New Yorker Liz Lange spends the winter in Palm Beach, but her shingle-style summer cottage in East Hampton is by far her most famous residence. In 2017, she bought the notorious Grey Gardens estate and spearheaded its second major restoration, with help from landscape expert Deborah Nevins, designer Mark Sikes, and Lange’s longtime best friend, Jonathan Adler.
The circa-1897/1901 mansion—planned by F. Stanhope Phillips but completed by his widow, Margaret Bagg Phillips—was the subject of a 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles. The cinema verité masterpiece became a worldwide sensation, later inspiring a Broadway musical and an Emmy-winning HBO homage starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. During its mid-century years of infamy, the house was occupied by Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and her namesake daughter, “Little Edie,” aunt and cousin, respectively, of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her sister, Lee Radziwill. The Beales, members of East Hampton’s ultra-exclusive Maidstone Club, bought the home in 1923. However, Big Edie’s attorney husband, Phelan, divorced his flamboyant wife in 1946, deeding over the beloved house but granting no alimony. Little Edie soon gave up her own theatrical pursuits and moved home to help her mother. With almost no financial means, the two women became increasingly reclusive as the mansion literally rotted around them, filling with trash and barely escaping condemnation.
After her mother’s death in 1977, Little Edie moved back to Manhattan, refusing to sell the house to anyone who would tear it down. Writer Sally Quinn and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, visited the property two years later. According to reports, the home was in such derelict condition that the real estate agent refused to enter, and Bradlee—who was allergic to cats—began to choke. But Quinn saw past the raccoon skulls and dozens of dead cats to the home’s original glamour. The Bradlees—whom Little Edie surely recognized as “staunch characters”—bought the house for $220,000 and began what Lange calls a “heroic” restoration.
Lange grew up spending weekends and summers nearby at her family’s contemporary-style house designed by renowned architect Charles Gwathmey (known for his renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum). As a kid riding her bike around the neighborhood, she didn’t pay much attention to the spooky mansion obscured by overgrown vines on West End Road. As an adult, she learned of its notoriety but never joined the legions of fans taking selfies from the street or gossiping in Facebook groups. “I did not have that level of obsession,” she says.
However, as a fashion designer known for revolutionizing maternity wear with her eponymous clothing line and now as CEO of the women’s fashion and lifestyle brand Figue, Lange recognizes style when she sees it. She admired the home’s authenticity, particularly as more and more original East Hampton homes were being demolished, and she jumped at the opportunity when it came on the market.
“I like houses that are what they are meant to be,” she says. “I think the history is amazing, and I feel very lucky to be a part of it. But, really, we bought it for the land, the location, and the house.”
Having grown up in a modern house, Lange doesn’t take period details for granted and launched a rigorous restoration. She replaced all the windows with restoration glass, which is thinner, a bit wavy, and truer to what would have been used at the turn of the century. Likewise, she installed smaller diamond panes that would have matched the lattice windows’ original scale. Studying the documentary frame by frame, she noted and replicated details, like the streamlined curves where the front porch columns meet the roofline. She also replaced shutters and restored the original front door.
The new owners’ dedication to authenticity also led them to leave some features deliberately imperfect. For example, an upstairs landing remains a bit uneven. “The floor is a tiny bit creaky on purpose,” says Lange, who wanted to make sure Grey Gardens still “felt like an old house.”
Nowhere is this attention to detail more obvious than in the iconic foyer—where Little Edie performed her famous flag-waving dance in the documentary. Lange removed, restored, and reinstalled all the woodwork and stair parts, keeping everything true to its original scale. “I was extremely mindful of not ruining it,” she notes. “I wanted [to restore] the house so that it would’ve been familiar if Big Edie and Little Edie walked in.”
However, if the bones remained true, the furnishings are entirely Lange’s own invention. “I wasn’t looking for the house to look like a museum,” she says. “I wanted the architecture to reflect [the times], but I wanted the decor to be brighter, happier, cleaner—more fun. I’m not into dusty chintzes.”
Again, the foyer sets the tone. The original wood floors are now faux-painted like black-and-white tile, and blue leopard wallpaper flows to the second-floor landing. A curved chest with a jungle and leopard motif, designed in the 1950s by Piero Fornasetti, adds mid-century swagger, as do accessories like a white porthole mirror and a chinoiserie monkey and pagoda. Lange is an inveterate collector, and many rooms feature groupings such as Murano glass, handmade pottery, seashells, and quirky objects sourced everywhere from Florida’s Dixie Highway to Les Puces de Saint-Ouen in Paris.
Artistic homages to Big Edie and Little Edie appear throughout the house, too. On the second-floor landing, bookshelves are topped with papier-mâché busts of mother and daughter by Mark Gagnon. The ladies are flanked by a series of classical-themed drawings with winks to the home’s famous occupants by Luke Edward Hall. Lange even commissioned a custom wallpaper with drawings of the Beales for a guest bedroom closet. Most dramatic of all is an installation in the garden’s original thatched hut: Adler drew a flamboyant mural of the women’s eyes, rendered in Portuguese tile and paired with brass stools shaped like tongues. “It’s a little scary but fun and surreal,” Lange says with a laugh.
The entire project took three years, partly due to COVID, and involved major structural changes. Lange had the entire house lifted on stilts and built a daylight basement that includes a gym, screening room, laundry room, wine cellar, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. She also added new bathrooms in the attic, where hand-painted murals by Bob Christian bring whimsy to the narrow hallways, which lead to cozy guest rooms tucked under the eaves. The electrical systems were completely replaced, and the entire home was outfitted with new period-style hardware.
Outdoors, Lange restored the famous walled gardens, originally commissioned by noted horticulturist Anna Gilman Hill, who, with her husband, Robert, owned the estate between the Phillipses and the Beales. Hill imported concrete walls from Spain to protect her beds of roses, phlox, and delphinium from ocean breezes. She also gave the estate its name, Grey Gardens, inspired by the soft colors of the flowers, walls, and salty mist.
Part of the walled garden’s magic is that it can only be viewed from inside its gates or from the house. The property’s tiled sunroom was already glassed in, but Lange redid the diamond panes in their original smaller size and re-created the oversize French doors so that the room could appear to have only three walls when those doors are open. A fireplace adds a cozy touch on cool evenings.
Lange planted more flower gardens and a kitchen garden, resurfaced a hard tennis court with grass, replaced a rectangular pool with a round one (inspired by the Woodland estate in Hollywood), and added an open-air cabana wrapped in French treillage. Many of the home’s indoor spaces are various shades of blue, but Lange used a particular cyan she calls “Grey Gardens Blue” for all gates, benches, and doors on the grounds.
Visitors often ask Lange if she sees ghosts, but she insists she’s not superstitious. “Sally had told me the lights flicker, and she thought that was Big Edie and Little Edie,” she says. “But once we completely redid the electrical [system], those lights don’t flicker anymore.”
She does acknowledge it’s an honor to be among the lineup of determined women who have been stewards of this home: Margaret Phillips, who actually completed the house after her husband’s untimely death; Anna Gilman Hill; the Edies; and Sally Quinn—not to mention Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill, who financed major repairs that helped the home escape condemnation in the 1970s. “I do feel the presence of women prior to me,” Lange says, “and I feel their sense of history about the house.”
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