• Oheka Castle, the second-largest private home in the US, has been sold for $72 million.
• The estate is said to have inspired "The Great Gatsby" and has been used in film and TV.
• It's also a favorite wedding venue for celebrities, such as Kevin Jonas, Megyn Kelly, and more.

If you've ever read or seen "The Great Gatsby," you know 1920s New York was home to extravagant mansions with owners who hosted lavish parties — and if you've watched "The Gilded Age," you know those parties began decades earlier in the 1870s.

And if you're a really dedicated fan, you just missed your chance to own a piece of F. Scott Fitzgerald history yourself. Oheka Castle, a sprawling, century-old estate said to have inspired the parties in "The Great Gatsby," went up for auction on October 27, via Concierge Auctions and Adam Modlin of The Modlin Group.

Its original homeowner was financier Otto Hermann Kahn, who built Oheka Castle — named after its owner (Oh-He-Ka) — in 1919 on Long Island.

Kahn's wife used to call the home "Otto's zoo," and it seemed to be an accurate description. A-listers of the time used to party at the 109,000-square-foot home, with Kahn as a Gatsby-like figure entertaining all his guests.

But Oheka's journey didn't end there. After Kahn's death in 1934, the property changed hands numerous times until it was abandoned in the '80s. Fires, vandalism, and theft devastated it.

According to Oheka Castle, land developer Gary Melius then purchased the estate and spent $40 million restoring it to its former glory. He defaulted on a loan over a decade ago, Forbes reported, and declared bankruptcy in July 2025 to forestall what happened this week: Oheka on the auction block.

Per Concierge Auction, seven bidders were competing for Oheka, but the eventual winner, Gold Coast Property & Estate Management LLC, is set to pay $72 million for the property, pending approval. The sale also includes a pre-approved plan to build a four-story condo building.

"This sale marks an exciting next chapter for Oheka and an opportunity for its next owner to preserve that legacy while bringing a new vision to the estate," said Modlin.

Today, Oheka is the second-largest private home in the US, behind only the Biltmore House in North Carolina. It's a popular venue for weddings, a restaurant, and a hotel, and has been featured in movies, TV shows, and music videos. Taylor Swift even filmed the "Blank Space" video there.

You can also tour the grounds for $30. I took the tour in April 2024 and was astonished by the beauty of Oheka Castle. Here's what it was like to visit.

Oheka Castle was built in 1919 by German-American financier Otto Hermann Kahn.

He spent about $11 million, or about $213 million in today's currency, to build Oheka on 443 acres of land in West Hills, New York.

Oheka Castle has seen a lot in its 100-plus years, and for anyone who wants to learn more, tours are offered twice daily.

So, I decided to visit. All I knew about Oheka was that Kevin Jonas got married there and Taylor Swift filmed the "Blank Space" music video there.

But Oheka has a rich history. I learned all about it on a beautiful afternoon in April 2024.

When you drive to the entryway, it's a bit intimidating. There's someone working the gate who must let you in.

Then comes a long driveway. I felt like I was going back in time to the Gilded Age.

My first look at the main house was astounding — and yes, I mean house. Oheka Castle is the second-largest private residence in the US.

It's also on the National Register of Historic Places. It was added in September 2004.

When Kahn built this house, he had three requirements: He wanted to be high up, he wanted a view of the water, and he needed the house to be fireproof.

His previous house in New Jersey had burned down. Oheka, in contrast, is built largely out of stone.

I went inside and waited in front of a grand staircase with the rest of my group for our tour to begin.

When it began, we saw photos of how the house looked before its current owner restored it. We'd learn more about this later.

The first room we entered was this beautiful entryway with a mural of the sky on the ceiling.

The house itself is 112,895 square feet today and has 127 rooms.

Many of the rooms are dedicated to showing off the home's history, like the Chaplin Room.

Charlie Chaplin was just one of the many '20s A-listers who hung out at Oheka. This photo shows Chaplin (right) with Kahn (center) and actor Douglas Fairbanks (left).

In fact, according to my tour guide, Jay Gatsby's wild parties in "The Great Gatsby" were inspired by what was going down at Oheka in the '20s.

This was Kahn's wife Adelaide's favorite room. Adelaide wasn't as big of an entertainer as her husband, but this sunny room was perfect for guests.

This ballroom is the only room that's not original to Kahn's time inside Oheka today.

But as you can see from the ballroom's windows, Oheka met Kahn's requirement for a view of the water. He used to dock his yacht there.

Kahn, who was Jewish, also built a golf course on his property — country clubs at the time wouldn't admit Jewish people or allow them to play.

After Kahn's death in 1934, the property was shuffled between owners. From 1948 to 1979, it was the Eastern Military Academy.

During those days, what is now the breakfast room was used as a gym.

From that room, we made our way to this huge library.

