 It is open for tours from April through October.Work on the estate began in 1903, when John Shaffer Phipps promised his fiancée, Margarita Grace (a daughter of businessman Michael P. Grace), that he would build her a home in the United States that resembled her family's British residence at Battle Abbey in Battle, East Sussex, England.The house was ready in 1906 for Phipps, his wife and their young children.