A 52-acre estate in New Canaan , Connecticut , with the tongue-in-cheek name of Le Beau Chateau and previously owned for more than 60 years by the late and reclusive copper-mining heiress Huguette Clark , has been listed for $25.5 million . Rob Johnson and Mary Higgins of Brown Harris Stevens hold the listing.
Though she was free to leave at any time, for two decades before her 2011 death at the age of 104, Clark lived quietly and simply at a reported cost of more than $800 a day in a Manhattan hospital room overlooking Central Park. During her long life, the doll collector and painter amassed a portfolio of rarely- and never-used homes that included a trio of sprawling co-operative apartments in the same aristocratic building on New York’s Fifth Avenue, a grand Italianate villa overlooking the ocean in Santa Barbara, and Le Beau Chateau, which she bought in 1951 as a potential refuge from a nuclear attack during the Cold War but, curiously enough, never spent a single night in. The Manhattan apartments were sold off shortly after she died for a combined $55 million, and the Santa Barbara mansion, known as Bellosguardo, which she had not visited in half a century, was bequeathed to a foundation that now offers limited docent tours.
Clark’s unoccupied but always maintained Connecticut spread, which she had unsuccessfully attempted to sell a couple of times in the years before her death, was acquired in 2014 for $14 million—a steep discount from the original asking price .