A Shingle

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By Marcelle Sussman Fischler

An 1877 shingle-style “cottage” with 330 feet of sandy beach 50 feet from the Atlantic Ocean is poised to enter the market at $55 million. The property taxes on the house, on the eastern edge of Wainscott, N.Y., are $13,848 per year.

The beach house is on 2.8 acres in the exclusive 100-acre Georgica Association, a guarded enclave with four communal tennis courts abutting an 18th-century windmill, weekly baseball games and sailboat regattas for children. The listing is shared by Frank Newbold and Beate V. Moore, of Sotheby’s International Realty, and Ed Petrie, Julie Wolfe and James Petrie of Compass.

The three-story house has seven bedrooms and seven and a half baths and a porch on three sides, and crowns a dune between the Atlantic and Georgica Pond. It is called Kilkare, a “whimsical Victorian name meant to evoke a fictional Irish town, the sort of place where you could kill all your cares,” said Eleanora Kennedy, who with her husband, Michael J. Kennedy, purchased the house in 1975.Mr. Kennedy, a criminal trial lawyer who died last year, defended the Black Panthers and represented Ivana Trump in her divorce from Donald J. Trump.The 5,000-square-foot house appeared in the 2004 movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and in 2007 in “The Nanny Diaries.”

Kilkare was constructed by shipbuilders for Camilla and Walter Edwards Sr., a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Congregationalist Protestant theologian. When the Kennedys first saw it on a cold February day, “the fog was so thick all we could see was this looming Wuthering Heights,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “The bones were perfect, but it was in a state of disrepair.”

They replaced its peeling plaster walls with drywall, but left the house’s character intact. “We freshened it up. It was called decorating by restraint,” she said. But they added six bathrooms and converted the butler’s quarters to an eat-in kitchen with butcher block countertops, a professional Garland range, a fireplace and a white ceramic tile floor. The rest of the house has pumpkin-color pine floors.

With 85 windows and screened double doors front and back, the house is cooled by ocean breezes. Original tracery patterns made of thin strips of molding decorate the ceilings, with lattice in the living room and a chevron pattern in the dining room, which has a bow window. Wide treads on the staircase accommodated Victorian gowns. There are nine fireplaces, including those in the foyer, dining room and living room.

“It’s more Gothic cathedral than 1877 beach house,” Mr. Newbold said . Except for a porte-cochere, Kilkare survived unscathed the 1938 hurricane that demolished numerous structures in the area.

Windows in a staircase landing known as the “ship’s knee” overlook a 60-foot swimming pool enclosed by a stacked stone wall, and a meditation garden.

A stone revetment wall provides a barrier to the shore.

“The house is built much closer to the beach than would be allowed today,” Mr. Newbold said. To the east, the nearest neighbor is across Georgica Pond. “You have this front-row seat protected forever.”

The Kennedys often entertained. The actress Candice Bergen, the writers Peter Matthiessen and Kurt Vonnegut, the artist Robert Dash and Bert Schneider, a producer of “Easy Rider,” frequented Kilkare. “Billy Joel would come after dinner and play piano with my daughter,” Ms. Kennedy said. Annual soirees for 200 to 250 people included a Victorian cotillion and a Mexican fiesta, and sometimes featured magicians and mimes.

Early on, the Kennedys rented “a very modest, tiny saltbox” on the property to the Trumps when they were newlyweds. “They stayed there each summer for seven years,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “They left it better than when they moved in. They were perfect tenants.” The saltbox was sold and replaced by a grander house. (It is no longer part of Kilkare and is not for sale.)

Ms. Kennedy surmised that three types of buyers would vie for Kilkare: someone who “will love it the way it is,” someone who will modernize, or “someone who will come with a wrecking ball.”

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