The main house and the grounds of The Mount in Lenox, Mass., have been restored, but foreclosure may be only weeks away.

AP / MATTHEW CAVANAUGH

LENOX, Mass. — By 1997, the palatial estate built nearly a century earlier in this upscale country town by wealthy novelist Edith Wharton had fallen into disrepair.

The terrace that encircled the 25-room European-style house was on the verge of collapse. Chunks of stucco had broken off the exterior. The windows were riddled with rot.

“The building was in very sad shape,” said Stephanie Copeland, president of Edith Wharton Restoration, a nonprofit group formed to rescue the 48-acre property from disintegration. “It was clear that we were either going to restore it or we were going to lose it.”

Intent on returning the home, called The Mount, to its original grandeur, the group launched an ambitious and costly renovation project. Preserving the building was important, it believed, because although Wharton is best known for her more than 40 books, she was also an accomplished interior designer and gardener — and the Mount’s handsome decor and elaborate landscaping were a testament to that.

Wharton’s most famous works include The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, which won her a Pulitzer Prize. But her first book, was The Decoration of Houses, an 1897 guide to interior design written with Ogden Codman, the architect and pioneering interior designer whom Wharton had commissioned to redecorate her Newport house, Land’s End.

In it, she expounded on her belief that a home should embody the principles of proportion, harmony, simplicity, and suitability. Seven years later, influenced by her frequent European travels, she published Italian Villas and Their Gardens, in which she wrote that gardens should be divided into rooms and should blend into the natural landscape.

“Wharton was not only one of our greatest writers, she was also a major contributor to the field of interior design, architecture, and landscape gardening,” Copeland said. “This is an area that’s very unappreciated about her.”

The Mount became Wharton’s design laboratory, a place where she could put her theories into practice. Her 16,000-square-foot house, for example, was built on a hillside to take advantage of its sweeping views of the Berkshire Hills and nearby Laurel Lake. Its main rooms overlooked three acres of formal gardens, which incorporated grass terraces, stone walls, and a crushed marble walk, reflecting English, French, and Italian styles.

And its entrance hall had double glass doors that kept visitors out of the main house unless Wharton was home to welcome them. “While the main purpose of a door is to admit,” she wrote in The Decoration of Houses, “its secondary purpose is to exclude.”

Wharton’s property also included a two-story stable, a gatehouse, and a greenhouse with an attached potting shed. Inside the house were a gallery where she displayed art and furniture acquired during her travels, a drawing room with ornamental plaster ceiling, a 2,600-book library, a servants’ wing, and an attic containing eight servants’ bedrooms.

As Copeland likes to say, “The Mount is the Monticello of Massachusetts,” a reference to Thomas Jefferson’s preserved plantation in Virginia. In other words, just as Monticello is a monument to Jefferson’s contributions to American architecture and gardens, Wharton’s home is a monument to hers.

Thanks to the efforts of Edith Wharton Restoration, much of the property now looks the way it did when Wharton lived there with her husband, Teddy, and their beloved dogs. The gardens have had a $5-million makeover, during which their original footprint was replicated using historical photographs. The house also has a new roof, cupola, stucco siding, windows, shutters, terrace, and stone foundation. Inside the main house, the principal public rooms, as well as Wharton’s bedroom suite, have been restored.

Meticulous efforts have been made to match the look of the house from more than a century ago. By having an analyst study the multiple layers of paint on Wharton’s sitting room walls, an original color palette was re-created. Her bedroom required an even more arduous process. It had been decorated with a textured wallpaper that is no longer manufactured, so a Canadian company that makes custom paper was hired to create a facsimile, which it did using colored rags.

The nonprofit restoration group was established in 1980 but didn’t start renovation on the property, which went through a series of owners after it was sold in 1911, until 1997. That’s because the house had a tenant — Shakespeare & Company, a theater group that moved in during 1978 and left in 2001 — whose presence caused work to be delayed.

The total cost of renovation to what is now a National Historic Landmark is expected to reach at least $30 million, and a $10 million endowment will be needed to cover maintenance and upkeep, according to Copeland. About $14 million has been spent on the project so far, she said. Money has come from private donations and state and federal grants.

“Visiting The Mount is an educational experience,” Copeland said, “because not only do you hear about Wharton’s theories of design, you actually see the house she built and the gardens she made based on those theories.”If you go

FROM PROVIDENCE: Take Route 146 North to the Mass Pike (I-90) interchange. Follow the Pike west to exit 2 (Lee). From Lee, follow Route 20 west for about three miles. Turn left onto Plunkett Street, opposite Blantyre Road. Entrance is nearly one mile down the street.

VISITOR INFORMATION: The Mount will reopen Friday. The current plan is to be open Wednesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., then switch to seven days a week after Memorial Day (May 26). Tickets are $13 for adults, $11 students until June 15; $16 adults, $13 students from then until Sept. 1. Children free. Visitors are urged to check the Web site (edithwharton.org) or call (413) 551-5111 for updates.

The Mount, the splendid mansion that Edith Wharton built in the Berkshires in 1902 after fleeing Newport (and an overbearing mother), will open for the season this Friday after all, more beautiful than ever thanks to a 10-year restoration project. The issue had been in doubt following last month’s resignation of the restoration group’s president, Stephanie Copeland, and word that the costly renovations had brought the fabled tourist attraction to the edge of bankruptcy.

Whether the National Historic Landmark, which has won several prestigious awards for its restoration, will remain open after the end of this month is still in doubt. Foreclosure, already postponed twice, looms again unless the trustees can come up with $3 million by May 31.

So go see it now — if you’re an optimist, because your ticket purchase will help save a national treasure; if you’re a pessimist, because it may be your last chance. You’ll find other reasons in the following story, written a few weeks before the problems came to light.

— Doug Riggs, Travel editor