No. 85: Coindre Hall

The lovely Gold Coast mansion on the hill overlooking Huntington Harbor is modeled after a chateau. was built between 1910-1912 and is a replica of a French chateau, complete with towers.

The 80,000-square-foot house was part of a 135-acre estate once known as West Neck Farm. The nearby land was once part of the farm, and so was the property.

The mansion’s 33 acres stretch down to the boathouse at the water’s edge, just past a fresh-water pond where the estate used to cut ice for use cooling the house during the summer. As of last summer, the Coindre Hall rowing programs are operating from Fleets Cove Beach while the Suffolk County Department of Parks renovates the boathouse.

Many residents walk their dogs on the park trails or down the hill to the harbor. “It’s great. We come here all the time. My dogs love it,” said Sandy White, who was out for an afternoon run with her dogs.

The estate belonged to George McKesson Brown, heir to the McKesson pharmaceutical fortune. The company is currently No. 15 on the Fortune 500 list, according to its web site. 

The architect of the French chateau-style mansion was Clarence Luce.

Brown and his wife, Pearl, used the house first as a country home, but by the time of World War I lived on the estate year-round, according to the tour guide. When the Browns had to retrench, they sold the mansion and moved next door onto what are now the grounds of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

The chateau-style of the mansion's architectural elements include circular towers with cone-shaped roofs, a hipped roof on the main part of the mansion, elongated brick chimneys and steep, pointed masonry gables. The second-story porch over the entrance connects the two towers. 

On the right side off the entrance foyer, a small circular breakfast room has a black marble fireplace that burned coal and the original herringbone-pattern wood floor.

The home’s seven fireplaces are all original, which along with the courtyard's lead-paned windows are about the only original items that remain, according to tour guide Richie Liebowitz, operations manager for the group Splashes of Hope, which gives tours of the mansion. 

The mansion became a school when Brown sold it and 33 acres of his estate to the Brothers of the Sacred Heart in 1938 after his money dwindled.  The school closed in 1971.

Suffolk County acquired Coindre Hall in 1971 for $900,000, according to old press clippings. It sat empty from 1973 to 1980, then was leased to Eagle Hill School from 1982-1990. The grounds and mansion were listed in the National and New York State Registers of Historic Places in 1985 and it was dedicated to the Suffolk County Historic Trust in 1988. It received local landmark status from the town of Huntington in 1990.

Interested residents may arrange free tours of the mansion through .  For tour information, call Heather Bugee at (631) 424-8230.

Stay tuned for No. 84 next week, same time same place, as Huntington Patch explores the places and activities in town.