Duke Gardens Open House

Duke Gardens Open House Bridgewater NJ

#1 Rail Paul

Advanced Member

Group: Members
Posts: 16,200
Joined: 23-March 04

Posted 30 June 2005 - 02:22 PM

Doris Duke's mansion will be open for tours beginning in July. The luxuriously sculpted property will also be open for human browsing. Guests were previously restricted to escorted garden tours only.

Money may not buy happiness, but in the case of tobacco heiress Doris Duke -- in her day, one of the richest women in the world -- it did buy seclusion from a raucous world, a pampered, globe-trotting lifestyle and the means to amass collections of exquisite objects from around the world.

While Duke owned estates in Rhode Island and Hawaii (not to mention pied-à-terre in New York and Beverly Hills), Duke Farms in Hillsborough was the place she and her parents called home. After Doris Duke's death in 1993 at the age of 80, the bucolic estate passed into the hands of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The property has long been sequestered behind stone walls and off limits to the public except for guided tours, begun in 1964, of display gardens maintained in a complex of greenhouses

Duke Farms Site

Star Ledger Article

My only complaint was that if they need to charge me $30 because they're robbing the duck to pay the boar they might as well give me a more substantial portion of flour, water, and bits of meat.

Orik, on the pasta price at Hearth in NYC

#2 ranitidine

Advanced Member

Group: Members
Posts: 3,727
Joined: 14-March 04

Posted 01 July 2005 - 12:02 AM

The original furniture has been auctioned off, so why bother to go inside? By the way, the property has a naturalist in residence and is one of the best birding venues in New Jersey. In fact, Lippy just informed me that their fall migration naturalist-guided tours are already fully subscribed.

"Say not the struggle nought availeth...."
Arthur Hugh Clough, 1819-1861

Arise ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth

#3 Rail Paul

Advanced Member

Group: Members
Posts: 16,200
Joined: 23-March 04

Posted 01 July 2005 - 08:18 PM

The pictures in the dead tree version showed some furniture in the rooms open for view (a small number of the 60 or so in the house), but the rooms themselves looked quite interesting.

The area north and west of the gardens is characterized by large estates and many ponds, with a mixture of rolling hills and fields / forest. It would seem like ideal birding territory.

The well regarded restaurant Ixora is just a few minutes away, as is the Ryland Inn and Bistro. Harvest Moon and others are a bit more distant.

Ixora's Info

This post has been edited by Rail Paul: 09 July 2005 - 06:01 PM