Jackie O.’s Collection of Homes Was as Iconic as It Gets

When Eaddo and Peter D. Kiernan III first laid eyes on Hammersmith Farm in Newport, R.I., in the 1990s, they loved it immediately.

Immortalized as the site of the 1953 wedding reception of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, and later dubbed President Kennedy’s summer White House, the circa-1880s estate overlooking Narragansett Bay hadn’t been lived in for decades. But Kiernan, a self-described patriot who said he knew the late John F. Kennedy Jr. , realized instantly it would be the perfect summer home for his own sprawling Irish Catholic family. 

The Kiernans purchased Hammersmith Farm for just over $8 million in 1999, and then spent more than 10 years restoring it, drawing on old sketches, photographs and stories shared by Jackie’s stepbrother, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss III, whose family built the estate about a century before. “We would literally say, ‘Tell us everything you can remember,’ ” said Kiernan, a former Goldman Sachs banker. When Auchincloss saw the finished renovation, Kiernan said, he wept. 

“There are pretty houses in the Hamptons and in Nantucket, but we wanted to do something that was authentically connected to what had gone on here for a very long time,” Kiernan said. 

Born into wealth, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis lived in homes ranging from apartments in New York City to houses in Georgetown and estates in Newport, Virginia and Martha’s Vineyard. Many were legacy properties that, nearly 30 years after Jackie’s death, still command top-dollar among luxury buyers drawn to their classical style, history and aesthetic. 

In Washington, D.C., real-estate agent Jamie Peva of Washington Fine Properties said homes tied to Jackie and John Kennedy can command a roughly 10% premium even in Georgetown, a historic neighborhood full of notable residents. “It might be a conversation starter that [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger lived there, but it doesn’t translate into money unless it’s the Kennedys,” he said.

Peva said it helps that the couple—along with their families and later, Jackie herself—owned exceptional homes in prime locations. “The house they went to the White House from was one of the most important houses in Georgetown,” Peva said. 

Jackie’s name is an instant draw and marketing boon, said Eileen O’Neill of the Corcoran Group, who is marketing Lasata, one of her childhood homes in the Hamptons, for $55 million. But provenance only goes so far, O’Neill said, and Lasata’s classic elegance and exacting renovations by the recent owners have drawn interest from potential buyers. “Comparable sales and the climate of the market is really what dictates price,” she said. 

That was the case when Jackie’s childhood apartment at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan sold for $25.25 million in 2017, said Jeremy Stein of Sotheby’s International Realty, who was involved in the deal. The buyer was banking heir Jacob M. Safra, records show. “The building speaks for itself,” said Stein, citing location, architecture and a long history of prominent residents, including Jackie. “It remains this iconic, great building that has a cachet, but it lives up to the cachet,” he said. 

Read on for a closer look at notable properties tied to Jackie over the years, based on property records, multiple biographies and the accounts of real-estate agents. 

As a young child, Jackie spent summers at a lavish East Hampton estate owned by her paternal grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr. Known as Lasata, meaning “place of peace” in the Algonquin language of the native Montaukett people, the estate sat on roughly 14 acres. It was set back from Further Lane and had a long, curving drive and 15-room manor built in the 1910s, according to the book “Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: A Life” by Donald Spoto. 

When designer Reed Krakoff and his wife, interior designer Delphine Krakoff, bought the property in 2007, the manor hadn’t been renovated in years, Reed Krakoff said. The Krakoffs paid $25 million for two parcels totaling about 11 acres, records show. The couple spent nearly two years restoring the house, using building techniques and materials original to the home, he said. They restored single-pane glass windows and instead of sheetrock walls they used three-coat plaster on metal lathe. They also refurbished and restored all of the existing hardware and fixtures, he said. (For example, the bathtubs are porcelain over iron.) 

Krakoff said there is a “mystique” to owning a famous property, but the real draw was the house itself. “It’s a really rare thing to find a beautiful, historic house that hasn’t been altered in a way that takes away from the authenticity,” he said. The couple, who have restored around 15 homes, uncovered and restored original oak-paneled walls from the Bouviers’ time under Louis XV-style paneling added later.

Around 2017, the Krakoffs subdivided the property and sold it in two parts. A neighbor purchased a nearly 4-acre parcel with a sunken tennis court for $11.25 million. David Zander, a television, commercial and film producer based in Los Angeles, paid $24 million in 2018 for a roughly 7.2-acre parcel comprising the main house, a swimming pool, pool house, guesthouse, caretaker’s cottage and a garage with a workshop. 

