After a successful career as a photographer he bought a tract of land in the Catskills and built a studio residence and a resort on it, decorated with sculptures inspired by the Native American art he had seen.

The resort closed and the statues were relocated soon thereafter when Route 28 was widened through it at the end of World War II, but the sculpture garden remained a popular roadside attraction afterwards.

The studio and sculpture garden are located on a 1.3-acre (5,300 m2) lot at the intersection of Da Silva and Route 28, approximately a half-mile (1 km) south of the small hamlet of Boiceville.

The land across the highway is undeveloped since it is owned by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection as a buffer for Ashokan Reservoir to the south.

Seven (the sculptures and totem poles) are art objects and three are buildings: the studio, a shed and a log cabin fronting on Da Silva.

Alternatively the four faces at the base represent the anti-thesis of those on top: Jesus and Satan; Moses and Pharaoh; Buddha and Mara, the king of Demons; and Mohammed and Bacchus, the god of wine.

He set out for the West, where for several years he made a living as an itinerant painter, focusing on scenes of the vanishing frontier life and painting signs and broadsides for traveling circuses and whiskey makers.

He added tennis and croquet courts, bridle paths, and what local lore claims was the first Olympic-size swimming pool in Ulster County.

[1] The resort was very successful, with many celebrity guests, due to its location on Route 28's C-shaped course up through the Catskills into the Adirondacks, in an era when auto touring was just beginning.

It was listed as the summer time residence of Broadway producer Harold Prince, father and son abstract painters Max and Jimmy Ernst, the Austrian composer Karol Rathaus, and the architect Frederick John Kiesler.

Brunel exhibited Native art and artifacts he had collected out west along with his own sculptures that he had started making in the years after he had bought the land.

[2] They sold off parcels of the resort and consolidated the sculptures in their present garden and built the log cabin for the store around 1960, nine years after Gladyse died.

In 1997 the property was sold to the current owners who have been preserving the home and restoring the gardens in keeping with the original style, spirit and unrealized plans for both.