If the Hamptons are the vacation playground for New York’s rich and famous, the North Shore of Long Island is the backyard for the city’s almost-as-rich and vastly more discreet.
Towns less than an hour from New York, such as Glen Cove and Oyster Bay, have long been home to insular, old money communities whose heyday was more than a century ago.
Financier Otto Kahn, for instance, built the 109,000-square-foot quasi-chateau “Oheka” in Huntington; real estate scion Vincent Astor built the sprawling Cloverly Manor in Sands Point; John Pierpont Morgan Jr., heir to the eponymous banking fortune, built a massive Georgian-revival mansion on a peninsula (PDF); and soon after, his son, Junius Spencer Morgan, built his own, 27,000-square-foot mansion on a 48-acre island, “Salutation,” next door.
While many of those mansions have been demolished or turned into hotels, others, including Junius Morgan’s island retreat, remain. Now, for the third time in its 100-year history, the property—now called Dosoris Island—is listed for sale for $125 million with Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty.
“In my career, I’ve sold many of these [Long Island] manor houses,” says Bonnie Devendorf, the Sotheby’s broker representing the property. “But for $125 million, you’re not just buying the house, you’re buying the island—and that’s what makes this a one-of-a-kind listing.”
'What You’ll Get
The island comes with six houses on 46 acres of land, along with 10 acres of underwater rights and a 28 acre pond.
The main house was built by Morgan in 1919 and overlooks Long Island Sound, with views north toward the Manhattan skyline. (If the house looks familiar, that’s because it had a star turn in the 1995 remake of Sabrina, starring Harrison Ford.)
Little about the house has changed since it was built: The dining room reportedly still seats 100, there’s an 80 foot-long slate and marble floored hallway, and the so-called ladies parlor is paneled in mahogany. Upstairs are nine bedrooms, including a master suite which itself has two bedrooms (each replete with fireplace and bathroom), and sitting room. Two guest rooms are on the third floor, bringing the house’s total bedrooms to 11. (This doesn’t include servants’ quarters.)
Grounds surrounding the main house were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed Manhattan’s Central Park, and include a formal garden, massive pool and pool house, and lawns that slope down to a sandy beach. Lest anyone worry about storm surges, the house has a relatively new sea wall, along with a sturdy 250-foot-long dock, which was built contemporaneously.