Sunnyside and Kykuit

Before we visited the final resting places of both Washington Irving and William Rockefeller on our recent trip to Sleepy Hollow, we toured their respective estates, Sunnyside and Kykuit. They are geographically almost neighbors, but the properties are very different.

Sunnyside is more of a cottage, although Irving (who never married) shared the relatively small space with his brother and his five daughters. The house sits on beautiful former farmland, separated from the Hudson River by train tracks, an addition that was made back in Irving's time. Four of us actually got into Sunnyside for free because the fifth person in our group became a member of the Historic Hudson Valley. I think I may have been disappointed if I had paid the $12 admission price, but as I've said before I have a hard time complaining about something I got for free.

The tour encompasses only a few of the ground floor rooms, and we were free to explore the grounds (including the outhouses and icehouse) on our own. I wish we had been able to see more of the house and I felt as if the guides stationed in each room were a bit less enthusiastic with their stories than I expected.

Later in the day, as we were standing in front of Irving's grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, we overheard the following conversation between a husband and his wife: "Who was Washington Iriving again?" "He's the one who wrote the Headless Horseman."

They definitely could have benefited from the tour at Sunnyside, but since we already had a cursory knowledge of the man who wrote the inspiration for our entire trip (which is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by the way, not the Headless Horseman) it was interesting but not terribly enlightening.

Down the road a bit is the Rockefeller estate, Kykuit (pronounced Kye-cut), which is much larger and more grandiose than Sunnyside. We were wary of our tour guide at first, but aside from her creepy obsession with Nelson Rockefeller, she ended up being pretty great.

The house is beautiful, but it's the location and the grounds that really make it a spectacular place. The sloping lawns overlook the Hudson River Valley and I can't imagine a more beautiful time than fall to take the tour. Again, we didn't see as much of the house as I would have liked (why are the top floors always off-limits?) but it was still pretty long and informative.

Apparently the Rockefeller's tried not to be too showy with their wealth in keeping with their Baptist beliefs, but I'm not sure how much they succeeded in that regard. If Kykuit is their idea of what restraint looks like, I'd love to see what it would have looked like had they really tried to show off.