(www.ft.com) Financial Times – It’s like entering Brigadoon,” says a friend as we drive through the gates of Judy and Michael Steinhardt’s 55-acre estate inWestchester, New York, one misty summer day. “An almost mystical experience.”
To me, it is more like the Garden of Eden: 2,000 varieties of perennials, bulbs, trees and shrubs; encyclopaedic gardens; an orchard of 300 fruit trees (no two alike) highlighted by raspberries and gooseberries in colours from burnished gold to deep purple; a magnificent collection of Japanese maples; and to top it all off a menagerie of monkeys, llamas, zebras, antelope, camels, wallabies, lemurs, ostriches, cranes and rare fowl roaming the grounds with proprietorial nonchalance. It’s hard to believe that we are a mere 50-minute drive from Manhattan.
Somehow, though, this property suits its larger-than-life owner. Michael Steinhardt is a pioneering hedge fund manager and Wall Street legend alongside George Soros and Julian Robertson. Since his retirement in 1995, he has focused his considerable energies on three things: Jewish philanthropy (his charitable gifts total more than $100m), collecting (he and Judy have important antiquities, pre-Columbian feather pieces, Judaica and art, including paintings and superb works on paper from Goya to Jasper Johns) and the Westchester estate.
