Berkshires MA: Tanglewood, Mass MoCA & North Adams Art Scene

Edith Wharton's 1902 mansion in Lenox, designed by Wharton applying the principles of her 1897 book The Decoration of Houses. The formal Italian garden, the French flower garden, and the New England rock garden represent Wharton's most complete expression of landscape design; the house tour traces the rooms where Wharton wrote The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911).

The largest collection of Rockwell's original works, with his Stockbridge studio preserved on-site. The Four Freedoms series (1943) — commissioned by FDR after the Pearl Harbor speech and published in the Saturday Evening Post — is the emotional center of the collection. Rockwell's studio, with his personal reference library, palette, and easel, was moved from his Stockbridge Main Street location to the museum grounds in 1986.

A lunch at the 1773 Red Lion Inn on Stockbridge Main Street — a New England institution where Norman Rockwell painted the original Christmas cover for the Saturday Evening Post. The dining room serves New England classics; the porch above the Main Street is the most photographed lunch setting in the Berkshires.

The summer estate of Daniel Chester French, creator of the Lincoln Memorial seated figure and the Concord Minute Man statue — French's studio, with the sliding trolley system that moved his sculptures outdoors for natural light, is preserved on the Glendale Road property. The studio and house are open for tours; the woodland sculpture trail through the 122-acre property shows plaster casts of French's major works.

A Stockbridge restaurant on Main Street serving contemporary European cuisine in a renovated 19th-century storefront — one of the few Berkshire restaurants with a serious prix-fixe tasting menu. The duck breast, the house-made pasta, and the Berkshire cheese course are the kitchen's anchors.

The largest contemporary art museum in the western hemisphere — 26 19th-century mill buildings connected into 250,000 square feet of gallery and performance space. The Sol LeWitt retrospective (permanent) covers the entirety of Building 7's interior walls with LeWitt's wall drawings; the James Turrell light installation occupies a dedicated chamber; Gunnar Schonbeck's sound instrument installation fills an entire factory floor. The campus functions simultaneously as a music venue, film program, and outdoor performance space.

A brewery and taproom in the Mass MoCA campus, occupying 7,500 square feet of the former Arnold Print Works mill complex. The 20 taps feature New England-style IPAs, session ales, and seasonal specialties; the taproom's industrial character — exposed steel trusses, concrete floors, mill windows — makes it the most architecturally interesting brewery taproom in New England.

A private art collection on 140 acres designed by Tadao Ando, with nearly 40 Renoir paintings — one of the finest Renoir collections in the US — alongside major Winslow Homer, Sargent, and Barbizon holdings. The 2014 Ando expansion added a Reflecting Pool and a new stone building that integrates the museum with the surrounding Vermont hillscape. The woodland walking trails on the Clark property are as carefully designed as the galleries.

A French country restaurant in a converted grist mill on Route 43 between Williamstown and New Lebanon, serving classic French cuisine in a room with water wheel and mill pond visible through the windows. The restaurant has operated from this mill since 1978; the steak au poivre, the house-made pâtés, and the crème brûlée are the menu's anchors.

A 1790 Shaker community preserved on 750 acres in the Berkshire foothills — the 20 surviving Shaker buildings include the 1826 Round Stone Barn, the most functionally elegant agricultural building in American history. The Shaker furniture and craft collection demonstrates the religious community's design philosophy: 'Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.' The farm animals, heirloom gardens, and working craft demonstrations are active from May through October.

The museum cafe serves lunch made from the village's own farm produce — Shaker-influenced New England cooking from the heirloom vegetable gardens. The apple cider, the herb breads, and the seasonal pies are the Shaker kitchen's legacy.

New York's highest single-drop waterfall, accessible from the Massachusetts side via a 1.5-mile trail from the South Egremont parking area. The falls drop 80 feet in a twin cascade through a narrow granite gorge on the New York-Massachusetts border; the pool at the base is swimming-depth. The surrounding Taconic State Forest preserves 5,000 acres of hardwood forest above the Columbia County farmland.

A lively North Adams restaurant and bar adjacent to MASS MoCA serving creative wood-fired pizzas, local charcuterie, and craft cocktails in an industrial-chic space. The ideal post-museum dinner in the Berkshires before the drive home.