Englishman Arthur Stannard Vernay (1877-1960) moved to New York, made a fortune from architectural salvage and antiques, and in 1914 built himself a large house in the Hudson Valley 'made entirely of imported materials', for which offers around $125,000 are now being asked for its demolition rights.
 
Vernay was a dealer, interior designer, decorator, explorer and adventurer, collected thousands of specimens from around the world for the American Museum of Natural History, met the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, and entertained the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at his Nassau holiday home.
 
An obituary suggested in the late Twenties that his vocation and his avocation required him to alternate between sipping tea and talking drawing-room furniture with dowagers on Park Avenue and eating ant eggs and talking tiger hunting with head-hunters in Africa. [New York Times 27 Oct 1960]
 
His Hudson Valley home known as The Croft at Teatown near Ossining, in an area rich with heritage country homes, was built in the Arts & Crafts style using architectural salvage from the likes of Amberley Castle, Surrey, and Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire. The New York Herald described the house as the first completely antique Tudor house ever constructed in America, and Gustav Stickley wrote enthusiastically about the antique elements of the house in The Craftsman 1916.
 
After the death of Arthur Vernay the woodland estate in which The Croft was built was passed to the Teatown Lake Reservation which, after years looking for a financially viable solution, decided that the house was white elephant and is looking for offers for its sale and dismantling with help from Steve Israel of the American Salvage Company.

For further info see the links below or contact Dianne Barron dbarron@teatown dot org. Closing date for offers around $125,000 is 1st March 2015. The accompanying photos courtesy of Teatown Lake Reservation.