Besides being part of a well-known industrialist family and a winner of the America’s Cup sailing race, Bill Koch also bought Paul and Rachel “Bunny” Mellon’s house on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
The Mellons were pretty big names, too: Paul as an art collector and part of a prominent banking family, and Bunny as a horticulturist who redesigned the White House Rose Garden in the early 1960s. They built their home at 17 Indian Trail in Oyster Harbors, a gated neighborhood in Osterville, in 1954. Koch got to know Paul Mellon through their shared love of fine art, according to co-listing agent Joanna Dresser of LandVest Christie’s International Real Estate, and he bought the roughly 7-acre property about a decade ago.
Koch changed little about the 7,300-square-foot, eight-bedroom, nine-bath main house and accessory dwellings or the surrounding gardens that Bunny Mellon designed, Dresser and fellow LandVest agent Kelly Crosby said in an email. The house is now for sale for about $24 million.
“It is important to me to preserve the home the way I remembered it when I used to visit Paul and Bunny, and maintain their influence and style over the estate,” Koch said in a statement the listing agents shared.
Two guest cottages, each with two bedrooms, flank the main house. There’s also a beach house, a greenhouse and a private suite that Mellon used for her art studio. Among the Mellons’ notable guests over the years, according to the statement, were their friends President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie.
At one time, the Mellons had 2,000 tons of sand brought to their property to build a 20-foot-tall dune for privacy between the main house and the Seapuit River. On the other side of the river and adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean, the Mellons owned Dead Neck Island, which they later donated to a local conservation group for protection as a bird sanctuary. The island is accessible to the public at certain times of year, the Barnstable Clean Water Coalition says on its website.
As they market the property to potential buyers, Dresser and Crosby said in the email that they like emphasizing the ocean view and the afternoon breeze that cools the house. They also talk about the current and previous owners’ exploits and the history of Oyster Harbors, which includes a golf course designed in 1926.
“The setting, the history, and the sheer scale of this estate are unmatched on Cape Cod,” Dresser said in the statement.