Kate's estate gets extreme makeover

Katharine Hepburn's storied seaside Connecticut mansion in Fenwick is again for sale.

Yes, it is the Hepburn estate. And yet, it isn't. It's someone else's house not only by title, but by feel.

A massive, multimillion-dollar renovation pushed the limits of an extreme makeover of the 8,300-square-foot house, the centerpiece of the 3 1/2-acre estate on the shores of Long Island Sound.

Even Hepburn, who built the summer home in this little borough of Old Saybrook in 1939, spent weekends there for decades and finally retired there until her death in 2003, would hardly know her way around the place now.

Rooms have been combined to create larger, more open spaces. The kitchen is where part of the living room was. The living room is where the dining room was. A powder room, potting room and pantry now occupy the space where the old kitchen was.

And that's just the first floor.

Hepburn's kitchen was chock-a-block full of shelves laden with dishes. Two refrigerators stood on 16-inch tile platforms in case of flooding, and a second-hand stove came from her ex-husband's house, Hepburn wrote in her 1991 autobiography, "Me: Stories of My Life."

"Before, it was so different," said Colette Harron, of William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty in Essex, the listing agent who also sold the home to its current owners after Hepburn died at the age of 96.

"It was rustic and woodsy and very minimal," she said. "There was a bunch of little rooms. I'm starting to have a hard time remembering what it looked like."

"This," Harron adds, "is what people want in 2011."

And it comes with an updated asking price reflecting millions of dollars of work.

The estate is now on the market for $28 million, partly because it has been subdivided into three lots. The house -- on the largest of the three lots -- can be purchased separately for $18 million. Seven years ago, the entire property sold for $6 million, half the original asking price.

The three-story house, constructed in the English cottage style, was built with 21 rooms and nine bathrooms. The reconfiguration whittled down the rooms to 15, with 7 1/2 baths.

Old Yankee has been overtaken by modern Nantucket beach house. In Hepburn's time, old photographs show, the interior was dominated by exposed brick walls and knotty pine paneling. Now, sheet-rocked walls are painted with cool whites, creams and blues with a relaxed seashore motif suggested by sea stars, lanterns and shells. Doric-style columns flank main entryways.

The renovations are buffered from the flooding that often plagued Hepburn. The house was raised 5 1/2 feet from its concrete slab, revealing more of the house from the bottom of the winding, pebbled driveway where once only chimney tops could be seen.

The current owners, Frank J. Sciame, a Manhattan-based developer and his wife, Barbara, have divided the estate into three lots, with the potential for possibly building two smaller houses on either side of the Hepburn mansion.

Few would dispute that the renovation has resulted in a beautiful home and grounds. The footprint of the house has not changed, with the exception of a wraparound patio. The flecked, whitewashed exterior brick also remains unchanged.

"I guess people would still think of it as the old Hepburn house," said Tedd J. Levy, a member of the trustees of the Old Saybrook Historical Society. "It's quite a different house than what it once was."

Levy and other longtime local residents say the Hepburn house, though large by most standards, wasn't fancy. The actress "wasn't too fussy about caring for things," Levy said.

Donna DiBella, past president of the historical society, visited the house one time while Hepburn was alive and came away with an indelible impression: "It was the kind of place where you could sit and put your feet up."

Hepburn was known to wear loose pants, sometimes frayed at the cuff, cotton and flannel shirts and large hats. Sometimes, she dried her laundry on the grass outside her home to capture the fresh, air-dried feel. In general, she kept a low profile, and residents of Old Saybrook didn't bother her.

The Sciames owned neighboring property when they bought the Hepburn estate in 2004, the year after the actress died.

Sciame declined to be interviewed for this story. But initially, he intended to buy, renovate and then sell the Hepburn estate. The family held onto the house because, according to one published report, his children loved to stay at the place.