The former East Hampton estate that belonged to Calvin Klein has been listed on the market for a whopping $165 million, which would a new sales record for the Hamptons if it finds a buyer anywhere near the asking price.
Originally purchased by Klein in 1987 for $3.6 million, he sold it in 2021 for $85 million after multiple upgrades.
The property at 121 West End Road sits on 8.2 acres in East Hampton with 500 feet of Atlantic Ocean frontage and a boathouse on Georgica Pond, a combination the listing agent, Ed Petrie of Compass, says is genuinely rare in a market where scarcity at this level is largely what drives price. The main house is a nine thousand square foot shingle-style mansion with seven bedrooms, originally built in 1891 for socialite Laura Brevoort Sedgwick and designed by the same architect behind Grey Gardens. Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American World Airways, bought it in 1935 and held it until Klein purchased it from Trippe’s son 52 years later.
Klein renovated it substantially during his ownership, adding the boathouse and a red clay tennis court, and had the interiors featured in a 1992 edition of Vogue Decorations. The current owner, whose identity hasn’t been disclosed, bought both the main parcel and an adjacent vacant lot in two off-market deals totalling $85 million in 2021, completed another round of renovations since, and is now looking to exit at close to double what they paid.
The timing of the listing isn’t accidental. Petrie told the Wall Street Journal it was partly timed around the SpaceX IPO, which expanded the pool of buyers who can credibly write a cheque at this level, with further mega-IPOs from Anthropic and OpenAI expected later this year likely to push that pool wider still.
If it sells at asking, it would surpass the current Hamptons record of $137 million, set in 2014 when hedge fund billionaire Barry Rosenstein bought an East Hampton property. It is also the second listing this month alone to chase a potential Hamptons record, with hedge fund founder Zach Schreiber listing his Sagaponack estate at $152.5 million just two weeks earlier. The Hamptons market has seen a handful of significant deals already this year, including a $72 million oceanfront sale in March and a $59 million off-market sale of a Wainscott property that appeared in HBO’s Succession.
