(Bloomberg) -- Roughly 30 years ago, the designer Kenneth Cole was visiting a friend in the suburb of Purchase, New York, and spied a rambling colonial mansion nearby. “I said to my wife, ‘I love that house, I wish that was the house I grew up in,’” Cole says. “It was kind of a standing joke.”
The punch line, it turned out, came roughly a year later, when Cole discovered that the very same house was on the market. “It was so close to New York City, but so far,” he says. (It’s about an hour’s drive to Midtown Manhattan.) “The airport was just down the street, and there were great schools, private as well as public. It was kind of the perfect scenario.”
Then there was the nearly 12,000-square-foot, century-old structure itself, “which I’ve always loved,” Cole says. He was living on Columbus Avenue in New York at the time, and he discovered that the property in Purchase was where they’d filmed the 1969 movie Goodbye, Columbus. For a man who takes wordplay very seriously, it was a sign. “It was clear somebody was telling us to buy that house,” he says.
Since then, it’s been his family’s primary residence. But with his kids grown, Cole says he and his wife find themselves “empty nesters in a very big nest.” As a result, they’ve put the roughly 14-acre property on the market for $22 million, listing it with Pat Hirsch at Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty, and Leslie McElwreath at Sotheby’s International Realty-Greenwich.
Cole, whose father had a shoe factory, founded his fashion business Kenneth Cole Productions in 1982. He took the company public in 1994; at its peak it reached a reported market cap of roughly $850 million. In 2012, Cole took the company private again.
Inside the House
The estate dates to at least 1912. It has seven bedrooms, six bathrooms and four half-baths. Visitors enter at the core of the building, where a foyer leads to a grand staircase. Radiating from that central hall are two living rooms (one formal, the other informal) and a large dining room that listing materials claim can seat 80 guests.
Pass through the dining room and you’ll enter a massive eat-in kitchen, which in turn leads to a family room that opens onto an outdoor patio. Upstairs, there are five bedrooms, including a primary bedroom suite that occupies nearly half of the floor plan and includes two balconies and three closets. The third floor has another two bedrooms, an office, a library and a sauna.
When he bought it, “the house was in pretty good shape,” Cole says. That said, “we had to do a lot of work over the years,” he continues.
Aside from updating bathrooms and the kitchen, he says, the only major addition to the house was a detached garage, done in the style of the main building. (In addition to that new four-car garage, the house also has an attached two-car garage, along with a smaller attached garage for golf carts.)
The Property
In fact, Cole says, most of the work on the property was directed at the house’s grounds. The rolling lawn leads to a fenced, heated saltwater pool, which is surrounded by a bluestone patio. There’s also a five-hole putting green, a basketball court and a tennis court. Elsewhere on the property are a koi pond, a gazebo and a meditation garden.
Given that when Cole first saw the house he wished he grew up there, there was a certain irony, he says, to the fact that “arguably maybe I did end up growing up there, along with my kids.”
Understandably, Cole’s family used it to host large family events, including his daughter’s wedding. “It was great for most occasions,” he says. “It was just very comfortable, and very open and spacious, and people could move around very easily,” he continues. “It accommodates a good amount of people, and also small intimate groups as well.”
He professes to be somewhat conflicted about selling the property, but says it’s time. “It was a great creative retreat for me,” he says. “It was a place to be kind of close to the world, but apart from it.”
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