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Elysium (Southampton, New York)

USA / New York / Southampton / Southampton, New York / Meadow Lane, 650
 house, LIGC - Long Island Gold Coast
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Built by Henry F. duPont in 1929, the Georgian-style mansion originally called Chesteron was the largest house in the Hamptons in the days before the industrialist Ira Rennert built his 100,000 square foot estate in Sagaponack in 1999. Chesteron was 45,000 square feet with 72 rooms, 60 of them bedrooms. For decades, the duPont family held on to the white elephant and then finally shuttered it.

Overgrown and semiderelict, the house was sold at auction in 1979 to Barry Trupin, whose fortune derived from truck leasing, for a reported price of $330,000. Mr. Trupin began to redesign the house as gothic French chateau, installing the interior of an English pub and a shark tank, and named it Dragon's Head. His efforts to renovate were protracted and costly and eventually embroiled him in a series of lawsuits with the Town of Southampton.

Mr. Trupin's vision of Dragon's Head was never realized. He sold it to Francesco Galesi, a Manhattan investor, for $2.3 million in 1993. Mr. Galesi knocked the turrets down, reduced the number of bedrooms, and soon the house was on the market again, this time with an asking price of $45 million. There it languished, until Calvin Klein came along paying $29.9 million to buy it in 2004. In 2009, Klein tore down Elysium, with plans to start building a smaller, modern home.

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Coordinates:   40°51'36"N   72°25'8"W
This article was last modified 13 years ago