Buying a lake house in the Finger Lakes comes with a second, unplanned project nobody warns you about: figuring out what’s supposed to go inside it. Most new owners spend their first season testing furniture that ends up getting returned, because nothing in a showroom tells you how a room behaves next to open water and full sun. Ontario and Seneca county listings have moved fast all year, which means a lot of people are about to make that same expensive guess at once.
One option is to look at how it’s done (more than successfully) somewhere else: the luxury terraces of an Italian villa on Lake Como furnished with the outdoor collection from B&B Italia, or the lakeside venue in Belgium filled with the Bamboo Mood collection from Roche Bobois… But the better option means actually walking through the rooms: three of the region’s own lakefront estates already solved the exact same furnishing problem a century ago, and each one points toward a completely different look. None of them needed to leave New York to get there.
Sonnenberg Gardens: The First Stop for the Eclectic, Mix-and-Match Crowd
Sonnenberg Gardens & Mansion, on the north end of Canandaigua Lake, started in 1887 as a forty-room Queen Anne summer house for banker Frederick Ferris Thompson and his wife, Mary Clark Thompson. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Thompson spent the next two decades building nine separate gardens around the property, each one committed to a single idea instead of blending into the others: a Japanese garden with its own tea house, a rose garden, an Italian garden with sunken parterres laid out like a fleur-de-lis. None of the nine try to talk to each other stylistically, and that’s exactly why the estate still reads as coherent more than a century later. Anyone whose lake house already has a sunroom doing its own thing and a deck doing another should make the trip and see how confidently Sonnenberg lets nine completely different moods coexist without any of them apologizing for it.
Belhurst Castle: Go Here If You Want a Statement-Stone Inspiration
Forty miles north, on Seneca Lake in Geneva, Belhurst Castle took a different approach entirely. Architects Fuller & Wheeler built it between 1885 and 1889 for a wealthy widow, and the whole three-story, Romanesque Revival house reads as one continuous material decision instead of a list of separate finishes: Medina sandstone, inside and out, top to bottom. There’s no granite here and brick there competing for attention. The consistency is exactly what keeps a fairly heavy, ornate style from tipping into busy. Worth a visit for anyone tempted to mix five different finishes across one house: a hundred and forty years later, Belhurst still doesn’t look like it’s trying too hard.
Geneva on the Lake: Mediterranean Style Without the Plane Ticket
A few miles down the same lake, Geneva on the Lake skips the question of inspiration altogether, because there isn’t one to guess at. Built in the early 1910s for Byron Nester, the house was modeled directly on Villa Lancellotti, a sixteenth-century estate in Frascati, outside Rome, down to the Italian marble fireplaces, the Ionic columns, and the wood-coffered ceilings. It later spent three decades as a Franciscan monastery before reopening as a resort in 1981, and somehow none of those lives canceled the others out. If the look already forming in your head involves marble, columns, and warm, sun-bleached color, skip the Pinterest board and drive to Geneva instead: the entire template is sitting there already built, a lot closer than Frascati.
Plan the House Visit in Finger Lakes: What’s Free, What’s Ticketed, What’s Worth the Drive
All three are real and easy to get into, just not in the same way. Sonnenberg is a ticketed state historic park, open May through October, so the nine gardens are worth timing a visit around. Belhurst and Geneva on the Lake are both still working properties, a winery and a resort, which means no ticket required: walk the public rooms, sit on the terrace, and pay attention to what each one is doing rather than what happens to be sitting in it. That’s the cheaper, faster version of hiring a designer: let three buildings that already solved the problem do the thinking, then bring home only the part of the answer that fits a particular dock.
This content is brought to you by the FingerLakes1.com Team. Support our mission by visiting www.patreon.com/fl1 or learn how you send us your local content here.