The American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church grew up swaddled in wealth and made a heap more as one of the most famous artists of his era. In 1872 he and his family moved into a bespoke house that blended Persian, Moorish, and Italianate architecture high on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, just across from the town of Catskill. They called the place Olana and stocked it with treasures and art collected over years of travel in Europe and the Middle East. Landscape views unfolded in every direction, framed by Church’s carefully pruned vegetation and freshly planted trees; he’d found a passion for making three-dimensional vistas that rivaled his desire to paint them.

On one of the sloping lawns of Olana, state-owned since 1966, the British American artist Ellen Harvey has built Winter in the Summer House , an enclosed gazebo made of gold-framed mirrors that reflect their natural surroundings and—from certain angles—Olana itself.…