The restoration of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Top Cottage, a National Historic Landmark, is one of the most significant historic preservation projects in America today. Designed by President Roosevelt himself, Top Cottage is the only presidential home other than Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Poplar Forest ever designed by a President. It is the most important expression of President Roosevelt's ideas about architecture and reflects his love of the Dutch Colonial stone buildings of the Hudson Valley. It may also be the first residence ever designed by a person with a disability to enable him to live as independently as possible.

FDR built Top Cottage high on Dutchess Hill overlooking the Hudson Valley in 1938 and he used it as a refuge from the formality and stress of presidential life. It was a simple fieldstone house with no air conditioning, no telephone, no screens on the porch, no formal landscaping—"just the trees"—and the tranquil view, as he put it. FDR anticipated writing his memoirs there after he left the presidency. Due to his death at the beginning of his fourth term in office, that was never to happen. The cottage did serve him well during his lifetime, however, as both a retreat and a place to entertain distinguished visitors and foreign dignitaries, including Winston Churchill and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Top Cottage was privately owned for over forty years but in 1996 the Open Space Institute purchased it with a grant from the Lila Acheson and DeWitt Wallace Fund for the Hudson Highlands. It was recently restored through the efforts of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (FERI) and members of the Roosevelt family. The work was directed by John G. Waite Associates, one of the leading historic preservation architectural firms in the country. The restoration was completed in June 2001 and the property was turned over to the National Park Service and opened to the public. Its addition to the Roosevelt National Historic Site (which already includes FDR's mother's home, Springwood, and Eleanor Roosevelt's home, Val-Kill), will enable the National Park Service to tell the full story of the Roosevelt family in Hyde Park for the first time.

More than half a century after his death, many people don't fully grasp the fact that FDR was unable to stand, let alone walk unaided, yet he was determined to maintain his independence. FDR designed Top Cottage so that he could move around in his wheelchair unaided and have access to whatever he might need to entertain independently. The one-floor design has no threshold barriers and everything is within easy reach. This is, perhaps, the only historic structure that specifically commemorates the achievements of a disabled person. It will have special meaning to persons with disabilities as a beacon for highlighting the issue of accessibility and independent living. What better role model than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose lifelong efforts to overcome polio and success in establishing the Warm Springs Foundation and the March of Dimes contributed so much to transforming attitudes toward people with disabilities and led to the development of the polio vaccine?