The Manor House 18 Elm Avenue

At the end of the revolutionary war, Peter Jay Munro and his wife Margaret White began to acquire the property on the middle neck of Richbell's purchase formerly held by Samuel Palmer and his heirs. This Federal style country house was erected sometime between 1789 when the land was acquired, and 1797, when it first appears on a map of the area. It was passed down through the Munro and Jay family until it was sold in 1845 to Edward Knight Collins, who established the first American transatlantic steamship line, and secured the first U.S. Mail contract, becoming one of the wealthiest men in New York.

Collins named the estate "Larchmont" after the larch trees Munro had planted on rising ground between the house and the Post Road. He commissioned the designer of Central Park to survey and lay out its grounds. In 1865, Collins auctioned off 288 acres of his land to an Illinois-born banker. In 1871, he added the word manor to the estate's name although the property had never been part of a colonial manor. From there he formed the Larchmont Manor Company to develop the land as suburban homes for New York City businessmen. The Manor Company turned the dwelling into a hotel, named The Manor House. It also served as a club for Manor property owners and offered lodging to their overflow guests. Following the dissolution of the Manor Company in 1891, the building was converted back into a private residence.

The underlying Federal-style core of the house is immediately apparent both externally and internally in its rigid biaxial symmetry, paired side chimneys, and superstructure raised on a tall basement that orignally contained the kitchen and other service rooms. The cornice of the veranda matches the deep modillioned cornice at the eaves. The three gabled dormers with round arched windows and delicate curved panes that punctuate the side-gable roof may also have been added when the house was remodeled. The polychromatic decoration of the overdoor and sidelights, painted in France around 1850, feature floral and vegetable motifs based on the vocabulary of 17th-century Dutch painting along with typical 19th-century angels.