Zander said the scale, proportion and aesthetics of the home drew him in—not the Jackie connection. “If Jackie lived in a hovel would I be interested in buying it? No,” he said. But he admitted that over time, the connection became interesting. “Through a house, you become a small part of American history,” he said. Zander said he has repaired structural issues and made other improvements to the home, including adding a glass front door so that visitors can see through the house to the garden. 

The property also has a visual easement in front to maintain a view of the house from the street. “It’s a significant historical structure for all to enjoy,” Zander said. 

When she wasn’t at Lasata, Jackie and her parents summered at Wildmoor, a circa-1800s house in East Hampton owned by her paternal grandfather, who let his son and daughter-in-law stay there rent-free, according to multiple accounts. The house, located a few houses down from Grey Gardens, the famed estate once owned by Jackie’s cousins, was a “charming old wooden-frame structure, clapboarded and shingled, with a widow’s walk overlooking acres of potato fields, a cattail swamp, and the distant, roaring Atlantic,” according to John H. Davis’ 1993 book “The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster.”

Later, the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and his wife, Esther Gottlieb, purchased Wildmoor and turned a free-standing carriage house into an art studio. Around 1990, the attorney Richard D. Spizzirri purchased the property; his estate sold it for $6.8 million in 2021, records show.

David Tosher, a residential design consultant who advised the buyer, said the roughly 5,700-square-foot house with six bedrooms hadn’t been renovated in decades. The wood on the bottom of the house was rotten from sitting in mud for decades and “the house was held there by the grace of God,” he said. The kitchen was “uneatable,” a glass atrium was leaking and at some point, portions of the elevator shaft were blocked off and removed, rendering it useless, he said. Tosher said workers took apart the house and rebuilt it entirely in a slightly different location farther from the road. They kept the original framing but added a full basement. They also used old photographs to restore original features including the main staircase, some doors and a gooseneck-curved railing. “We rebuilt everything but left the history,” Tosher said. 

As a child in the 1930s, Jackie lived with her parents at 740 Park Avenue, an elegant, limestone-clad building designed by Rosario Candela. The building was developed by Jackie’s maternal grandfather, James T. Lee, who let his daughter, Janet Lee Bouvier, and son-in-law, John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III, live there rent-free, according to multiple accounts.  

Flamboyant but cash-strapped, Jackie’s father gutted the kitchen and added gold-plated fixtures to the bathroom, according to Michael Gross’ “740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building.” But his finances were such that he couldn’t afford to furnish it when he was done, leaving open space for Jackie and her sister to roller-skate through what became one of New York City’s most iconic buildings, according to the book.

Today the apartment is owned by Jacob M. Safra, an heir to a banking fortune, who purchased it for $25.25 million in 2017, records show. The sellers, hedge funder David Ganek and his wife, Danielle Ganek, renovated the duplex and had it on the market for several years, asking as much as $44 million in 2014.

Stein of Sotheby’s, who represented the seller, said the Kennedy and Bouvier cachet is real although the building itself is the main draw for most buyers. “The building speaks for itself,” he said. 

Jackie moved to Merrywood in the 1940s after her mother married Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., according to Spoto’s “A Life.” Located on the banks of the Potomac River, the estate is about 8 miles from downtown Washington with a Georgian-style house spanning more than 16,000 square feet.

By the 1960s, Auchincloss, facing financial constraints, agreed to sell Merrywood, then spanning about 46 acres, for $650,000 to real-estate developers and brothers Sheldon and Ira Magazine, according to Jan Pottker’s 2002 book “Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.” The Magazine brothers’ plans to build 1,030 high-rise apartments on the site sparked “an enormous cry” among neighbors, the book said. After the deal went through in 1963, the Kennedy White House took steps to block the high-rise development. “Jackie sparked it,” said the book, citing her commitment to preservation and environmental causes.

In 1965, the Magazine brothers sold the entire property for $650,000 to real-estate developer C. Wyatt Dickerson and his then-wife, Nancy Dickerson, who retained the main residence and more than 7 acres and built about 46 smaller homes on the remaining land, according to “Janet and Jackie.” In 2005, AOL co-founder Steve Case bought the 7-acre original manor residence for a then-record sum of $24.5 million, records show. Thirteen years later, he sold it for $43 million to the Kingdom Saudi Arabia, the government of which expressed “tremendous respect” for the home’s place in American history in a statement at the time.

