Innisfree Garden began as the private property of Walter Beck (1864–1954) and Marion Burt Beck (1876–1959), who married in 1922. He was a painter, the son of a German garden architect, and she was the daughter of Wellington R. Burt, a lumber baron from Saginaw, and inherited in 1919 the estate of and part of the family fortune. They commissioned a residence in 1930, designed by Robert Carrère and Norman Averill from New York. It was modeled after the manor house of Wisley, Surrey, UK, which was assembled in 1915 of remnants of older houses, and placed on a plateau overlooking the central Tyrrel Lake. The name Innisfree was taken from a poem by W. B. Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree".