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.”