Madame Sherri's Castle

Antoinette Bramare was born in Paris in 1878 and worked as a seamstress and nightclub performer before moving to New York in 1911, where she designed costumes for Broadway productions including the Ziegfeld Follies under the stage name Madame Sherri. After her husband's death in 1924, she began spending summers in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and in 1929 bought roughly 600 acres on Gulf Road.

Working without blueprints and changing the design as she went, Sherri built a three-story house that mixed Roman-ruin and French-chalet styles, with an exterior stone staircase leading to her private quarters, a cellar bistro, and a main floor where live trees grew through the roof. Funded partly by gifts from her former assistant, the Oscar-winning costume designer Charles LeMaire, she hosted lavish, widely talked-about parties there through the 1930s and into the 1940s while living across the road in an unheated farmhouse.

LeMaire's support ended after World War II, and Sherri's finances collapsed. She found the house vandalized when she returned to it in 1959, and it burned down in 1962; the property was foreclosed the following year. Sherri died in Brattleboro, Vermont, in October 1965.

Ann Stokes, who bought the land, preserved it and transferred it to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests between 1976 and 1991, with a further donation in 2005. The 513-acre Madame Sherri Forest now includes the Anne Stokes Loop Trail and a trail up Wantastiquet Mountain. The staircase's uppermost arch, weakened by decades of rain and freeze-thaw cycles, collapsed on its own in July 2021.