Gilded mansion by the sea was Astor summer home

The Irish Times, January 24, 2008 by Frances O'Rourke, Irish Times Staff Writer

A summer home once owned by American aristocracy is being sold for less than the price of some D4 redbricks.

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 dining room 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 10,545sq ft it is nearly the same size, but at $10.75 million 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 Exterior" Pool, Cabana and Patio

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 drawing room 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.

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 weekend stay in the invitation-only Carnegie Abbey Club. And the agent who brings a buyer to the lead agent is also eligible for a $10,000 selling bonus.

The agency has another Astor mansion by the sea in Newport, the 15-bedroom Beechwood, for sale for $18 million.