A HOME FOR ALL SEASONS

LUCKY WERE the young couple gifted a 70-acre estate for their marriage.

by Andrea Bennett

Industrialist and American Woolen Company founder Frederick C. Ayer built this stately 10,200-square-foot home at 59 Walnut Road in Wenham, Massachusetts, in 1898, giving it to his son and his new bride—the first of only three owners in its history.

Today Copper Beech Hill, as it was later named for the hundreds of century-old beech trees that surround it, looks much as it would have 125 years ago. Even the additions that have been made in recent decades are perfectly in keeping with its original design. The stucco-and-stone colonial sits on thousands of feet of raised bluestone terraces and sundecks, its fieldstone walls capped with granite. The home would later belong to the family of Edward Mauran and Julia Beals, scions of America’s early railroad industry. They divided the acreage into five lots with conservation restrictions governed by the Essex County Greenbelt Association.

Copper Beech Hill now sits on bucolic 24-acre grounds, close to the 15th hole of the famously tony Myopia Hunt Club. “Along it, the Essex Trail Association’s horse-only protected trails run all the way to Cape Ann,” says Sofia Bikos, a licensed real estate agent for Douglas Elliman in Massachusetts. With care, the estate and grounds will look this way 125 years in the future.

Perhaps the greatest feat of the home’s current owners has been their careful preservation of the estate’s significant features and character while introducing present-day efficiency. Around the gracious home, pillars and arched, cased openings lend a distinctly Italian Renaissance feel. Beautiful handpainted murals in the dining room pay tribute to the beeches around the property. The custom woodwork is original, but details like a faux opera ceiling in the wet bar are new. Of the home’s 11 fireplaces, nine have been reconstructed in grand style, including one in a large sitting room where a walnut panel slides closed to conceal a television. The sunroom, with radiant-heated floors, is a new but seamless addition. The original walnut horse stalls remain on the ground floor of a horse barn and carriage house whose upper floor is now a beautifully outfitted guesthouse.

“It was important to these owners to enhance, but not visibly modernize, this historic home,” Bikos says. Wander the grounds of this Renaissance-inspired estate, and you, too, will be transported to another time.