Oheka Castle, French-style mansion in Huntington, United States.
Oheka Castle is a 127-room mansion in West Hills, New York, built 1914–1919 for Otto Hermann Kahn in steel and concrete. Its pale cream stucco facade has a central tower with a pyramidal roof, a round-arched wooden entrance door, and wings of rectangular windows and dormers; a stone balustrade runs above a lower level of five arched glass doors between pale stone columns.
Financier Otto Hermann Kahn commissioned construction between 1914 and 1919, creating one of the largest private estates on the East Coast. After changing hands several times, the building was restored in the 1980s and reopened as a hotel.
The name comes from the initials of the builder, Otto Hermann Kahn, who created an alternative social world here to the New York club culture of his time. Today visitors can experience the architecture on tours or as hotel guests.
The estate sits on a hill and is surrounded by extensive gardens that visitors can explore on foot. Tours show the interior rooms, while hotel guests have access to all public areas and the outdoor grounds.
The Olmsted Brothers designed the grounds around a formal axial sunken garden in the French manner, with clipped greens, gravel parterres and water terraces screened by high hedges from the entrance drive. The estate was raised on an artificial hill built over two years, said to be the highest point on Long Island.
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