Marc C. Lowham of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, who was involved in the 2018 deal, said the property’s location and provenance made it one of the most timeless and valuable estates in the area. Many original details remain, including the basic floor plan and elaborate plaster moldings. The gated estate also has formal gardens, a swimming pool and tennis court. “The Jackie Kennedy legacy there still feels very much alive,” he said. 

In 1953, Jackie and John Kennedy’s 1,200-person wedding reception took place at Hammersmith Farm, an estate overlooking Narragansett Bay in Newport, R.I. The Auchincloss family estate had gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, according to “A Life.” During the summer of 1961, when the Kennedys visited Hammersmith, the farm was dubbed “the summer White House” by the press, according to “Janet and Jackie.” 

The White House installed phones in the main house and the Coast Guard inspected all boats and ships sailing past, the book said. After the oil crisis of the 1970s, Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, sold the main house and about 54 acres for about $825,000 and the property was turned into a museum, the book said.

When plans to rezone the property and build condos emerged in the 1990s, William F. Farley, a Rhode Island native and former CEO of Fruit of the Loom, swooped in and paid $6.675 million in 1997, records show. 

“My motivation was really simple,” he said. “It was to make sure it wouldn’t get developed and it would remain part of American history.” Farley kept it as a museum, and sold it a few years later to Kiernan on the condition that Hammersmith would never be developed commercially. Kiernan paid just over $8 million, records show. 

Kiernan said there was work to be done. “No one had lived here for a quarter-century,” he said. The Kiernans reinforced the structure with steel and wood beams, replaced the roof and redid the plumbing and electrical. They removed parking lots and restored farmland, and today Hammersmith is a working farm with horses, llamas and other animals; an old tea house has been repurposed as an aviary for peacocks, Kiernan said. 

Kiernan said the Auchincloss family was “incredibly gracious” and gave him a portrait of Kennedy that is hanging in his office—which he was told Kennedy also used. The Kiernans, who purchased some of the home’s original furniture at auction, have since held reunions at Hammersmith, he said. Kiernan said when he was working on Wall Street, the farm was like a “tonic” that would calm him. Two of his daughters have gotten married there, and the family feels a sense of responsibility for it. “We’re trustees of it more than anything,” he said. 

About three years after getting married, Jackie and John Kennedy bought a house in Hyannis Port that became part of the famous Kennedy compound. The couple paid $45,948 for the shingled house, located next to homes owned by John Kennedy’s parents, Rose and Joe Kennedy, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy’s home, records show. Built around 1925, Jackie and John Kennedy’s house has about 4,484 square feet of interior space and sits on about 0.81 acres, according to the Barnstable County assessor.

Spanning about 6 acres of waterfront, the compound was a base for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. After the 1960 election, “the grass in front of Jack’s deck became the temporary stage for twice-daily press conferences for the next couple of weeks,” according to Kate Storey’s book “White House By the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port.” It remained a summer White House and presidential retreat until Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, according to the National Park Service.

In 2004, Jackie’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and son-in-law, Edwin Schlossberg, sold the house for $3 million to a Kennedy family trust, records show.  It is currently used as a summer residence by Ted Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Katherine “Kiki” Kennedy, who remodeled the house and donated the original windows, cabinets and shingles to the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum, according to Wendy Northcross, the museum’s executive director. The museum allowed local artists to repurpose the materials into artifacts and other works of art. The house is currently worth around $4.5 million, according to Zillow’s “Zestimate.” In 2012, Rose and Joe Kennedy’s home—known as the Big House—was donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate to be preserved. “This house was my family’s epicenter,” Ted Kennedy Jr. said at the time. 

In 1957, before Kennedy’s run for president, he and the future first lady bought their first house together, a red brick Federal-style building on N Street in Georgetown. “Kennedy paid $82,000 for it, and Jackie’s remodeling cost another $18,000,” according to “A Life.” She filled the house with Louis XV armchairs and porcelains, Louis XVI dining chairs and an antique carpet. 

Following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Jackie returned to Georgetown, where she bought a 1790s house that is currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

She paid about $175,000 for it, but moved to New York about a year later to escape the barrage of tourists that gathered outside, according to “A Life.” Yolande Betbeze Fox, a onetime Miss America, bought the house in 1976, records show. Construction entrepreneur David W. Hudgens purchased it for $5.25 million in 2017.

