Family Ties

Hi everyone, Millie Rockerfella here. I thought I'd share a few pics of my distant relatives old house. They come from the American side of the family, & as you can see, they changed the spelling of their name to end with an 'er'. We could never quite figure out why, but you know those American possums, they do strange things with the English language sometimes!!

Anyways, this house in Greenwich Connecticut was built for my 8th cousin, 200 times removed, James Stillman Rockefeller. He & his wife, Nancy Carnegie Rockefeller (yes, of THE Carnegie's) built this house just after they got hitched in 1929. A classic brick Georgian home, it's got 11 bedrooms and 16 marble bathrooms on four levels. There's also 12 fireplaces, an elevator, an outdoor pool and English gardens - pretty nice eh. Cousin James lived there until 2004 when he went to God at the mighty old age of 102. (Nancy had pre-deceased him in 1994 after 68 years of marriage). It was then sold for US$13.4m.

The new Owners found it in it's original and unaltered 1930's condition (we'd heard whispers across the Pacific that old James was a bit of a penny-pincher). They thought the layout of the home was geared toward an obsolete lifestyle - a pretty harsh statement I reckon, as in my books, a combined family wealth of over $110 billion never loses its relevance! So they hired the boys from Vicente-Burin Architects to fix the joint up. The heart of the project was relocating the kitchen from an isolated servant's wing to the center of the main house. I'm so glad old James didn't live to see this, he would have had a total spin-out, as he'd never actually set foot in a kitchen! The former servants wing was repurposed into a billiard room with guest quarters above. The 20,000sq.ft. home was renovated in it's entirety & then resold again in 2009 for US$23.9m. Us Aussie Rockerfella's were sure sad to see the old place go!!

I thought I'd put these pics in first, as I know my fellow Bloggers just love a good Laundry!

I reckon if old James was still in an above ground position, he'd have made sure those machines had coin slots in them!

Images: Vicente-Burin