Olde Towne Summer House Listed For $35 Million; Salz Estate On Meadow Lane Sells For $14.5 Million

Jul 17, 2017 10:12 AM

A property on uber-expensive Meadow Lane? A family feud? An art scandal? Lots of lawyers? Must have something to do with real estate in the Hamptons.

Initially, we were going to write about another property in Southampton, this one new to the market with a $34,950,000 price tag. Okay, we’ll tell you a few details. The address is 6 Olde Towne Lane, and the 9-bedroom estate by Kean Development known as Summer House totals 23,000 square feet on 4 acres. (Harald Grant of Sotheby’s International Realty has the listing.) As you can imagine with that ask, the dwelling has oodles of amenities, including a chef’s kitchen, custom stone fireplaces, entertainment lounge with full bar, gym, movie theater, and staff quarters. The exterior features an in-ground pool with spa, pool house, and for those of you channeling Henrik Stenson as he defends his British Open title this month, a rooftop putting green.

Not quite as impressive is $14,500,000 but it’s still a lot of dough, and that is what was just paid for 1990 Meadow Lane. The former owner was the Janet Salz 2009 Trust, and as you know we like to say, the people behind the property are often more interesting. The house—7,448 square feet on 8.3 acres with 3,300 feet of direct oceanfront—is intriguing too. There is a 360-degree unobstructed view of the ocean and Shinnecock Bay, and there are 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half-baths, formal dining room, library elevator, and three-car garage. And, of course, a pool.

Now to the real life behind the real estate. Sam Salz was born in Vienna in March 1894. He served in the Austrian army during World War I, then went to Paris to become a great painter like Picasso, Chagall and Matisse. That didn’t work out as planned, but Mr. Salz did the next best thing—he befriended these artists and mounted exhibitions of their work. By 1923, he was a successful art dealer in Cologne. Fifteen years later, with Nazism expanding, he moved to New York, where he continued to sell the works of European painters whose prices kept going up, especially in the 1960s and ’70s. His clients included the Rockefeller family and film stars like Edward G. Robinson.

Mr. Salz was 87 when he died in 1981. By that time he had two sons from a previous marriage and was married to Janet Reisner Traeger-Salz, who continued his art dealership company. She died in 2015 at age 98. That December, the stepsons, Marc and Andre Salz, sued the widow’s estate, alleging that Ms. Traeger-Salz took at least three paintings—a Claude Monet, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and an Edgar Degas—from their father’s estate and sold them off for millions of dollars, pocketing the profits instead of sharing them with the estate—meaning, of course, Marc and Andre.

It is not known if the sale of the Meadow Lane manse has any impact on the estate or the lawsuit.