Topline
A 151-acre estate in the Hudson Valley has hit the market for the first time in more than 30 years in the exclusive Tuxedo Park village of New York, which has housed billionaires, socialites and business tycoons since the late 1800s.
The home, named "Renamor," has hit the market one year after the death of its longtime owner Robert Dow, senior managing partner at a private investment firm and 1972 Olympic fencer, and his wife, Christina Seix Dow, a former asset manager.
The Gilded Age estate, listed by Ellis Sotheby’s International Realty, is the largest in the historic and exclusive Hudson River town of Tuxedo Park, New York.
The main house on the 1920s estate is 14,000 square feet and includes a large kitchen, banquet-size dining room, library, former chapel, smoking “fumoir” or fume room, wine cellar, 16 bedrooms, 20 bathrooms and 19 fireplaces.
Scattered around the expansive property are eight other buildings: a 3,700-square-foot guest house, 4,700-square-foot carriage house, boathouse on Tuxedo Lake, secluded log cabin, tea house, pool/spa house and five-car garage.
The property also has two pools, a tennis court and a $1 million geothermal heating system and concealed solar field, which allows the estate to fulfill its own energy needs.
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Renamor was built in 1920 in the French Provincial style and features the rustic architecture popularized in America after World War I, complete with a hip roof, clay tiles, dormer windows, stone and stucco façade and period ironwork, according to Sotheby’s. The house was built for original owners George Amory, a major stockholder in container shipping business Sea-Land Freight Company, and his wife Marion Renee, who inspired the Renamor name. It was bought in the early 1950s and housed the now-closed Academy of Mount St. Vincent, according to New York Heritage, before it was returned to private ownership.
The Tuxedo Park village, about 40 miles northwest of New York City, is gated and houses a social club synonymous with high society in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The area can historically count names like Colgate/Palmolive heir Adele Colgate, actress Millicent Rogers (granddaughter of Standard Oil tycoon Henry Rogers), banker J.P. Morgan and politician William Waldorf Astor among its residents. It was founded as a hunting-and-fishing reserve in 1886 by tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV (his company made cigarettes under the brand names Newport, Maverick and others until it was purchased by Reynolds American in 2015) along Tuxedo Lake. Visitors often arrived in their own private railroad cars, according to Sotheby's, and its private country club is believed to be where the first short dinner jacket, or tuxedo, was introduced in the late 1800s. Today, Tuxedo Park is home to fewer than 400 residents, the homes of which are preserved and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Emily Post, who wrote the famous etiquette guide "The Blue Book of Social Usage," summered with her family in Tuxuedo Park.
$7 million. That's the next most-expensive home currently listed for sale in Tuxedo Park. The property is a six-acre estate called Brook Farm with a 8,250-square-foot, 8 bedroom, 9 bathroom home.
