Village of Upper Brookville

Planting Fields

Planting Fields is a magnificent Gold Coast estate from the 1920s, which survives today as a statement about art, architecture, and landscape. Located in Oyster Bay, New York, and originally landscaped by the Olmsted Brothers, the grounds feature 409 acres of greenhouses, rolling lawns, formal gardens, woodland paths, and outstanding plant collections.

Planting Fields is one of only a few surviving estates on Long Island with its original acreage intact, as well as its buildings, including Coe Hall, a 65-room Tudor Revival mansion commissioned by the Coes, and designed by architects Alexander Walker and Leon Gillette. Coe Hall was built to resemble a 400-year-old English manor, along with two greenhouses, a large hay barn with stables, and a landscape designed by the Olmsted Brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted.

The interior of the house is a showcase of artistry and craftsmanship and features a distinctly American aesthetic through original ironwork commissions by Samuel Yellin and murals painted by artists Robert Winthrop Chanler and Everett Shinn. Architects Alexander Walker and Leon Gillette envisioned a comprehensive estate, which combined the built and natural world, relying on the landscape design to unify efforts, including a circular pool. In the fall of 1918, ground was broken for Coe Hall.

Walker and Gillette were one of more than 200 architectural firms that designed large houses on Long Island during the Gold Coast era. Nearly a thousand such estates were built after the Civil War through about 1940, making this area the largest concentration of large estates anywhere in the U.S. Just under 60% of them survive today; about 400 are in residential use, most on reduced size lots. Planting Fields was one of the last of these estates to be created.

Planting Fields is included in the National Register of Historic Places.

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