The Jackie Kennedy Onassis Selling Tactic
After a member of a Brazilian billionaire banking family dropped more than $25 million on a penthouse on Manhattan’s Park Avenue that was once one of the childhood homes of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis, WWD takes a look at other homes on the market with links to the style icon.
MERRYWOOD: $49.5 Million
Merrywood, a grand estate on the banks of the Potomac River in McClean, Va., became another childhood home of Kennedy Onassis when her mother married its owner, Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss, in the Forties.
Set on 7 private acres of land, it includes a 23,000-square-foot, nine-bedroom Georgian-style brick and limestone main residence that was built in 1919, a tennis court, an outdoor pool and a pavilion with an indoor lap pool.
The current owner is AOL founder Steve Case, who paid $24.5 million for the estate, which is about 8 miles from downtown Washington, in 2005.
LASATA: $35 Million
Lasata, the East Hampton Village estate on Further Lane, is perhaps most well-known for being the Bouvier family’s summer home during the Twenties and Thirties.
It was where the future first lady — known as Jacqueline Bouvier then — spent her childhood vacations until around the age of 12 and was where she became an accomplished horse rider.
These days it belongs to Reed Krakoff, Tiffany & Co.’s chief artistic officer, who has been trying to sell it since last September with no takers, prompting the former creative director of Coach to reduce the asking price of the 100-year-old house by $4 million to just a touch under $35 million.
GREY GARDENS: $18 Million
Known as Grey Gardens, this shingle-style East Hampton home was owned by Kennedy Onassis’ reclusive aunt and cousin — Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Beale.
The eccentric duo was profiled in the namesake 1975 documentary, which was adapted to a 2005 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, as well as a Broadway musical.
At one point, Kennedy Onassis and her sister, Lee Radziwill, provided funding for necessary repairs in order to stop the house from being knocked down by the local authorities for not meeting their standards.
The house, which was overrun by cats, was purchased at the end of the Seventies by The Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn and her husband Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, who restored the house to its original grandeur.
WEXFORD: $4 Million
John F. Kennedy and Kennedy Onassis had a modest ranch in Virginia built in the early Sixties as a weekend retreat from the White House, with the former first lady designing it herself and naming it Wexford after the Irish county where her husband’s ancestors lived.
Sadly the family only spent three weekends there before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and the house was sold a few months later.
The four-bedroom home, set on an impressive 166 acres of land, is now on the market for close to $4 million, a huge discount from when it was first put up for sale by its current owners in 2013 for just under $11 million.
LEE RADZIWILL’S PARIS PAD: 3.4 Million Euros
Onassis’ younger sister Radziwill recently listed her longtime chic Paris apartment for sale, asking 3.4 million euros.
Located on the sixth floor of a building dating back to 1890, the 1,625-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment comes with a large balcony that overlooks Avenue Montaigne and boasts a bird’s-eye view of the Eiffel Tower.
A source told the New York Post that the 84-year-old, who was once European royalty thanks to her second marriage to a Polish prince, doesn’t spend enough time at the apartment anymore, and prefers to stay at the Plaza Athénée.
Once an interior designer to the superwealthy, the socialite decorated the pied-à-terre herself.
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