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'OpenHouse NYC' goes inside Grey Gardens this Sunday
Photo credit: Permission LXTV
Viewers who want to see the inside of the infamous Grey Gardens estate in East Hampton can tune in to “OpenHouse NYC” Oct. 11 at 8:30 a.m. on WNBC Channel 4.
A four-minute tour of the home and grounds will be featured in the weekly half-hour show about real estate and design trends.
This is the first look inside the home since a 1975 documentary.
The 14-room home was designed by architect Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe, who designed many East End cottages and mansions. It was built in 1897 and purchased by Edith Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) in the 1920s. She lived there with her daughter, also Edith Beale (“Little Edie”), until her death in 1977, when Little Edie sold the house to Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn of The Washington Post. The shingle-style house is just 100 yards from the Atlantic.
Quinn reminisces about meeting Little Edie at the start of the segment, says Marni Kupfer, executive producer. Quinn relays how there were cats everywhere and the smell was awful, but when she met Little Edie she told her the house was beautiful. “She was the first to say she loved it and wanted to restore it,” Kupfer says, “and Little Edie said, ‘All it needs is a coat of paint.’ ”
Many coats of paint later, after Suffolk County authorities threatened to condemn it, the house and grounds have been restored. It is now rented out much of each year to Manhattan designer Celerie Kemble, with Quinn and Bradlee reserving the month of August for themselves.
They were in residence this August when the segment was filmed. The host for the tour is Christopher Hyland, a designer and textile merchant who was roommates with Quinn’s brother in college, Kupfer says.
The gardens have been brought back to the overgrown look they had when the Beales lived there, Kupfer says, and it’s even the same company doing the gardening work. The segment includes a bit with Hyland talking about an area of the garden with a clearing containing two chairs the Beales would have used and how every garden should have a calm space similar to that.
Hyland and Quinn talk about how she met Little Edie, then there’s a tour of the main floor entertaining rooms, including the parlor and sunroom. After what Kupfer calls “beauty shots” of the upstairs, Hyland takes the tour outside and talks about the gardens and how much of the furniture in the home has been restored.
There apparently was lots to work with. “Sally said that when she bought the house there was a gold mine in the attic, furniture and china,” Kupfer says.
The home became famous in 1975 when Albert and David Maysles made a documentary on Beale and her mother, and an HBO movie of the same name won several Emmys for its rendition of the Beales’ story.
Permission LXTV
Tags: Grey Gardens , East Hampton , celeb
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