The house at 196 Furnace Dock Road comes with lots of stories. Many are hearsay, so let's get those out of the way first.
One such story is that its famous late owner, comedian Jackie Gleason, might have purchased an entire quarry in Italy to make sure he had enough marble for the house, according to the listing agent, Heidi Henshaw of Corcoran. He often held star-studded parties, and the Hollywood elite, including Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra — even Salvador Dali — might’ve visited the home. Gleason also reportedly went on a trip out West with President Richard Nixon to visit a secret facility filled with information about UFOs.
That last story, the one about Nixon and the UFOs, does point to something true about his Cortlandt Manor home in New York’s Hudson Valley: Gleason was fascinated with all things extraterrestrial and wanted to build a property inspired by the unknown. So, in the 1950s, he tasked midcentury architect Robert Cika with designing “The Mothership,” a circular 7,000-square-foot home that’s on the market $5.5 million.
When visitors step inside the structure, they might ask, "Where am I?" "What is this?"
“It really, truly is one of a kind,” Henshaw said. “You feel like you’re on a spaceship."
Or maybe a spaceship-boat hybrid.
A Northern European shipmaker built elements of the home offsite, according to Henshaw. That craftsman relied heavily on bentwood, making use of a painstaking craft that sees wood steamed, softened, and then bent into curving forms. On the ceilings in particular, the wood bends into a delicate pattern that recalls the boning in a bird’s wing.
The interiors — almost entirely outfitted with their original finishes and built-ins — bend around a spiral staircase that leads from the marble-paved ground floor (equipped with a bar and futuristic audio control panel) to two upper levels containing a round kitchen, a curved game room (original shuffleboard table included), and three bedrooms (also curved, one with a round bed). Bands of clerestory windows encircle each floor, contrasting the home’s futuristic spaces with the trees and foliage outside.
“When you look out the windows,” Henshaw said, “it’s just nature.”
Gleason also commissioned a miniature UFO-inspired outbuilding to accompany The Mothership. This compact space “is more for camping out,” Henshaw explained. It has a miniature kitchen and toilet, but it’s mostly a circular sleeping space where a visitor can perch a mattress or sleeping bag on built-in slats.
“It’s not really anything that you’re going to spend a lot of time living in,” she said. “But it is cool.”
'The real interest is coming from private people'
The 8.6-acre property also boasts the original 1930s stone house that Gleason reportedly called “The Barracks.” Once the property’s main structure, the Colonial-style building became a guest house after The Mothership was completed.
Gleason purchased the property in the early 1950s and completed The Mothership project in 1959. After that, he used the home as a part-time residence geared toward hosting. In the 1960s, Henshaw said, he moved to Florida and sold the property to CBS as part of a contract agreement. The network reportedly donated the residence to Pace University, which sold it to today’s sellers in the 1970s for $150,000, according to a “New York Post” article from 2018, when the home hit the market for $12 million.
The property has been on the market for slightly more than a month, and it has received a variety of interest. Some, naturally, come from lookie-loos hoping to tour (regrettably, not possible, Henshaw said). There have been a few calls from people interested in turning the home into a public museum, but “so far, the real interest is coming from private people,” she explained.
The home is “like a trophy property,” Henshaw said. It’s so unique that it might be “too different” for certain buyers, especially those uninterested in navigating wide spans of marble flooring and lots of stairs.
“There are a lot of hard surfaces,” Henshaw said. They’re durable materials — marble, glass, copper, stainless steel, but particular.