Only when fire destroyed a wing made of glass and damaged two of the remaining three sides of the house did the price come down to their level _ $38,000. However, the Kerrs _ who did not become wealthy until Jean's "Daisies" was published and her 1961 play "Mary, Mary" made it to Broadway _ could not afford the place. In "Please Don't Eat the Daisies," a 1957 collection of writings that became a best seller, author Jean Kerr said the couple had been house-hunting for more than a year when the agent asked if they'd like to see "a crazy house down on the water… just for the laughs."Īfter taking in the "Persian idols and towering stone cats and Chinese bells and gargoyles… the Venetian paneling and the iron gates and the portholes and the stained-glass windows," the Kerrs told the agent, "It's the nuttiest house we ever saw, we'll buy it." He fashioned one room, known as the captain's quarters and resembling the bridge of a ship, from the remains of a Hudson River steamboat. King took what had been a stable and carriage house and added on and on, collecting ideas and building materials from churches, mansions and even ships. Her husband Walter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning theater critic, died in 1996 at age 83.īefore the Kerrs, the house was owned by Charles King, an automobile pioneer who is mostly responsible for the building's size and uniqueness. Jean Kerr, the humorist and playwright, died in January at age 80. The turreted, ivy-covered, 102-year-old mansion on Long Island Sound, once dubbed an "architectural error" in Time magazine, is on the market for $4.4 million, being sold by the estate of Walter and Jean Kerr, who moved there in 1955. This residence _ informally known as the "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" house _ has three mirrors on an outside wall, each five feet by eight feet, to redirect sunlight into the courtyard. Most front doors have doorbells, but this entrance has two _ one for right-handed visitors and one for lefties, each in the mouth of a brass griffin.
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