$85 Million Hamptons Home With Ties to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jackie Kennedy Finds a Buyer
An oceanfront Hamptons megamansion once asking $120 million has found a buyer after reducing the price by almost 30%.
The 3.6-acre estate, known as Dune Cottage, in East Hampton Village, was originally part of an 80-acre estate that belonged to a wealthy ink manufacturer and has a long and colorful history that included two fires and connections to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It went into contract asking $84.9 million.
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Today, the property on Dune Road was originally part of and includes a 14,000-square-foot main residence, a two-bedroom guest house, 225 feet of ocean frontage and a tunnel that connects the pool area to the beach. The home, which is appropriately located atop a dune, went into contract Tuesday, according to the listing with Hedgerow Exclusive properties.
The seller is Ann Tenenbaum, who purchased the property along with her late husband, private equity investor Thomas H. Lee, in 2001 for $16.2 million, according to real estate website Behind the Hedges. The couple rebuilt the home twice, once after they bought it and once after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2013, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Grosvenor Atterbury-designed home was originally the summer residence of ink manufacturer Frank Wiborg, part of a larger 80-acre estate. It was inherited by his eldest daughter, Jazz Age socialite Sara Murphy, and her husband, the expat Americans that inspired Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night.”
According to their granddaughter, the Murphys didn’t always appreciate Fitzgerald’s attentions. “It’s such a mean book but so well-written,” they said of it.
In those days, Wiborg’s original 30-room home was the grandest in the Hamptons and would have been the site of many society events. The Murphys had spent time in the French Riviera and were part of the artist circle that included Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, among others.
In the 1940s, the Murphys chose not to maintain the sprawling property and the East Hampton fire department burned most of it down. What remained was later purchased by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s sister, Lee Radziwill, and her then-husband Herbert Ross, in the 1980s. They briefly agreed to sell it to Jerry Seinfeld in 1999 but ended up pulling out of the deal.
Tenenbaum and Lee purchased the home after renting it just as Radziwill and Ross finalized their divorce. The existing two-story stucco home was in bad shape, so they rebuilt it nearly from scratch but chose to keep the original design, according to the Journal. The seller could not immediately be reached for comment.
The property was first listed in June 2024 with Hedgerow for $120 million but was reduced to $95 million less than two months later, listing portals show. The brokerage did not comment on the deal.
