Wheatleigh — a Gilded Age summer “cottage” in the Massachusetts Berkshires — is sitting frozen in time. After 65 years as a hotel, daily operations ceased in spring 2024. But the beds are still made. Toiletries and towels are at the ready beside deep claw foot tubs. A sprawling commercial kitchen sports a stocked bar and stacks of clean dishes. Just beyond the sculpture gardens, nary a leaf disrupts the glassy surface of the oval-shaped swimming pool.
Calls still ring into the voice mail system with requests for dinner reservations, despite the recorded greeting: “You have reached the Wheatleigh. We are closed to the public.”
The approximately 21-acre estate on the Lenox–Stockbridge line could soon change hands for the first time in more than four decades. Stately and well-kept, the 25,478-square-foot home, a Jeffersonian take on an Italian villa, is on the market for $14.5 million.
The asking price includes the furnishings, equipment and hospitality-world cachet associated with its past life as one of New England’s most rarefied small hotels. The award-winning restaurant served, among others, classical music dignitaries associated with the abutting Tanglewood. It was the kind of place one could expect to find Joan Baez checking into the two-story Aviary Suite or Yo-Yo Ma enjoying vichyssoise in the portico.
