The grand white estate where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spent her childhood summers in East Hampton—no less regal than the other White House she would eventually inhabit—is on the market.
The home is listed for $55 million by The Corcoran Group’s Eileen O’Neill and Compass’s Ed Petrie. Named Lasata, meaning “Place of Peace” in the language of the indigenous Montaukett people, the sprawling property at 121 Further Lane provides a luscious escape from city life.
The stucco and ivy-covered 7,000 square-foot mansion sits on 11 immaculately landscaped acres, just a stone’s throw away from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. If you sleep with the window open in the eight-bedroom main house, you can even hear the sound of the waves at night. A large pool, sunken grass tennis court, lush flower gardens and neatly trimmed hedges make it the perfect summer oasis, with separate guest quarters for out-of-town visitors.
One of the biggest appeals of Lasata, of course, is its legendary past.
The home was built in 1917 by noted architect Arthur C. Jackson and bought by the former First Lady’s grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr, in the 1920s as the family’s summer home. The young Jackie Bouvier spent many of her formative summers at Lasata, during which she became an accomplished equestrian.
Life at the East Hampton estate could be idyllic. In the summer, the Bovier family would gather for “a ritual Sunday lunch of roast beef followed by peach ice cream (homemade on the back porch by the French chauffeur) around the huge oak table in the beamed dining room,” historian Sarah Bradford writes in her book “America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”
But it wasn’t always. By 1940 Jackie’s parents’ marriage had fallen apart. Her stockbroker and socialite father “Black Jack” Bouvier was known as a heavy drinker, gambler and philanderer.
“Life was falling apart at the seams and the family were more than ever at each other’s throats,” writes Bradford of the atmosphere at Lasata during that time.
Jackie’s mother Janet went on to marry lawyer and financier Hugh Auchincloss, and the family began spending summers in Newport, Rhode Island, instead. Over the following decades, Lasata would change hands eight times. Its current owner, film and commercial producer, David Zander, bought it from fashion designer Reed Krakoff in 2018 for $24 million.
Zander spent “gobs and gobs” of money on restoring the property, he told the Wall Street Journal, bringing in famed interior designer Pierre Yovanovich to give the home a modern French makeover and French landscape architect Louis Benech to tend to the gardens.
Beneath the luxe new fixtures and custom interiors, the history remains.
In 1939, not long before the news of her parent’s divorce broke, a ten-year-old Jackie captured her East Hampton memories with a poem:
When I go down to the sandy shore
I can think of nothing I want more
Than to live by the booming blue sea