The name still catches people off guard. Grey Gardens sounds peaceful — gray dunes, gray-green garden walls, soft morning fog. And in a way, it is. But the name also carries one of East Hampton’s most famous real estate stories: a house that went from Gilded Age retreat to notorious ruin to two separate rescues by two very different women, decades apart.
Built in 1897 in East Hampton’s Georgica Pond neighborhood, this shingle-style summer estate began as a polished getaway for moneyed New Yorkers. Then Big Edie and Little Edie Beale moved in, and by the time the Maysles brothers pointed their cameras at the place in 1975, Grey Gardens had become shorthand for faded glamour, family devotion, and spectacular disrepair.
What often gets left out of the story is what happened next — twice. Journalist Sally Quinn and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, bought the wrecked house in 1979 and spent a year rescuing it from near-collapse. Nearly forty years later, fashion designer Liz Lange bought that same restored home from Quinn and gave it a second, very different kind of makeover.
Here’s the real story of the Beales, the Bradlees, and Liz Lange — and what actually happened to Grey Gardens along the way.
A House That Was Always More Than a House
So why does an old East Hampton house still get so much attention? It’s not the floor plan. It’s because the house carries a story most people can’t shake.
Big money, family breakdown, two eccentric women refusing to leave — that’s not a typical real estate listing. That’s a drama. And the house itself played a supporting role. The peeling walls, the overgrown garden, the raccoons living in the walls. All of it became part of the legend.
Big Edie and Little Edie: The Story That Made Grey Gardens Famous
The legend started in 1924, when Phelan Beale bought the house for his wife, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale — known as Big Edie. Her niece was Jacqueline Bouvier, later Jackie Kennedy Onassis, which made Big Edie’s daughter, Little Edie, Jackie’s first cousin.
When Phelan and Big Edie’s marriage fell apart in the 1940s, Phelan moved out. Big Edie and Little Edie stayed — and by the early 1970s, the house had fallen into serious disrepair. A 1971 National Enquirer exposé revealed that the two women were living without running water, surrounded by dozens of cats, fleas, garbage, and raccoons nesting in the walls. Suffolk County health officials moved to evict them.
In the summer of 1972, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister, Lee Radziwill, quietly paid to bring the house up to code and lift the eviction threat. It didn’t stay that way for long, and the decay that followed became the backdrop for the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens — the film that made the house famous.
Big Edie died in 1977. Little Edie held on until 1979, when she finally sold the house.
The First Rescue: Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn
This is the chapter most retellings skip, and it’s arguably the more dramatic restoration of the two. In 1979, Little Edie sold Grey Gardens for $220,000 to Sally Quinn and her husband, longtime Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee — on the condition that they never tear the house down.
Quinn later described what they found: cats crawling everywhere, raccoon skulls on the front porch, rooms buried in garbage. “The smell and filth were unbelievable,” she told House Beautiful in 2022. Bradlee reportedly needed convincing just to walk through the door.
They spent about a year gutting and rebuilding the house, restoring it to what Quinn called its 1930s heyday — comfortable rooms, plenty of windows, nothing showy. The walled garden’s Spanish concrete walls, imported decades earlier by an earlier owner and long buried under overgrowth, were rediscovered and restored during this renovation. Quinn and Bradlee lived at Grey Gardens for the next 35 years, hosting friends and letting the house appear in several architectural and home décor magazines along the way. Bradlee died in 2014, and Quinn found the house “too sad” to live in alone. She put it on the market in 2017.
Liz Lange’s Turn: A Second Restoration, Not a Rescue
Fashion designer Liz Lange, who had rented Grey Gardens for a summer in 2015, bought the house from Quinn in December 2017 for a reported $15.5 million. It’s worth being clear about what that purchase actually involved: by 2017, Grey Gardens wasn’t a ruin. It was a well-kept, magazine-featured home that hadn’t changed much in the four decades since the Bradlees restored it.
So Lange’s project wasn’t a rescue from decay — it was a modernization and a redecoration, carried out over roughly three years. The most significant structural change was raising the house to build a proper basement where only a crawlspace had existed, adding around 4,000 square feet of new space for mechanicals, a wine room, and a gym. Decorator Mark D. Sikes led much of the interior redesign, and landscape architect Deborah Nevins reworked the grounds, including a refresh of the historic walled garden, the reconstruction of a pergola, and new plantings throughout.
Lange has said she wanted to bring the house back to what she considers its true glory years — the 1920s and early 1930s, when the Beales first bought it as a summer cottage — while making it work for a modern family.
| Feature | Under the Beales (pre-1979) | After Bradlee & Quinn (1979–2017) | After Lange (2017–present) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walled garden | Overgrown, walls hidden | Rediscovered and restored | Replanted, pergola rebuilt |
| Interior | Dark, cluttered, deteriorating | Rebuilt to 1930s-style comfort | Redecorated by Mark D. Sikes |
| Systems | Failing, no running water | Modernized for 1980s living | Fully updated; new basement added |
| Basement | None (crawlspace only) | Crawlspace retained | Full ~4,000 sq ft basement added |
Grey Gardens Today: Ownership and Visiting
Grey Gardens is already a local landmark. On summer weekends, people still slow down on West End Road to peek at the shingled exterior. The documentary gave the house a lasting fanbase, and press coverage of Lange’s restoration — including a 2025 feature marking the documentary’s 50th anniversary — has kept that curiosity alive.
That attention has an economic side, too: more visitors browsing the neighborhood means more business for East Hampton’s hotels, restaurants, and shops. But the bigger story is cultural. The house now has two restoration chapters behind it instead of one collapse — it’s no longer just a cautionary tale about decay.
Who Owns Grey Gardens Now?
Liz Lange remains the current owner. She’s held the property since buying it from Sally Quinn in December 2017, and she’s continued to live there with her family since completing her restoration.
Can You Visit Grey Gardens?
Grey Gardens is a private residence, so there’s no walk-up access or standing public tour. That said, it isn’t completely closed off. The house has appeared on the East Hampton Historical Society’s annual Thanksgiving-weekend House & Garden Tour, a ticketed fundraiser where Lange and a handful of other homeowners open their doors for a few hours each year. Outside of an event like that, the closest most people get is the view from West End Road.
So, Is Grey Gardens Still the Same Place?
Yes and no.
The decay is long gone and has been since 1980. The raccoons are gone. The house has modern systems, a new basement, and a garden that’s been cared for continuously for over 45 years. But the story hasn’t been erased — if anything, knowing that it took two separate owners, decades apart, to keep this house standing makes the story richer, not smaller.
It’s still the house where two women lived on their own terms, even when those terms looked like chaos to everyone else. That’s the part no renovation can remove — and it shouldn’t.
If you haven’t seen the 1975 documentary, start there. Then look at photos of the house today. The contrast is something else.
