NEWPORT ESTATE OF CAMPBELL SOUP HEIRESS SELLS FOR $14 MILLION
Frieda Squires/The Providence Journal
Sept. 11, 2013: Wildacre, a Newport estate at 310 Ocean Ave., was sold Tuesday by Campbell Soup heiress Dorrance Hamilton for $14 million. The estate was built in 1902 for Albert H. Olmsted, the brother of famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City's Central Park.
By CHRISTINE DUNN
Journal Staff Writer
cdunn@providencejournal.com
Wildacre, a Newport estate at 310 Ocean Ave., has been sold by Campbell Soup heiress Dorrance Hamilton for $14 million.
The sale price is the second-highest this year in Rhode Island, after singer Taylor Swift’s $17.75-million purchase in April of a mansion on Watch Hill in Westerly. It’s the latest in a string of sales indicating that the luxury-house market in Rhode Island is recovering.
The 14-room, 8,180-square-foot mansion was listed for sale in September 2012 for $15.75 million. It was built in 1902 for Albert H. Olmsted, the brother of famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City’s Central Park.
Dorrance Hamilton
Wildacre was designed by Irving Gill, a California-based early modern architect, and the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm. A shingle-style with Asian and arts and crafts elements, the house has steep peaks and gables and a secluded location near granite outcroppings overlooking Price Neck Cove and the Atlantic Ocean. The house has seven bedrooms, six full bathrooms and a half bath.
The mansion was extensively restored after Hamilton bought the 2.5-acre property in November 1998 for $3.725 million. A private dock was added, along with new terraces, stone walls and a new infinity-edge swimming pool. The property also includes a greenhouse, a pool house and a guest house. Hamilton won an award for the restoration in 2001 from the Rhode Island Historical & Preservation Heritage Commission.
Wildacre has been a summer residence for Hamilton, a widow in her 80s whose wealth has been estimated at $1 billion by Forbes magazine. She lives mainly in Philadelphia and is known as a philanthropist. (In 2005, she donated $1 million to the Blithewold estate and gardens in Bristol.)
She will continue to summer in Newport, having recently constructed a new house at the Blue Gardens property, the former Arthur Curtis James estate on Beacon Hill Road. She plans to re-create the Blue Gardens, which were also originally designed by Olmsted.
The sale caps a summer that has seen continued recovery in the state’s luxury-home market. Statistics from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors show that there have been 91 single-family house sales over $1 million so far this year in Rhode Island, a number that already beats the year-end total for 2009 (85), the low point for the high-end sector, and approaches 2011’s 111 luxury sales.
Those 91 transactions don’t include the Swift sale, which did not go through the Statewide Multiple Listing service, but they do include another major Watch Hill sale, the Aloha Cottage, at 14 Aloha Rd., which closed on Aug. 30 for $9.35 million.
There were 175 $1-million-plus sales in Rhode Island in 2012, a number helped by a surge at year’s end, when the fiscal-cliff budget standoff raised fears that capital-gains taxes would soon increase.
Gustave White Sotheby’s International Realty, of Newport, handled both sides of Tuesday’s Wildacre sale. Michelle Kirby represented Hamilton, and David Huberman represented the buyer, identified only as Ocean 310 LLC.
Huberman was also involved in the December 2012 sale of the Hopedene estate in Newport, which, at $16 million, was Rhode Island’s top sale in 2012.