Mansion · Cold Spring Hills (Huntington), New York · Built 1914–1919
Oheka Castle
Listed on the National Register as Oheka
A fireproof French-château country house of 1914–19 built for financier Otto H. Kahn on Long Island's North Shore, later a military academy, left derelict, then restored from 1984 and turned into a hotel.
History
Otto Hermann Kahn, a partner in the banking house Kuhn, Loeb and a lavish patron of the Metropolitan Opera, named his estate from the first letters of his three names, as he did his yacht and his Palm Beach villa. After an earlier country house of his in New Jersey was nearly destroyed by fire in 1905, he had Delano & Aldrich build this one of steel and concrete. Work began about 1914; an artificial hill was raised first to lift the house above Cold Spring Harbor, and the Olmsted Brothers laid out a 443-acre estate with a sunken French parterre garden, a Seth Raynor golf course, greenhouses and stables. Wikipedia connects the choice of Long Island to Kahn's exclusion, as a Jew, from clubs near his New Jersey home.
Kahn died in 1934, and within a few years the estate was sold. The golf course and stables became the Cold Spring Country Club in 1946, and in 1948 Eastern Military Academy bought the house and 23 acres, bulldozed the gardens and cut up the rooms. The school closed in 1979. Over the next four years the empty building was vandalized and survived more than a hundred recorded arson attempts, a testament to its fireproof construction. Long Island developer Gary Melius bought it in 1984 and began a restoration that the nomination describes as a twenty-year effort, re-creating the garden from the Olmsted plans; ownership passed to the Japanese businessman Hideki Yokoi from 1988 before returning to Melius. Photographs of Oheka stood in for Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and the house later became a hotel and wedding venue.
“Its style is French Chateauesque, the predominant features of which are the steeply pitched and slated roof, stuccoed walls, and classical design elements that are borrowed freely from Renaissance examples”
Architecture
The house rises three and a half stories under steep slate roofs with narrow dormers, tall chimneys and copper-spiked towers, its buff stucco walls trimmed with limestone quoins. The plan is an E on the ground floor and a C above, organized around a tall central tower. In a deliberate piece of theater, the main entrance, a pedimented limestone doorway, opens at basement level off a cobblestone courtyard, and twin semicircular stairs climb a full story to the reception hall. The main floor holds a 34-by-70-foot ballroom with red Verona marble fireplaces, a dining room with curved, niched end walls, and an oak-floored library. The west front looks over a rectangular formal garden of shallow pools lined by old cedar allées.
What to look for
- Turreted gate tower over the entrance drive
- Pedimented limestone doorway in the cobblestone courtyard
- Twin semicircular staircases in the entrance hall
- Formal garden of shallow pools between cedar allées
- Small round stair tower with a built-in birdhouse
Setting
Oheka occupies the high point of a 23-acre remnant of Kahn's estate in Cold Spring Hills, in the town of Huntington near the Nassau County line, with views north toward Cold Spring Harbor and Long Island Sound. A golf course, once part of the estate, wraps three sides of the grounds, preserving much of the original open setting. A turreted gate tower straddles the drive into the walled entrance court.
Timeline
- 1914Construction begins for Otto H. Kahn
- 1919House completed
- 1934Kahn dies
- 1948Eastern Military Academy buys the house
- 1979Academy closes; building left vacant
- 1984Gary Melius buys it and begins restoration
- 2004Listed on the National Register
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia's claims that Oheka is the second-largest private house in the United States and stands on the highest point of Long Island are not supported by the nomination.
- The year the house began taking overnight guests is not given in the sources.
