Movin’ Out: Billy Joel Lists Long Island Estate for $49 Million

From a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island…

Legendary singer Billy Joel is movin’ out of his waterfront estate on Long Island’s swanky Centre Island. The expansive property, with 26 acres of land and a 20,000-square-foot main house, is located about 40 miles east of Manhattan. Joel is asking $49 million for the vintage estate, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, while taxes are a heart-stopping $625,000 a year. The listing is repped by Bonnie Williamson at Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty.

The estate, built by railway magnate George Bullock in 1914, was originally known as Yeadon. Later, the property was sold to the chairman of pharma giant E.R. Squibb. Now known as Middlesa (middle C being the first note Joel learned on the piano!), the sprawling waterfront spread was purchased by the Piano Man in 2002 for $22.5 million.

The grandly proportioned main house is currently undergoing renovations, a curious time to sell but also a great opportunity for some captain of industry or blue-blooded scion to put their own aristocratic stamp on the place.

The main house, with five bedrooms and six bathrooms plus two more powder rooms, includes everything from a double-height entrance hall with marble tiled floors to Parquet de Versailles floors in the glitzy all-white kitchen. Other amenities include a two-lane bowling alley, a spa, a hair salon, and a wine cellar, not to mention six fireplaces.

Need a bit more room? There is also a three-bedroom “beach house,” which sits right on the estate’s sandy shoreline. Still too cramped? There’s also a three-bedroom guest apartment as well as, for anyone who might still be bursting at the seams, a four-bedroom guesthouse with a pool of its very own.

Indoor and outdoor pools allow for year-round dips, while a floating dock and a boat ramp provide easy access to the Long Island Sound. Perhaps the most extravagant feature of the massive compound’s many extravagant features is the private helicopter pad.

Centre Island, in the prosperous heart of Long Island’s Gold Coast, was made famous in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Nearby are Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill, now a museum, and the beautiful Planting Fields Arboretum.

Joel’s other Long Island home, in Sag Harbor, is not for sale; he also owns a residence in Lantana, Fla., that he picked up in 2015 for $22 million.