Sherry and Joel Mallin, two of the world’s top collectors of contemporary art, have listed a Pound Ridge, New York, estate which for years served as a showcase for their thousand-plus piece art collection.
The nearly 14-acre property, known to its thousands of visitors as the Buckhorn Sculpture Park, contains eight structures including a sprawling, 1930s-era main house and a 9,200-square-foot, museum-quality exhibition space. The property is priced at $8.5 million, and is listed with Houlihan Lawrence brokers Mary Palmerton and Jody Rosen.
The Houses
The Mallins have owned the property for about 40 years. Joel, a lawyer, and Sherry, an entrepreneur-turned-options trader, initially met as high school students and then reconnected after each divorced a first spouse within a week of one another—unknowingly.
Joel had purchased the property as a weekend home about a year before his divorce. The new couple was able to quickly make it their own.
“It was very beautiful,” says Sherry. “The people before us had done a lot of revision to the land. It was re-contoured and redone, which is why our property is quite different from our neighbors; it’s been rearranged into a beautiful site.”
At the time they met, Joel had an extensive collection of Surrealist art. Sherry, by her own admission, “knew absolutely nothing about art.”
That changed fast. Over time, the duo began to amass an increasingly contemporary, cutting-edge group of artworks that included pieces by such acclaimed 20th century titans as Sol Lewitt and Richard Serra and contemporary stars like Anish Kapoor.
As their collection grew, the limitations of the main, 5,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, five-bathroom home became increasingly apparent. “All of our little house had a lot of glass, and glass is not very friendly with art,” says Sherry. So around 2000, they built a structure they call their “art barn.” It has, she continues, “all the specifications you need to create a museum.”
In addition to the main house and the art barn, six other structures are on the property, including a large, one-room house that’s attached to the main structure via a porte-cochere. There’s also a caretaker’s house, two separate guest cottages, a pool house with its own kitchen and bathroom, and a studio apartment over the main house’s garage.
The property has two wine cellars—one for red, one for white. While the white wine cellar has a sign clearly indicating which wines are suitable for the couple’s children and grandchildren to drink casually, the red wine cellar has a guardian in the form of artist Tony Matelli’s famous Sleepwalker, a hyper-realistic statue of a man in his underwear, reaching blindly forward. The couple placed it as decoration.
“He’s just quiet there, with his hands out, looking,” says Sherry, who dismisses the notion that it could terrify unwitting houseguests. (Sleepwalker will be removed when the house is sold.)
The Art
“We do not buy art to fit the house and the property,” says Sherry. “We buy art because we love the art we’ve seen. We didn’t buy it because it’s going up in price, or a critic recommended it. We buy it because we looked at it, looked at each other, and knew it was a piece for us.”
At first, there were a handful of outdoor sculptures. (This video offers an excellent primer on their outdoor art.) “From five it got to 10, and before you know it, got to 15—and now there’s almost 70,” Sherry says of the outdoor sculptures. “We really didn’t plan it. We did one at a time and made a firm rule that the sculptures had to fit the landscape; the landscape didn’t have to fit the sculptures.”
That was due, in large part, to the landscape’s charm. There’s an apple orchard with 40 trees, which the Mallins used as a pretext to invite 600 to 1,000 people every year for an apple picking and cider-making party that “ran from morning until night,” says Sherry. The property also includes a forested area, rolling lawns, vast flower beds, and a large pond.
“The overwhelming, unasked-for comment is made day after day after day by people who say, ‘It’s so strangely calm here,” says Sherry. “It just exists. Everyone feels it.”
Saying Goodbye
Given their long history with the house, not to mention the fact that the property is currently a showcase for their very large, ungainly outdoor sculptures, the decision to sell the land wasn’t easy. After a time, the Mallins made up their minds.
“We are blessed with decent health, but we certainly know we’re declining,” says Sherry. “Eighty-eight is very different than 68.”
As a consequence, she continues, “We are going to live a different kind of life, one more suitable to the aging process. We decided not to have life happen to us, and that we would take charge of what we can manage.”
In practical terms, this meant acknowledging that owning a large estate and an art collection containing what she says is “less than 2,000, and much more than 1,000” artworks, was not sustainable. “It’s a chapter in our life that’s closing, whether we close it or not,” she concludes, “so we should choose to close it in a way that makes us happiest.”
So they’re selling the property. As for the art collection, “some of it will be donated, some will be sold, some will be gifted,” Sherry says, “but basically, we are disassembling it.” All the sculptures can be moved once the house is sold, with the exception of one work by Andy Goldsworthy, which will come with the property.
Should a potential buyer be interested in the house and the art, they might find very accommodating sellers.
“My dream is that there’s this fantasy person who adores art and adores sculpture, who would buy all the sculpture and just let it sit,” says Sherry. “But I’m also practical. The art will live on, regardless of what we do, because it has a longer lifespan than we do.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.