The Dream in Brick and Stucco
On a wooded rise above Long Island's North Shore, just outside Jericho, NY, a château rises from the green. Haut Bois, literally "high wood" in French, was never meant to hide.
Its red-brick walls and slate mansard roof announce themselves with the poise of an aristocrat holding court.
Visitors arriving up the long axial drive pass under trees that seem to usher them toward an idea as much as a building: America's dream of Versailles.
The house was born in 1916, a decade when the wealthy treated Long Island like a blank canvas. Financier Walter Effingham Maynard and his wife, Eunice, wanted a home that would stake their claim among the titans of the Gold Coast.
They turned to Ogden Codman Jr., a patrician architect fluent in French classicism, who sketched a structure meant to evoke Louis XIV's hunting lodge at Versailles.
Where other builders on Long Island borrowed loosely from Tudor or Georgian styles, Codman produced something rare: a disciplined French Renaissance château, built for American money yet dressed in European memory.
The house was not alone in its theatricality. Its gardens, shaped by Parisian landscape architect Jacques Gréber, unfurled in terraces and allées like verses of poetry.
A reflecting pool stretched toward the horizon, its fountain throwing arcs of water into the air.
Maynard imported antique wood paneling from an actual French château to line the interiors, as if authenticity could be purchased by the crate.
For a moment, it seemed the North Shore had outdone itself.
Roaring with Jazz
The 1920s turned Haut Bois into a stage set for Long Island's great improvisation: the jazz age. Partygoers in tuxedos and flapper dresses spilled across its lawns.
The scent of boxwood hedges mingled with cigar smoke, while bands played the night away under stars that blinked like the sequins of a gown.
To step through the tall French doors into the garden was to enter a scene equal parts Old World and new, a country estate borrowing its lines from Versailles but pulsing with the syncopation of New York modernity.
In those years, the Gold Coast was thick with such illusions.
Mansions rose and fell like operas in repertoire, each competing for greater spectacle. Haut Bois distinguished itself with restraint.
Where other houses flaunted marble staircases or gaudy turrets, Codman's symmetry suggested lineage and continuity.
The Maynards lived amid it all, cultivating an air of noblesse, their parties photographed for society pages that promised readers a glimpse of a life forever out of reach.
But illusions are fragile. By the time the Great Depression dimmed the chandeliers of Long Island, many of these palaces stood empty.
Wealth contracted, fortunes shifted, and the grand experiment of importing Europe to Nassau County faltered.
Haut Bois endured, but its luster dulled with each passing year.
The Diva Arrives
In 1966, soprano Patrice Munsel and her husband, advertising executive Robert C. Schuler, purchased Haut Bois in Brookville, New York.
They renamed the 1916 Ogden Codman Jr.–designed mansion Malmaison, after the Château de Malmaison outside Paris, once occupied by Joséphine Bonaparte.
The property at the time consisted of the château-style residence, formal French gardens laid out by Jacques Gréber, and additional grounds enhanced by Ellen Biddle Shipman during the 1930s.
Munsel had been a Metropolitan Opera soprano since her debut in December 1943, performing more than 200 times at the Met through the 1950s.
Her contract there initially paid $40,000 annually, and by the early 1950s, she was earning approximately $100,000 a year with combined appearances on stage, radio, and in concerts.
In 1952, she married Schuler, who became her manager.
Together, they diversified her career into television, including The Patrice Munsel Show on ABC in 1957, and into film, such as her portrayal of Dame Nellie Melba in the 1953 MGM production Melba.
By the time of the Brookville purchase, Munsel had begun appearing in national musical theater tours of The Sound of Music, Kismet, and The King and I.
The couple used Malmaison as both a family residence and a base for her performance schedule.
The house's French doors and terraces were suited to outdoor entertaining, and neighbors recalled summer evenings when Munsel would sing from the second-story windows facing the gardens.
The estate remained in their possession through the early 1970s.
In 1975, businessman John L. Maddocks Jr. acquired the property, and the Schuler-Munsel chapter of its ownership ended.
The house's name reverted to its original designation, Haut Bois, following the sale.
Years of Silence
In 1975, John L. Maddocks Jr., a businessman active in Long Island real estate, purchased Haut Bois from Patrice Munsel and Robert Schuler.
The name Malmaison was dropped at the time of the transfer, and the estate reverted to its original designation, Haut Bois.
Throughout the late 1970s, the 1916 Ogden Codman Jr.–designed mansion began to deteriorate.
The slate mansard roof, which had been installed during the original construction, developed leaks.
Water damage spread into the imported French oak paneling on the first floor, and plaster ceilings in several formal rooms cracked under moisture.
By the early 1980s, the Gréber-designed French gardens had grown over.
The allées of linden and chestnut trees lining the terraces were no longer trimmed, and the long reflecting pool on the south lawn, originally built with a central fountain, was left stagnant.
The stone balustrades edging the garden steps fractured in several sections, with missing blocks never replaced.
In the mid-1980s, operating costs for the estate were cited as a burden. The house, built with more than 20 rooms and expansive service wings, required full-time staff to maintain.
Without regular upkeep, the original stucco cladding on the exterior walls loosened, exposing the red-brick base underneath.
Chimneys, designed as tall symmetrical stacks, lost decorative caps to erosion.
By the early 1990s, Haut Bois stood in near-ruinous condition.
Several upper-floor rooms were closed off entirely, and the carved stone entry stair at the main façade showed structural sagging.
The once-formal landscape was reduced to meadow grasses, and the rectangular pool was filled with algae and debris.
The estate was no longer used for public or private events, and its condition made occupancy difficult until restoration efforts began in 1995.
Restoration and Afterlife
In 1995, new owners acquired Haut Bois and initiated a restoration after years of neglect.
Work began on the roof, where damaged slate tiles and flashing were replaced to halt water infiltration.
Inside, restorers cleaned and repaired the oak paneling imported from France in 1916, and replastered ceilings compromised by leaks.
Masonry crews rebuilt the limestone balustrades on the terraces and reset the tall decorative chimneys that had lost their caps during the 1980s.
The gardens underwent major changes. The original rectangular reflecting pool and fountain on the south lawn were removed and replaced with a swimming pool.
Gréber's formal layout was partially restored through replanting of linden and chestnut allées, and boxwood hedges were trimmed back into geometric parterres.
By the early 2000s, the estate was again a functioning residence. The main drawing room, dining room, and upper-floor bedrooms were returned to use.
Period chandeliers were rewired, and the stucco cladding on the brick façade was repaired.
The property, approximately eight acres, added a tennis court, pool house, and putting green.
The mansion also served as a film location in The Age of Innocence (1993). By the 2010s, it was marketed for sale at multi-million-dollar prices.
Echoes in the Wood
The house is quiet now, but nothing here is empty. The oak paneling still carries its 1916 grooves, shipped from France and set into Codman's walls.
The gardens step down in terraces, replanted after 1995, their lines still holding Jacques Gréber's geometry.
Where a reflecting pool once caught the sky, a swimming pool now lies flat against the lawn.
Each life lingers. The Maynards' parties in the 1920s. Patrice Munsel leaning out a window in the 1960s, her voice moving over the hedges.
The 1980s silence, plaster buckling, and water seeping through ceilings.
Then, scaffolding was used in the 1990s, and craftsmen repaired stone balustrades and reset the tall chimneys.
In 2024, Haut Bois was again listed for sale with 8 acres and 18 rooms at $14.9 million. One of the last Gold Coast mansions still in private hands.
To walk its drive today is to hear all those decades at once, layered like voices in a score, fading and returning, refusing to disappear.