Church and his wife Isabel (1836–1899) named their estate after a fortress-treasure house in ancient Greater Persia (modern-day Armenia), which also overlooked a river valley.

[2] It is owned and operated by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and is also supported by The Olana Partnership, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.

On March 31, 1860, a few months before his marriage to Isabel Carnes, Church returned to purchase a 126-acre (51 ha) hardscrabble farm on a south-facing slope of a hill in Columbia County, near the thriving towns of Hudson and Catskill, New York.

In addition, Church laid out gardens and orchards, dredged a marsh to create a 10-acre (4.0 ha) lake, planted trees, and built a studio.

[11] For Christmas in 1879, Isabel Church gave her husband several books on the geography of the ancient Middle East, and shortly thereafter the couple began calling their property "Olana".

After a two-year anti-development campaign led by scholar David C. Huntington (1922–1990), which culminated in a cover story on Olana in Life magazine,[12] New York State purchased the property in 1966 and it was opened to the public.

Produced during the same period with the same aesthetic and ideological motivations, the landscape at Olana has been compared to Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

[14] He had walked and sketched throughout much of New England and elsewhere by that time, but his formative two years studying with Thomas Cole in nearby Catskill, New York, brought him back to the Hudson Valley.

From various points around the property, one has views of the Hudson River, the Catskill, Taconic and Berkshire Mountain ranges, as well as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.

Church strategically acquired additional adjacent parcels until his property encompassed 250.2 acres (101.3 hectares) and the top of the hill where the main house at Olana now stands.

To conceal, reveal and frame vistas of his own property and the wider Hudson Valley, Church combined natural landforms with the careful layout of carriage drives and extensive plantings of trees and shrubs.

Like Church's painted views of Niagara Falls, Canadian icebergs, and South American volcanoes this scene captures the majesty of nature.

[18] The stone, brick, and polychrome-stenciled villa at Olana is an unusual mixture of Victorian structural elements and Middle-Eastern decorative motifs from different times and places.

[7] Poet John Ashbery described the results: "The ensemble is breathtaking, and despite the proliferation of architectural elements and polychrome tile decoration, it is not busy but solemn and wildly fanciful, like Church's painting.

"[20] Church designed or commissioned many other devices, such as amber glass windows overlaid by cut-paper patterns and carved teak woodwork by Lockwood de Forest's workshops in Ahmadabad, India.

[8] In the studio at Olana he made hundreds of pencil and oil technical drawings for stencils, mantels, banisters, and other architectural elements of the main house.

[8] Olana was one of several grand artist's homes in the Hudson River valley, comparable to Albert Bierstadt's Malkasten in Irvington (destroyed by fire in 1882) and Jasper Francis Cropsey's Ever Rest, in Hastings-on-Hudson.

To the west, the ridge of Sieghenburgh drops off abruptly, offering a view of the Hudson River through a series of native trees planted by Frederic Church in the nineteenth century.

"[22] Church spent over thirty years meticulously designing the landscape—including the excavation of an artificial lake in 1873 to mirror the Hudson and add balance to the viewshed—meanwhile producing dozens of oil sketches of the view from Olana.

The proposed cooling tower would have reached 250 feet in diameter at its highest point discharging a heavy plume and obscuring views of the Catskill Mountains from several locations, including Olana.

Commissioner Carol Ash said at the re-opening in May 2007, "The installation of new state-of-the-art equipment underscores the commitment of New York State to protect this remarkable historic landmark, and we look forward to once again showcasing the unique collections and extraordinary landscapes of one of our most important cultural resources.

Future plans include a reconstruction of the wagon house and a stabilization of the main barn, to better fit their role as year-round centers for education.

[32] Huntington is credited not only with saving the site from public auction but with bringing Church's reputation from obscurity to prominence in relation to the Hudson River School.

Huntington theorized that the sketches and paintings that Church displayed at Olana, ones he either kept outright or reacquired, were key to understanding the painter's personal values.

[32] Huntington supposed that the name "Olana" was a corruption of an ancient language[33]—an article to that effect had been published in the 1890s in the Boston Herald and believed for many decades.

[34] In 1966, Huntington re-established this story, writing that the Arabic word Al'ana, meaning "our place on high", was possibly transliterated to Latin as "Olana".

[34] One volume of this classic Greek work describes a fortified treasure-house named Olana, or Olane,[31] situated on a hillside near the Araxes River in Artaxata,[2] a city in modern-day Armenia, close to the eastern border of Turkey and the northwestern arm of Iran.

John Ashbery agreed, writing in 1997 that Strabo's Artaxata "was one of the supposed sites of the Garden of Eden", and that the Churches must have felt kinship with both the idyllic and the protected qualities of ancient Olana.