The 400-year-old doors of a cosmetics empire

Lillian Sefton Dodge was a cosmetics executive who took over her first husband's company in 1918. By 1947, she sold the business to Lever Brothers for over 5 million dollars. She used that wealth to build Sefton Manor in Mill Neck, a 60,000-square-foot Tudor Revival dwelling designed in 1922 to mimic St. Catherine's Court in Somersetshire, England.

The house features a steel frame wrapped in brown Westchester granite, a gray slate roof, and tawny limestone trim. It contains a 9-foot tall silverware safe, oak-paneled walls, and ironwork by Samuel Yellin. The house even contains 400-year-old entry doors and sandstone fireplaces originally sourced from Europe.

For the drama, Dodge paid Charles Connick to install four large stained glass windows depicting five Shakespeare plays. Each one cost approximately 10,000 dollars in 1927. Below these windows sits a 15th-century cathedral pew. The grounds include a formal garden with boxwood shaped into a sundial and multi-tiered fountains imported from Venice - though the water was turned off after the property became a school.

In 1949, the Lutheran Friends of the Deaf bought the estate. It became a school for deaf children in 1951, and the living room was converted into a chapel in 1958. The manor served as a classroom until 2002. Since 2016, the property has been undergoing an extensive restoration to return it to its original look.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons