US/€7.38m:A summer home once owned by American aristocracy is being sold for less than the price of some D4 redbricks. Frances O'Rourkereports
Fancy a luxury Italianate-style 24-room mansion built in the 1850s on five acres with a heated outdoor pool, ballroom, music room, and a formal diningroom with 56 hand-painted Chinese panels? Not to mention furniture from an Elton John house and John F Kennedy's rocking chair.
It's as big and as grand as the French embassy featured in this supplement last week, and at 980sq m (10,545sq ft) it is nearly the same size, but at $10.75 million (€7.38m) it costs a fraction of its price.
It is being sold through the Lila Delman real estate agency in Newport, and Wexford woman Catherine Gazder who works with the agency expects that well-to-do Irish buyers may be interested in the property, which sits between a sheltered harbour and the open ocean.
Oakwood, built in the 1850s as a summer house for the Astor family, is one of the gilded mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, a resort where America's plutocrats reigned in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
About three hours from New York and an hour from Boston, Newport, a golf and sailing centre, is still a playground for the rich, and even though the state of Rhode Island has suffered a housing downturn in the past year, luxury homes in the state are attracting growing interest.
Oakwood, at 50 Narragansett Avenue, is being sold by Philadelphia-based Irish-American property developer Brian O'Neill, who bought both the mansion and Newport's golf and sailing Carnegie Abbey Club from international resort developer Peter de Savary in 2004.
Since then, O'Neill has renovated the seven-bedroom eight-bathroom house completely, adding a luxury bathroom to the main bedroom suite and turning the 26ft by 40ft ballroom into a comfortable drawingroom still used for entertaining.
There is access to the outdoors from nearly every room.The five acres of landscaped grounds include a rose garden, a six-hole putting green, lawn tennis court and a pool stocked with koi.
It comes with property taxes of about $30,000 (€20,000) year.
Real estate agents from the northeast US have been invited to a glittery cocktail do at Oakwood tomorrow night where they'll be entered into a draw for membership in the invitation-only Carnegie Abbey Club. And the agent who brings a buyer to the lead agent Lila Delman is also eligible for a $10,000 (€6,880) selling bonus.
The agency has another Astor mansion by the sea in Newport, the 15-bedroom Beechwood, for sale for $18 million (€12.3m)
www.liladelman.com (click on Newport, then on Melanie Delman to get to Oakwood)
