Bedford got heavier.\"\n\nAfter his sideways smear of witty girls, Mencken's attack continues with this: \"The aim of a work of art is not to make one think painfully, but to make one feel beautifully.\" The cerebral Dreiser may not have met that measure, but the Steinhardts' team of sensitive designers, reinventing the writer's property 58 years after his death, has pulled it off. As Michael Steinhardt puts it: \"This is the only physical possession in my life from which I derive real pleasure.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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