Grey Gardens, Shingle style residence in East Hampton, New York.
Grey Gardens is a Shingle style residence in East Hampton, New York, located on oceanfront land. The building holds fourteen rooms and occupies roughly four acres at the corner of West End Road and Lily Pond Lane.
Architect Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe designed the building in 1897 for F. Stanhope Phillips and Margaret Bagg Phillips, who paid $2,500 for the land. Health inspectors declared it unfit for living in 1971 due to severe neglect, prompting the Kennedy family to step in and fund repairs.
The residence became widely known through a 1975 documentary about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Visitors today recognize the name from that film, which captured the two women living here in an unconventional way that challenged social expectations.
The property underwent a complete restoration after fashion designer Liz Lange purchased it in December 2017 for $15.5 million. It sits in a quiet residential neighborhood of East Hampton, a few miles from the town center.
Although the building now appears well maintained, photographs from the 1970s show a completely different scene with overgrown gardens and crumbling walls. Those images became part of popular memory through the documentary about its former residents, and many visitors still associate the name with that earlier state.
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