Thursday, August 8, 2024. The past two days we’ve been getting a lot of rain, often steady, even through the night. It brought the temps down to the 60s! A lot of sweaters came out for dinner last night in New York.
This email came to us yesterday:
Historic New York Estate Has Ties To Addison Mizner, Timothy Leary & Standard Oil
One of New York’s historic properties, which includes a 38-room Victorian mansion, a 10,000-square-foot guest home, a stone bowling alley, a carriage house, a gatehouse, and much more on 2,078 acres, has hit the market for $65 million. The property last sold for just $500,000 in 1963, when Standard Oil president Walter C. Teagle sold the long-neglected property to brothers Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon family fortune. If it gets its asking price, it will more than triple the record for a real estate sale price in the Millbrook area, which currently stands at $19 million.
The Hitchcock Estate, also known as Daheim (“at home” in German), became infamous in the 1960s as the domain of Harvard psychologist-turned-LSD-evangelist Timothy Leary, who used the property for psychedelic experimentation for five years …. Considered “the most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon, Leary hosted such counterculture luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and attracted frequent raids by the FBI, which eventually caused him to leave.
The estate fell into disrepair but has undergone extensive renovations in recent years that have restored it to its former glory. High ceilings with intricate designs, ornate fireplaces, elaborate wood paneling, a carved wooden staircase, and stained-glass windows mark the stunning 15,000-square-foot main residence. Its ten bedrooms include a two-room suite connected by a luxurious sitting room. The smaller “bungalow” checks in at 10,000 square feet …
The estate’s massive acreage is mostly wooded, with two lakes, one spanning 45 acres and the other 60 acres. The peaceful forested grounds are complemented by an equestrian complex with stone buildings and a working cattle farm with plenty of hay fields for self-sufficient farming. The bowling alley and gatehouse are also stone, built in a Bavarian style. A tennis complex and staff quarters complete the truly unique property.
You might be wondering why we are re-printing an advertisement for an estate for sale. Well, some of you might remember a column we ran on NYSD called BIG OLD HOUSES, written by John Foreman. Forman, who the world lost in 2016, was a real estate broker by trade but also a big architectural buff, a real historian in anyone’s book, and brought new life to some of America’s forgotten great houses.
His interest in architecture and its social history was lifelong, and no doubt related directly in some way to his own childhood. Which is where all this stuff begins for those of us who are “obsessed.”
In writing his Big Old House pieces, John entered each dwelling with the same anticipation a kid might have for a treasure chest. He went informed but curious to learn more, to understand. He understood the politics of the families that built and dwelled in the houses. He understood the motivations both personal and social of its builders as well, and its designers and architects. He could explain to you how the house was used, lived in, and what happened in The End.
When his daughter was six weeks old, they moved to Daheim in Millbrook, New York. The same Daheim now selling for 65 million bucks. Its famous (abridged) history is recounted above, but “When John took over the house,” his daughter Jazzy recalled, “the windows were boarded up and to find where the leaks were, he turned on a tap and waited for the water to come pouring out. He renovated the house — a daunting project — himself and then moved in.”
It was John who recognized the great promise of this house and did everything in his power (and budget) to restore it to the best of his ability. He would be shocked and amazed at the $65 million price tag of his once-beloved home and I’m sure he’d have a thing or two to say about the integrity of its restoration, but still very pleased to know that the attempt to “restore it to its former glory” was even made.
What follows is a BIG OLD HOUSE column from October 2011 John wrote about HIS home of 34 years:
Aches and pains
Here’s Daheim, my home in Millbrook for thirty years, in a photo taken 2 weeks ago. It’s a complicated looking house by any measure, and if it isn’t huge, considering others I’ve blogged about, it ain’t small either.
Daheim was in ruins when I signed my first lease in December of 1981. It’s taken a lot of work, time, sweat, love and money to get it looking like this. Remember Sisyphus? Well, probably you don’t, but he was a mythological Greek king condemned by the gods to spend eternity repeatedly rolling a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll back down again.
You probably didn’t notice in the photo above that the eaves on my porte cochere are a mess. Actually, they look better since Eddie, my in-house construction man, pulled off the rotted wood in preparation for repairs. The explanation for the leaking eaves, while long and dull, can be summed up in two words that bring knowing nods from any old house lover, to wit: “flat roof.”
This one was resurfaced fifty years ago with tar and white pebbles. The desirability of this system completely eludes me, since it makes finding a leak virtually impossible.
The porch — sorry, “piazza” — at Daheim has 52 columns and probably five times as many decorative brackets. This pair is resting on the parapet until Eddie gets the porte cochere back together.
There are no longer so many houses like mine, in part because so many of them have burned down. The builder of Daheim had extensive interests in gas illumination companies, which must have made him more aware of fire danger.
