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Like many fixtures of the Manhattan social scene, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette escaped the city’s sweltering summers in favor of the Hamptons. Kennedy rented a house in Sagaponack with his cousin, Anthony Radziwill, and his wife, Carole Radziwill, in the mid-1990s. Their village of choice? Sagaponack, a seaside hamlet in the town of Southampton. Bessette, whose relationship with Kennedy is the subject of FX’s new series, Love Story, also stayed at the beach cottage, as Carole recounted in her 2005 memoir, What Remains, which she wrote after all three had tragically passed away.
A short walk to Sagg Main Beach, the Long Island retreat is where Carole first met both Kennedy and Bessette, who would go on to become her close friends. In her memoir, she looked back fondly on their shared vacation home, dubbed “Sea Song.”
Jaime Lopez
The open living area features vaulted, beamed ceilings.
“Sea Song is modest by Hamptons standards—three small bedrooms separated by an open kitchen and living area, furnished with Pottery Barn tables and white slipcovered couches,” she wrote. The single-story home, built in 1965, has a compact footprint of just 1,800 square feet. Its interiors feature touches like hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, and a brick fireplace.
Jaime Lopez
The house comes with a heated pool.
Also in her book, Carole recalled her first meeting with Bessette. “We were at Sea Song. I was washing dishes, Anthony was running on the beach, and John was reading the paper when she walked out of the bedroom, blonde and ten stories high, in a white cotton nightgown with eyelet trim,” she wrote.
Among the perks are a sprawling rear garden with a heated gunite pool and multiple outdoor entertaining areas. Perhaps best of all, the estate offers a sense of privacy and seclusion. “I remember our favorite feature was the outdoor shower on the side of the house,” Carole told the Wall Street Journal in 2016, when the house went up for sale. “It was completely open and overlooked a field to the front and [was] obscured by trees to the right and the left.”
In the ’90s, the owner was writer Yvonne Dunleavy, who purchased the residence in 1977 for $140,000, per WSJ. She put it on the market in 2016 for $5.75 million. The current owner most recently made it available as a rental in 2021, with an asking price of $50,000 a month.
Inside JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s Hamptons Rental House
Open Gallery
Geoffrey Montes is an associate editor at ELLE Decor with a serious love for all things real estate and design. Before that, he worked at Architectural Digest, Galerie, and Preservation magazines, covering everything from jaw-dropping listings to world-famous architects and design events like Salone del Mobile and Homo Faber.