Before buying Fox’s house, Hudgens purchased two adjacent properties for $1.2 million and $1.625 million, records show. Once he owned the trio, he tapped architect Dale Overmyer to combine the properties into a mansion that is more than 15,300 square feet and has 13 bedrooms.

Overmyer said Hudgens had a passage built underneath the homes to connect them. Certain features of the former Kennedy home remain, including a wood-paneled library and dining room with gold leaf ceiling. The fireplaces—saved from a dumpster by Overmyer—are also original.

Following Hudgens’s death in 2022, the assemblage of houses came on the market for $26.5 million this year. It is currently priced at $19.5 million, according to Zillow.  

Leaving Washington after Kennedy’s death, Jackie purchased a 14-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The arrangements for the apartment at 1040 Fifth were made so quietly that her name did not appear on the contract,” according to “Janet and Jackie,” which said she paid roughly $200,000 for the apartment, which spans the entire 15th floor. Jackie furnished the apartment with antique furniture and art, and lived there until her death in 1994, the book said. 

The following year, the late billionaire David Koch purchased the apartment for $9.2 million, according to C. David Heymann’s book “American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy,” published in 2008. “Mrs. Onassis was very conservative financially, and she didn’t spend much on it,” Koch later told the Observer. “We gutted the apartment and redid everything.”

In 2006, Koch sold the apartment for $30 million to hedge funder Glenn Dubin and his wife, Eva Dubin, records show.

Although luxury buyers have more options than ever, including new condominiums, 1040 Fifth is still considered one of the city’s best buildings, said Deborah Grubman of the Corcoran Group, who was involved in the 2006 sale. She said Jackie’s celebrity status bolstered sales prices after she died—“She had some fake pearls that went for crazy numbers also,” Grubman said—but the building’s attributes stand on their own. “Nobody did an apartment better than they did in those days,” she said. “The view is still something that’s hard to duplicate.”

In 1978, Jackie bought over 300 acres of land on the tip of Martha’s Vineyard where she built a secluded summer residence known as Red Gate Farm.

After paying just over $1 million for the land, Jackie tapped architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen to design the shingled Cape Cod saltbox-style main house and a two-story guesthouse, which cost about $3.1 million and was completed in 1981, according to “A Life.” Philanthropist and horticulturist Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, who designed the White House Rose Garden when Jackie was first lady, designed the landscapes.

Over the years, Jackie hosted President Bill Clinton and others at the home, but she also clashed with a group of the Wampanoag Native Americans, who claimed the right to access a beachfront area on her property. (She settled the dispute in 1990.) 

After Jackie’s death, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and son-in-law, Edwin Schlossberg, enlisted Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, to head up a multimillion-dollar renovation of the property, which also includes a pool, a tennis court and a treehouse Jackie built for her grandchildren. Caroline Kennedy listed it for sale in 2019, asking $65 million. At the time, she said in a statement that her three children had grown and it was time for the family to “spread its wings.”

In 2020 and 2021, however, two conservation groups—the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission and Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation—bought the land in separate transactions totaling $37 million, the groups said. The family retained roughly 60 acres, including the residence. 

“Many of these land conservation efforts take decades to achieve,” said Adam Moore, president of Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, who described the deal as “the pinnacle of my career in conservation.” The groups are currently seeking permits to open the property, now known as Squibnocket Pond Reservation, to the public. 

During the last decades of her life, Jackie retreated to a country home in New Jersey where she could ride horses. Located in Bernardsville, N.J., the property cost about $200,000 in 1974 and included a “two-story frame house on 10 acres of lush hunt country,” according to “A Life.” Jackie painted the outside yellow with white trim, the book said. “Inside, she furnished it with comfortable, chintz-covered country pieces.”

After she died, then-Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey said Jackie adopted Bernardsville “in pursuit of that elusive privacy” that she sought for much of her life. “There she indulged in her favorite pastime of horseback riding,” he said, in a memorial tribute shared with Congress.

In 1997, Caroline Kennedy and her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., sold the property to their mother’s former neighbor, Marjorie “Peggy” McDonnell Walsh for $1.475 million, records show.

“We tore down the house and built a new one,” Walsh said, declining to share details about the new house. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The much more important thing is we both love the property. It’s a private valley. It’s beautiful.”

Write to E.B. Solomont at [email protected]