The Clayton-Cedarmere Estates are located in Roslyn Harbor, New York, United States, listed jointly on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. Clayton, the bulk of the property, is the large landscaped Bryce/Frick estate, now home to the Nassau County Museum of Art. Cedarmere, the smaller of the two, is William Cullen Bryant's estate, currently undergoing interior renovation, is located on the west side of Bryant Avenue; overlooking Hempstead Harbor, now a historic house museum. The grounds are open to the public. The two combined properties, with input from several notable architects, illustrate the development of estates on the North Shore of Long Island over a period of nearly a century.
Bryant originally owned almost the entire property. Fifteen years after Bryant's death, in 1893, Lloyd Bryce bought the largely undeveloped inland portion of the estate and hired Ogden Codman, Jr. to design a mansion for it. In 1919, the dying Henry Clay Frick purchased the estate for his son Childs, who, after renovating it and expanding it, lived there with his family until his 1965 death. Four years later, it was turned over to the county for use as a museum.
Estates
All of Cedarmere and most of Clayton were part of Bryant's original purchase. After his descendants sold all but the area around Cedarmere to the Bryces, they and the Fricks made some other additions as well.
Cedarmere
Cedarmere is located behind a high stone wall on a parcel along Bryant Ave., Roslyn Harbor, with two small ponds and a landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Its main house is a three-bay, -story main block with two wings: a two-story multi-bay structure to the east and a smaller, single-story section to the north. All are covered in slate gambrel roofs, fenestrated with trimmed gabled dormers. Window shapes vary throughout the facades. The house is faced with stucco, except for the visible stone foundation. A green glass-and-metal conservatory protrudes from the front, and a porch wraps around all but the north side.
A single-bay entrance pavilion projects onto the south porch, overlooking the larger pond and its stone bridge. It is topped with a railed balcony. The doorway is heavily ornamented with classical molded surround, pilasters, sidelights, entablature and leaded transom. The south elevation also has solid and latticework supports with decorated balusters and brackets.
At the other edge of the main house's pond is a small Gothic Revival building known as the Mill, although it was never used as such and remains purely decorative, used mainly for storage. Its brick basement gives way to a board-and-batten first floor, with heavy surface decoration, and then to a slate-covered cross-gabled roof with decorated bargeboards and filials, topped by a brick chimney. The windows have been trimmed with arches of various shapes and other decorative touches. The main side window has 'W' 'C' 'B' (William Cullen Bryant's initial) etched in the top panes.
Other outbuildings include a small greenhouse south of the garden and two more modern garages to the north, some distance from the house. The latter two are the only improvements to the property not considered contributing.
Clayton
Clayton's property begins across Bryant from Cedarmere, but its main entrance is located on Northern Blvd. (NY 25A). The drive up, after passing a hipped-roofed brick Neoclassical gatehouse to what is now the museum takes visitors through some of the pastorally landscaped 165 acres (66 ha) that make up the center of Roslyn Harbor. The main house sits on a high plateau, surrounded by plantings and a modern parking lot. It is a Georgian Revival building, brick with stone trim and copper hipped roof, pierced by-gabled dormers, its eaves lined with modillions above a stone entablature.
The main block is two and a half stories high and nine bays wide. On both end there are symmetrical, two-bay pavilions outlined in quoins. The front facade has a five-bay open porch with Ionic columns and a flat roof, entablature and balustrade. The main entrance is a double door with semi-circular transom. On the east facade a series of round-arched French doors give access to the garden, topped by a balustraded balcony. Two one-story arcades wings project from it. The mansion's interior features much original woodwork and plaster.