Well the Missus and I trundled down to Milton the other day to take a tour of Historic New England’s Eustis Estate and say, it was spectacular.

Start with the exterior, a stunning medley of multi-colored stone, multi-patterned brick, and multi-dimensional windows.

As the Historic New England website notes, the estate is “A Marvel of the Aesthetic Movement . . . a rare surviving example of late nineteenth-century architecture and design.”

Designed by renowned Boston architect W. Ralph Emerson and built in 1878, the Eustis Estate sits on eighty acres of picturesque landscape at the base of the Blue Hills. Full of stunning, intact architectural and design details, the Eustis Estate is a historic site unlike any other in the Greater Boston area.

Inside the mansion, our excellent tour guide ushered us from one beautifully crafted room to another. Herewith, some representative samples.

And here’s a thumbnail history.

The mansion is a joy to behold in person, not only for its relentlessly artistic interior, but also for the artwork hanging on its walls, as Boston Globe correspondents  Patricia Harris and David Lyon detailed in this 2020 piece.

An evolving New England, captured in 45 paintings at Milton’s Eustis Estate

Visitors to Historic New England properties are usually so engrossed in the architecture, the furnishings, and the stories of the families who lived there that they pay little notice to the paintings on the walls.

“But the paintings are one of the hidden gems,” says Nancy Carlisle, senior curator of collections for the heritage organization. “We have an unbelievable collection when you pull it out of context and put it all together.”

That’s exactly what Carlisle and co-curator Peter Trippi, editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur, did over the last 2½years. They whittled HNE’s holdings of about 700 paintings down to 45 for “Artful Stories: Paintings from Historic New England.” The works date from the 1730s to 2018, presenting perspectives of New England that evolve over time.

If you happen to be trundle-impaired, the Eustis Estate website at Historic New England is a fabulous farrago of photographs, videos, and archival material.

Well worth the clicks.