Shortly before World War I, he built this stone addition to house modern kitchen and servants’ facilities, and to encapsulate a mammoth coal fired steam boiler in a steel and cement basement chamber. The exterior walls aren’t veneered with stone, they’re built with a two-foot thickness of it. The interior floors are supported with steel beams.
My kitchen could probably survive direct mortar fire with only minor damage. The boiler room originally wasn’t even accessible from inside the house. During the winter of 1982, my first caretaker, Noel, and I decided to open an access door from the basement corridor. Who would have thought the interior non-bearing wall would be a foot and a half thick and made of block and cement?
You also probably didn’t notice in the image above that some miscreant has made off with my copper gutters. When Daheim was new, and doubtless for many succeeding salad years of maintenance, those scrolled eaves and joist ends glowed under multiple coats of dark shiny varnish. But … not happening now.
On the ground floor, the kitchen wing is connected to the wood frame section of the house with a flat-roofed serving pantry (don’t even ask). On the second floor the connection is via this utterly charming “Bridge of Sighs.” I can only paint Daheim in sections, but we got around to this side recently enough for it to still look pretty good.
Well, “pretty good” unless you notice that dormer on the fourth floor. I’ll get to it, after I re-point the chimney. Jeez, it doesn’t look half that bad from the other side.
The chimney looks deceptively fine from this view of the east facade. Daheim’s exterior envelope is so visually complicated you tend not to notice the warts.
Speaking of warts, some benighted hippie from the Leary days — you do know Timothy Leary lived here, right? — managed to remove this attic window entirely. Noel and I temporarily boarded it up 30 years ago and it’s still on my very (very) long “to do” list.
Here’s the south elevation of the house. The mulberry tree and the gigantic yew bushes were deer-ravaged stumps in 1981. I have tended and protected them for 30 years and were they children, they would long ago have left home to make their own way in the world. Since they’re plants, they’re not going anywhere.
I used to keep the yews trimmed as spheres, but that plan lost traction years ago. Now they’re way too big for me to tackle. Last spring a landscape service gave me an estimate … $2,400. Not going to happen.
Nowadays I’m just trimming the yews to avoid actual contact with the house, but this is not the look I intended.
Daheim really is charming. I had the local historical society here for a tour and a tea last weekend, and everyone loved the place.
You probably didn’t notice this hole in the image above. Alas, it’s but one of a number made by aggressive squirrels whom I simply cannot keep out of the piazza ceiling. Were it not for my cat, they’d rampage inside the house as well. As soon as we plug one of these up another appears, although it can take a while to notice.
Here are the Daheim barns, seen from the air in 1982. 25 years after I snapped this picture from a friend’s plane, a catastrophic fire destroyed 60% of the complex. A remarkable reconstruction project has ensued. It was the subject of a luncheon lecture delivered last week by yours truly to 300 guests at the 20th annual Dutchess Land Conservancy’s Patrons’ Lunch, held at the Barns. The centerpiece of the project is a facsimile of the ornate main barn, constructed within the compromised stone walls of the original.
Here’s a contemporary view of the barns from earth. Like the main house, Daheim’s barns are so complicated you don’t notice the new metal roofed equipment shed (light green roof on the left) that replaces the grand old hay barn. When built during the first decade of the twentieth century, this farm was a model dairy. For the last half century it’s seen a lot of hard use as a beef cattle operation.
This is the roof of the molasses barn, taken before the fire. Admittedly kicked around for years, it was still essentially intact.
The barn complex is “U-shaped.” The big barn — or corn barn, or feed barn, depending on who’s describing it — is at the bottom of the “U,” flanked by the molasses barn on one side and a small stable on the other. The arms of the “U” are formed by a cattle barn on one side and a new equipment shed (formerly a hay barn) on the other. Each arm ends with the old dairyman’s cottage on one side, and the original dairy office on the other. The image above is a detail of the dairyman’s cottage.
This is the old hay barn, the farm workers’ dormitory and dairyman’s cottage at the far right, seen before the fire. The hay barn was completely destroyed, the roof of the dormitory burned off, and the cottage was spared.
Here was the scene at Daheim on the night of November 15, 2007. It was the largest fire in the history of Dutchess County — 8 fire companies responded; 80 firemen struggled until dawn the next day to control it. They managed to save the cow barn, the dairy office, the dairyman’s cottage and part of the dormitory.
The next morning it looked like Warsaw or Berlin after the Second World War. Those white clumps on the ground are the remains of fire retarding foam. Still smoldering hay bales had to be hauled away and spread out on a nearby burn site. The heart of the fire was 350 tons of recently delivered corn that burned with a white hot intensity — and continued to burn for another ten days.
When this ghostly image was taken, the corn and hay were still smoldering.
