Set between the sound and the sea, Long Island is home to some of America's most intriguing country houses.

This book highlights the best examples, telling the story of each through outstanding contemporary color photography. The dwellings, which began as 17th-century homesteads and 18th-century, high-style plantation manor houses, embody centuries of ownership and building activity - an aesthetic evolution shaped by both Dutch and English colonial influences and proximity to the cultural crossroads of Long Island Sound and New York City.

These many-layered homes, both large and small, have anchored successive generations engaged in living well amid evolving American taste, each generation expanding, altering, and redefining them in accordance with popular trends and personal eccentricities.

Representing the best of maverick Americana, their charmed interiors exude warmth, comfort, and familiarity and contain wonderful old objects and materials that will satiate all who hunger for old houses.