Even in the Hamptons, a $75 million asking price for a house is noteworthy. But, all things considered, and given the insane amounts being spent across the Hamptons lately, it may actually be a fairly reasonable asking price for this property, dubbed Oceancastle.
After all, a comparatively puny 0.7-acre oceanfront parcel sold earlier this year to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for $43 million, and last year hedgie Ken Griffen paid $84 million for a seven-acre nearby estate once owned by Calvin Klein. Plus, the $175 million asking price of the eight-acre Meadow Lane estate of Marcia Riklis — the would be Pia Zadora‘s ex-stepdaughter! — makes Oceancastle’s asking price seem almost like a bargain.
The estate boasts 8.3 acres, along with 512 feet of ocean frontage and a magical mansion built in 1929. Listed with Hamptons superagent Tim Davis of Corcoran, the house does need some renovation and upgrades. But the way we see it, they knew how to build in 1929, and this house has withstood some fearsome storms in its time, including the Long Island Express hurricane of 1938. The property also includes a bay-front parcel with a dock for your boat.
The massive, 300-foot-long house rambles along the dunes with a 900-plus-square-foot living room contained within its roughly 19,000 square feet. With a total of 19 bedrooms and 10 full and two half bathrooms across the compound, there are seven oceanfront suites in the main house, plus a four-bedroom staff wing, a guest apartment and an attached guest “cottage” along with a separate residence for guests or staff. There’s also a gym with sauna, an art gallery, a “Coney Island inspired” game room, an oceanside pool and a tennis court.
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Image Credit: Architectural Review, 1930 Back in early 1929, the estate’s original owner, William F. Ladd, was set on spending the Fourth of July in his new house. And he did; the place was built in just six months. Designed by Peabody, Wilson & Brown, who also architected homes for painter Maxfield Parrish and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the house was clad in stucco to look like a then-fashionable French Revival stone manor house. Ladd had the dunes reconfigured so that the house could offer a variety of different floor and ceiling heights as well as quirky twists and turns that ensure interesting and different vistas as one moves about the house.
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Image Credit: Corcoran Despite Ladd’s fat bank account and the mansion’s impeccable architectural pedigree, both the house and its first owner have somewhat notorious histories.
Things didn’t end so happily for Ladd, who was alleged to have bootlegged liquor during Prohibition, shipping sugar from his Cuban plantation to Florida. In June 1949, The New York Times reported that, “William F. Ladd, 63-year-old former New York Stock Exchange member and sportsman, died yesterday morning in his apartment at 45 Tiemann Place of self-inflicted pistol wounds of the head suffered on April 16 in his Palm Beach home. Mr. Ladd also had a home in Southampton, L. I.” He shot himself because his doctor told him he wouldn’t live more than a month. “In April Mr. Ladd left a note to his wife apologizing for his act.”
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Image Credit: Corcoran In 1963, Ladd House, as it was then known, was rented out to house male party guests in town for 18-year-old socialite and department store heiress Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill’s debut party. They trashed the joint. Big time.
Most people today realize that housing a whole bunch of 18-20 year old young men in a giant mansion and supplying them with copious amounts of liquor is not going to end well. And, of course, it didn’t. Newspapers were shocked and dismayed by the youth gone wild, which included boys dancing on the mantelpiece! A psychoanalyst wrote of the event in Life magazine that, “The Southampton rampage was an expression of mass psychosis—mass madness.”
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Image Credit: Corcoran In 1964, The New York Times reported on the trial of some of the party guests. (That’s right, the scene was so out of control, criminal charges were filed!) “There was also testimony that some youths had played ‘yacht’ by climbing on the mantel and trying to turn a decorative ship’s wheel fastened there. Miss Wetherill, who says she has lost much of her enthusiasm for debut parties, testified that this was regarded as ‘very funny.’” [Well—it is a little funny.] “Assistant District Attorney Theodore R. Jaffe told Suffolk County Judge Thomas Stark that the defendants were “smart alecks who were being fancy.” Charges were eventually dropped.
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Image Credit: Corcoran More than a decade later, in 1978, eccentric theater producer Roy Radin bought the house. The esate became infamous as the luxury site for drug-fueled parties, including one in which model Melonie Haller alleged she was raped for smashing a video recorder taping rough sex among the guests. In 1981, businessman Robert McKeage pleaded guilty to assaulting Haller.
(By the way, Radin was murdered in California in 1983, in what was dubbed The Cotton Club Murder; he was attempting to produce a movie about the Cotton Club along with Robert Evans; a woman called Karen Greenberger was angry about being denied a role as co-producer and hired a hitman. She was found guilty.)
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Image Credit: Corcoran The following decade, in 1983, infamous scamster Barry Trupin purchased Oceancastle to live in while he renovated—and most said desecrated—the former du Pont house next door into a garish behemoth that became known as Dragon’s Head.
(Dragon’s Head was the most notorious house in the Hamptons in the 1980s. The Washington Post noted in 1984, that, when complete, “Guests will frolic under a 30-foot waterfall cascading into an indoor saltwater swimming pool, well-stocked with tropical fish. They will recline on Turkish pillows in Muhammad’s Alley or fill their cups in the Normandy Pub, two of the castle’s 63 rooms.” Unsurprisingly, old line Southampton dowagers dropped their lorgnettes so fast they were blurs.)
After Trupin was sent to jail for tax evasion, Calvin Klein bought Trupin’s Dragon’s Head and, much to the delight of many in Southampton, tore it down.
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Image Credit: Corcoran Oceancastle itself was purchased by lawyer and real estate investor Julia Vance Carter later in the 1980s. You’ll be relieved to hear that the Carters lived quietly in the house. She died in 2014, and it’s an LLC tied to her family who is currently selling the property.
We can’t wait to see what happens next with this storied house because, if history repeats itself in any way, it’s bound to be a doozy!