"Rambleside"

 residence, estate (manor / mansion land), country house, historic remains

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"Rambleside" was designed in the 1920's by Eric Kebbon on 164 acres of land Zalmon Simmons, an industrialist in the mattress business. The 25-room mansion was designed as a rambling, abstract classical version of the Tudor style with an accompanying landscape by Ferruccio Vitale. The interior of the mansion, designed by Elsie de Wolfe, featured hand-painted chinoiserie wallpaper, black marble floors with inlaid copper, and a study paneled with pine that had been stripped from a mansion in London.

The main house had six maid's rooms. Outbuildings included a stable for horses, two greenhouses, a six-car garage, and a guesthouse with its own courtyard; as well, Simmons built a pair of two-family cottages to house the butler, the chauffeur, the head gardener, and the estate superintendent. For their two sons, Zalmon junior and Grant, Zalmon built two more houses on the estate. Zalmon Simmons died in 1934, during the Great Depression. Within a few years, his widow sold off the estate, piece by piece. In 1938, George Skakel, a self-made millionaire and founder of the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, paid $160,000, a sum equal to about $2 million today, for a parcel of her estate: it included 10 acres of land as well as the main house.

George Skakel had started his career as a freight-rate clerk on the Sioux City Line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. Twelve years later, on June 17, 1950, at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich, Ethel Skakel, the daughter of George and Ann Skakel, married Robert F. Kennedy. The bride wore a white satin gown with a wide, deep collar of point de Venise lace. The groom's older brother John F. Kennedy, then a Democratic congressman from Boston, was the best man. When the service was over, 2,000 guests attended a reception on the grounds of what had once been Zalmon Simmons's estate.

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