A Trip To Hillwood Estate: Museum And Gardens

By Anna Brailow on August 12, 2016

My family tends to brag about my skill at finding interesting places and about how well I do in initially unfamiliar areas. It is true that I’m good at using the internet to find neat under-the-radar things, and I’m good at adapting, but I am near useless at directions without the GPS on my (or someone else’s) phone.

I’m better at landmarks than street names. Navigating the metro system is alright. There are different lines of trains associated with different colors that go to different places. There are metro maps everywhere, even (as I discovered earlier in this trip) on plates and mugs in museum gift shops. The metro stop I was leaving from began with a long elevator that took me to an even longer elevator.

A quick note on elevators: if one plans to stand on the elevator and ride it up or down, one ought to stand on the right side and NOT the left side where people will be walking. This unspoken [or loudly spoken] rule is used and abused constantly. My not speaking and its abuse led to my spending 10 minutes on Mount Escalator behind a clump of very loud individuals around my age who were arguing over where they were supposed to be going. At least this isn’t rush hour traffic?


For my trip to the Hillwood Estate, I had to travel on the red line in the direction that would eventually take me to the Van Ness Station. It wasn’t a long trip, and there were no major service delays. This was good luck, considering many of those delays were happening this month leading to all the lines shutting down for all of October.

I found a seat near a window, leaving room in case the car got crowded. But, here again is another unspoken rule. One can sit down next to a person they do not know when there is an empty seat, but only when there are no other seats available.

Departing from the metro was easier than getting on. Once I scoured the map on my phone long enough to be somewhat confident that I knew what I was doing, I turned a corner away from a downtown area towards a neighborhood of well-trimmed lawns, uneven sidewalks, and the slight smell of chlorine. The entrance to Hillwood looks as though it is solely made for cars, but it is open to pedestrians, and as someone is walking/driving through, they are directed toward a visitor’s center.

“Go straight to the stop signs and then make a left.” There will be a red brick building with lots of windows. There will be two receptionist desks where people will list off times of the tours that day, provide booklets, and offer an audio guide. There will be a list of suggested donations per demographic: adult, senior, college student, etc.

But, Hillwood is a nonprofit establishment, and they host a variety of events in the form of feature exhibits. They don’t require payment for a ticket, they merely suggest a donation. While I was there, there was an exhibit on Japanese fashion and media. There weren’t many placards with informational blurbs on them in this exhibit or any exhibit really. Most of the extra information was in the tour booklet from the visitor’s center that explained each notable piece in context. The booklet took me from the reception area, up some stairs past a gift shop, out a set of heavy glass doors, and then to my right was an entrance to a beautiful mansion that was made into a museum as per the request of Marjorie Post (the late owner) with the help of curator Marvin Ross in the 1960s.

Because of this, the mansion could serve as something like a diary. Each room was an entry to that diary, and I got to know a person based on the sorts of things that she saw as beautiful. Because she had the means, and because the guide booklet was written well, I could admire those objects as she might have. She was particularly fascinated with Russian and French art. She had several pieces by Carl Fabergé, the jeweler of the Russian Imperial Court of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, including many of his famous Fabergé Eggs. These pieces, Marjorie bought from an auction in the 1930s in order to help further Russian industrialization programs.


It was just as interesting to learn how Marjorie Post had come by her treasures and the sort of people she commissioned her work from as it was to look at them mostly because of stories like these. I didn’t stop at the mansion. There were different gardens to walk through, a greenhouse, and the exhibit on Japanese art. See, I have a little fascination with gardens. If I have the opportunity, I always choose to go to them. They make me happy, I’m not quite sure how else to describe it.

There’s a rose garden at Hillwood. It’s a circular shape, and there are paths that separate several beds of roses. The ones in bloom look more like spun sugar than real flowers, and the ones that are faded look more like portraits than wilting roses. In the center of that rose garden is where Marjorie Post’s urn was put, and one of the paths leading away from (and then back to) the rose garden was the Walk of Friendship.

My favorite garden, though, was the Japanese Garden. It’s fun because there is a tiered waterfall, and the idea is that you walk on stepping stones through the layers of the waterfall or over tiny bridges to view it in several different angles.

There are water lilies on each tier of the waterfall that look like there are fireflies captured in them, and there are little stone statues hidden in surrounding shrubbery. A couple there asked me to take their picture on a couple of the stepping stones from the bottom.


The Hillwood Mansion and Gardens are not, comparatively, well-known tourist destinations in the Washington DC area. The more traditional landmarks would be The Capital Building, the Newseum, The Spy Museum, The Botanical Gardens, without a doubt intriguing and fun places to visit. But, for a unique experience to explore the history and the mind of someone who kept her rich home and history alive, Hillwood is definitely worth a visit no matter the means of transportation.

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