The barns on this estate have always been part of a working farm and there was no question that something would be reconstructed. The new equipment shed went up rapidly. There was talk of replacing the big barn with something similarly functional. Instead, my landlords have built an elaborate facsimile of the original. The image above shows a new poured concrete foundation and steel beams being constructed within the old walls. That’s American-made steel, by the way, from Benson Steel in Saugerties, New York.
A local lumber firm, J & J Lumber, has to date cut 57,000 board feet of lumber for the project. J & J couldn’t cut anything longer than 16 feet, which is why the portable sawmill in the image was purpose bought. 130 spruce trees, planted a century ago on the property, have provided all needed lumber.
The big barn’s original floor was made of wood. The new one is constructed of 68 “spancrete” slabs, each 4′ x 18′. Spancrete is a sort of cinderblock on steroids, used frequently in parking garages. Here’s one being hoisted into the sky.
And here it is being fitted onto the new floor.
The roof trusses are tied to vertical steel beams anchored in poured concrete. There is no weight on the original stone walls.
Here is the restored interior of the big barn, notable for its magnificent system of embellished trusses. This is surely one of the great interior spaces in Dutchess County. It might have been lost forever, but here it is, intact for generations to come.
Here’s detail of the new sliding barn doors. Steel verticals visible between wooden wall panels support the new roof. When the doors are closed, the unfinished interior of the original stone envelope is visible.
Even the scrolled rafter ends have been reproduced in this reconstruction (above, left). Although not yet mounted on the roof, replicas of two louvered lanterns complete with over-scaled copper finials, were on view at today’s luncheon.
And here they are (above, right), poised for positioning on the new roof. The tops of the finials are removable for installation. Beneath each is an iron “eye” which the dangling “hook” on the crane in the background will link under, then haul the cupola to the ridgepole. Once the hook is disengaged, a worker will reattach the top of each finial. Although it’s unlikely any of us on the estate today will be around to see it, in thirty years those copper finials will have turned a heavenly green.
The Tennis House
Once upon a time, there used to be a tennis court on the lawn in front of Daheim. Frankly, from an aesthetic point of view, this was a pretty loony place to put it. However, there it sat, spang in the middle of the view, surrounded by statues and boxed trees and flower-lined graveled paths, none of which was particularly enhanced by its presence.
Then came many (many) years of desolation and lack of maintenance, during which the lawns around the court — indeed, around the whole place — turned into fields. Those fields crept across the old clay court obscuring it completely, and by the time I arrived in 1981 the tennis court had vanished under a lawn. What hadn’t vanished was a charming, if very down at heel, tennis pavilion.
Here’s a glimpse of Daheim from the porch of the tennis house, giving a sense of the buildings’ relationship to one another.
In the 1960s, Tim Leary’s hippies rechristened it the “meditation house,”although I doubt much clear thinking went on here. By the time I arrived, the windows were mostly broken out, the roof leaked like a sieve, and the woodwork was gray with water damage. My landlords put a quick budget roof on the place, I scrubbed down the oak paneling with linseed oil and turpentine, had the windows reglazed, and turned it into a writing house. I wrote The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age at this desk.
Here’s the view in the other direction (above, right). I’ve never dared to actually light a fire in that fireplace. The chimney is surrounded by the huge limbs of towering evergreens and God only knows what shy fur bearing creatures of the forest live in the flue.
All the stained glass panels were smashed with the exception of this one. Not sure what cricket bats had to do with tennis, but they are a decorative motif. Back in the day, the tennis house would have provided storage for racquets and nets, cushions for outdoor seating, a marble basin (still in the closet) for washing up, and a place to sit inside and maybe even change.
Here’s a detail of the ceiling (above, left). I haven’t used the tennis house in almost twenty years, but every few months I have Antonia trek across the lawn — actually, she drives her Jeep across the lawn — and gives it a thorough cleaning. I have a book project I’ve been thinking about for years and since I’ve resigned from writing “Old House” articles for the Millbrook Independent, I think I’m going to start writing it out here.
Daheim was the subject of many postcard views in the early twentieth century. This framed collection is by the door (above, right).
This detail shows the door hardware, which was originally painted shiney black. The oxidized surface is now covered with clear varnish.
Immediately to the south of the tennis house is this stair which descends from the tennis lawn to a walled orchard below. The bulging stonework, sadly, has been like that for years.
Here’s the other side of the building, seen from the walled orchard below (above, right).
The gable ends were once elaborately painted, but not many traces remain.
The orchard itself was once a hugely elaborate millionaire’s garden, with an extensive range of greenhouses facing the tennis house across two acres of closely cultivated flowers and vegetables. Those two acres today are just a lawn, planted with fruit trees and surrounded with an immense palisade of century old evergreens.
