Monday, February 7, 2011

'Sandy Cay'

'Sandy Cay', the Conde Nast estate designed c. 1930 in Sands Point, with landscaping and swimming pool complex by Ferruccio Vitale. Nast was the publisher and president of such magazines as Vogue, House & Garden, and Vanity Fair. The house burned to the ground in 1954 but the garage survives. Click HERE to see where 'Sandy Cay' stood on google earth. Photo from the Library of Congress.

9 comments:

An Aesthete's Lament said...

Its contents were sold at auction, after Nast's death, in 1943. As far as I can tell the property was quite near the Sands Point Golf Club ground. The NYTimes indicated it was "near by ... the estates of Mrs. Christian R. Holmes [and] Harry F. Guggenheim."Another article, from 1937, states that is overlooked Long Island Sound and included a strip of lowland adjacent to North Hempstead. "The Nast property on Sands Point consists of fifteen acres, about half of which is low land bordering on Long Island Sound. It is part of property once owned by Captain Sands ..."

Zach L. said...

Found it on the '39 map, added a link to the location.

Anonymous said...

I can't believe that so many of these homes were destroyed by fire!!

commentator8 said...

What a gorgeous piece of property it still is. What's the story with the house that sits there now? It doesn't look half bad.

Turner Pack Rats said...

was this occupied when it burned or abandoned after the owner died?

the house there now isn't exactly a shack and it looks like a lot of the garden features survived or unbelieveably they added more - i am shoccked (so shocked i couldn't even spell "shocked") - usually the new ones are either surrounded by yards of boringlawn or worse yet boring crushed rock.

security word def - "lograw" - I'll take Hollywood bottom feeders for a $1000 please, Alex. What do you get when you combine Jlow and Kate McGraw.

Turner Pack Rats said...

more questions than answers.
i looked at the bing map. what the heck is going on next door, there's a pretty boring house with strange structures both fore and aft. wassup with that?
then go one more lot down cedar lane and theres a red roofed structure that looks for all the world like some estates farm group. yes - no - ?
one of these days, i'm going to make good on my threat and come down there and take a look around.

security word def - "sprityla" - another text word referring to festive women from the left coast.

Anonymous said...

Turner Pack Rat- I looked up that structure on Cedar Lane and it was built in 1915, so you may well be right. -Interesting photos of it on My Nassau Property.

HalfPuddingHalfSauce said...

"Driftwoods" by Addison Mizner.

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=40.8589734&lon=-73.7239695&z=17&l=0&m=b&show=/18872405/Driftwoods

Anonymous said...

Many of these might have been friction fires, like the fires that took out many of the old huge hotels along the East Coast. A friction fire is when a huge, worthless, tax ridden, property (house, hotel, etc.) rubs against a fat insurance policy.