By Kate Youde
Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon was a gardener, philanthropist and tastemaker perhaps best known for her redesign of the White House Rose Garden in 1962. While that garden has been updated — most recently by President Donald Trump, who replaced the lawn with stone paving — her former holiday home in Cape Cod remains largely unchanged.
On the market for $23.85mn, the two-storey house “retains almost all of its original charm,” says Joanna Dresser of LandVest, an affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate that is handling the sale.
Its current owner is American businessman Bill Koch, who bought the waterfront Massachusetts estate in 2013. It was built in 1954 for Bunny and her husband, banking heir Paul Mellon — whose family funded the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC — as a summer retreat within the private island community of Oyster Harbors in Osterville.
The large estate is around a two-hour drive south of Boston and includes a 7,300 sq ft main house with eight bedrooms plus two attached guest suites, each with their own entrance. Mellon’s pastel-yellow former art studio has been renovated into a guest cottage, and there’s further accommodation in a converted security outpost and a detached garage.
One idiosyncratic space off the living room, fitted with shelving and hooks, is likely to be coveted by green-fingered house hunters. “That’s where Bunny stored her extensive collection of baskets,” says Dresser.
The basket room opens on to the 7.43-acre grounds meticulously shaped by Mellon with flower beds and extensive tree planting, including a large number of fruit trees. There’s also her “berry pavilion” — a simple wood and screen enclosure where she grew raspberries, strawberries and blueberries — and a greenhouse.
There are two playfully-designed tool sheds, with domed roofs, a ground-floor potting room in the main house and a screened porch that opens on to a patio.
But it is the beach house, with a living area and a covered patio for entertaining, that’s linked with so many notable guests. It was here that the American philanthropists hosted their friends, President John F Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Mellon said discussions about the White House Rose Garden renovation began during a picnic at the beach house in August 1961.
The Mellon’s other homes included an estate in Upperville, Virginia, where Paul Mellon bred thoroughbred racehorses. Part of that estate, including the garden, the famous Basket House and the library — containing Bunny’s vast collection of books, manuscripts and artworks on botany, landscape design and horticulture — is cared for by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
Established by Bunny in 1993, the organisation is now dedicated to using her home, garden and collections for the public benefit, following her death in 2014 at the age of 103.
Dresser says the attraction of the Cape Cod estate lies in its “magical” setting. The property overlooks Seapuit River and Dead Neck Island, now a nature reserve, and has views across Nantucket Sound. “You don’t see any neighbours,” says Dresser. “You just look out at the water in the front and then the gardens in the back.”
The estate includes more than 500ft of waterfront, a private dock and a tennis court.
Photography: Courtesy of Bill Koch: Christie’s International Real Estate; Thomas Lloyd
