The much-renovated farmhouse, a sprawling structure with a wraparound porch, as shown in listing photos, is said to have been inspired in part by the Field of Dreams house.
Photo: MGS Group Real Estate
Blue Heron Farm, the Martha’s Vineyard estate that the Obama family made into their de facto summer White House before architect Norman Foster bought and redid the property in 2011, has sold for $37 million. The buyer, according to The Real Deal, is Les Wexner, an octogenarian known for his long tenure at the helm of L Brands, which includes Victoria’s Secret, the Limited, and Bath & Body Works, and for his deep personal and professional ties with Jeffrey Epstein.
Foster, who bought the house in 2011, added a poolhouse in his trademark modernist style, as shown in listing photos.
Photo: MGS Group Real Estate
The property is a generous 30 acres on Cobbs Hill Road in Chilmark — “up-island” in local parlance, on the western part of the Vineyard, where the estates tend to be larger and the real-estate prices higher than they are to the east. Nearby residents include Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, Dan Aykroyd, and John Kerry — as well as another Epstein associate, Alan Dershowitz, who has faced great disdain at the local library. The white clapboard house at the farm’s center has a wraparound porch that sprawls, somewhat untidily, over an enormous lawn — not at all in the sleek modernist style of Foster. (The Vineyard Gazette has reported that a previous owner almost completely rebuilt the old Victorian-era house on the property, partly inspired by the Field of Dreams farmhouse.) There are outbuildings, too, including a boathouse, a pool house designed by Foster, and a barn imported from the Pennsylvania countryside. Also a private beach on the cove, tennis courts, and horse paddocks. (It’s unclear whether one of Foster’s many gadgets, an autonomous lawn mower that was described in a New Yorker profile as freaking out the Canadian geese that landed at the property, will be included in the sale.) Foster, known for his relentless precision, was apparently willing to overlook the home’s hodgepodge-y style because of its excellent location. When the property was listed this spring, he wrote in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that he had been drawn to its siting: “a beautiful approach through a long avenue lined by trees to arrive at a classic New England house that had grown from historic farming roots.”
Foster told The New Yorker that Obama, who rented the home for three summers during his first term, jokingly asked Foster to rent the property after he’d purchased it. The answer was no.
Photo: Loren Elliott/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The Obamas rented the property for three summers starting in 2009, when it was owned by Mollie and William Van Devender of Mississippi. Foster bought it in 2011 and, as he told The New Yorker, subsequently met Obama at a neighbor’s where the president suggested, with “jokey pressure,” that Foster rent it back to him. (Foster said no.) The architect also told the magazine that he ripped an “absurd amount of wiring” out of an outbuilding, which he assumed was “related to communications and security.”
While not in Foster’s style, the farmhouse was renovated by him, and the interiors, as shown in listing photos, show the precision for which the architect is known.
Photo: MGS Group Real Estate
Foster has been coy about why he decided to put the home on the market this spring. (It featured prominently in his New Yorker profile, published in January.) The Real Deal reported that the buyer listed on the deed — Blue Heron Farm Nominee Trust, news first broken by the Vineyard Gazette — was Matthew Zeigler, an attorney based in New Albany, Ohio, the town that Wexner developed and supports, and where he and his businesses have been based out of for decades. Wexner is 87 and lives most of the year there, and he keeps a low profile, rarely giving interviews. His financial connections to Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner’s vast wealth during the years when he built his own fortune, included ownership of the Upper East Side house where Epstein lived and carried out his sex crimes. (Wexner bought it but never occupied it for any real length of time; Epstein then moved in and eventually took ownership himself.) Their relationship brought Wexner unwelcome attention as Epstein’s crimes — and subsequent death in custody in 2019 — became public.