A portrait of Kahn hung above the fireplace.

Our final stop on the first floor was this room, which also houses a bar. Press clippings about Oheka adorned the walls.

Among the displayed articles was Danielle and Kevin Jonas' wedding spread in People. They got married at the estate in 2009.

Then we went upstairs to check out the hotel and bridal suite.

The bridal suite, which is on the fourth floor, opens with this mural-covered entryway.

A beautiful open room with windows allows wedding parties to take in the view of Oheka's well-manicured grounds.

The gardens at Oheka are breathtaking from above.

Here's the main bedroom of the bridal suite.

The primary bathroom has a bathtub and a shower.

Then it was time to check out the gardens — and to learn what happened to Oheka.

When the Eastern Military Academy went bankrupt and vacated its premises in 1979, Oheka was left abandoned.

Residents who lived nearby were concerned about vandalism. One neighbor even took this statue for safekeeping and returned it when Oheka was restored in the '80s.

Land developer Gary Melius purchased Oheka in 1984 and spent $40 million restoring it to its former glory.

The gardens were originally designed by the Olmsted Brothers, best known for helping with Central Park.

Melius used those original sketches to restore Oheka.

These statues were tracked down at an auction and are thought to date back to the Renaissance.

Now, it's a beautiful wedding venue, hotel, restaurant, and home — Melius keeps an apartment on the third floor.

As I left the grounds, I got one more look at the restaurant and its courtyard.

I would highly recommend taking a tour of Oheka. As I viewed its stunning surroundings and learned about its unique history, I felt like I was traveling back in time.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published in September 2026 and most recently updated in October 2026.

• Taylor Swift's self-titled debut album celebrates its 20th anniversary this week.
• It would've been the ideal time to revisit her country roots with "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)."
• Instead, Swift squandered her own momentum by releasing the "Showgirl" deluxe last month.

The stage was set for Taylor Swift to sing her way back into critics' hearts — and back onto the country charts — with nostalgic twang and another picture to burn.

Instead, the curtains raised to reveal a rare strategic misstep.

This week is the 20th anniversary of Swift's debut album, "Taylor Swift." For much of this year, fans had been expecting Swift to mark the occasion by releasing "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" and reclaiming her place in the country-star pantheon — especially after "I Knew It, I Knew You," her cowgirl-inspired single for the "Toy Story 5" soundtrack, became a crossover hit in June, topping the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs simultaneously and finishing at No. 2 on the Songs of the Summer chart for 2026.

"I Knew It, I Knew You" suggested an imminent return to Swift's country beginnings, one that would be welcomed with open arms by longtime listeners and Nashville gatekeepers alike. The charm offensive was well underway: Swift gave interviews and exclusive snippets to country radio stations and publicly gushed about honoring her "country roots." Even the song's lyrics seemed to play like a sly Swiftian in-joke, the kind of marketing wink that she's famous for weaving into her work: "I remembered I loved you / Came back when it mattered."

But the "Taylor Swift" 20th anniversary celebration has been interrupted by a flashier, less prudent version of its titular author.

In late September, Swift surprised fans by unveiling the deluxe edition of her 12th album. "The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore" features four new songs Swift said she wrote in an excitable creative burst last year, shortly after the original album's release.

Commercially, this unexpected move has paid off. One of the new "Showgirl" tracks, "Patient Zero," has been No. 1 on the Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks, making "Showgirl" one of just a handful of albums throughout history to yield three chart-topping hits. The album also returned to No. 1, adding hundreds of thousands of additional sales to its already eye-popping total.

Strategically, however, revisiting "Showgirl" in lieu of "Taylor Swift" is far from savvy — especially for a self-described mastermind who is seldom caught in the middle of a PR campaign with a domino out of place. Swift had seemingly arranged her country-music homecoming with care, precision, and pitch-perfect anticipation. Now, that momentum is gone.

'The Encore' disrupted what could have been a perfect rollout to revisit 'Taylor Swift'

After two decades of Swift's solo-written anthems and high-pressure reinventions, the 2025 arrival of "Showgirl" was uniquely disenchanting. Swift had recently wrapped the highest-grossing tour in history, reunited with two of the music industry's most revered producers, and promised the album would contain "the best ideas we've ever had." This was positioned to be her pop opus.

Alas, "Showgirl" was overhyped and underbaked, peppered with ham-handed imagery and corny puns. Critics tempered their disappointment with justifications: Swift is too famous and too successful to disappear into her work; her public persona has grown too distracting and unwieldy; she's likely experiencing professional burnout.

This year's deluxe album was received with much less mercy, earning a 39 out of 100 on Metacritic, a 40-point drop from the original's score. When Swift brought "Showgirl" back to the fore, its shortcomings shifted focus away from the goodwill she'd spent all summer cultivating with "I Knew It, I Knew You."

Even worse, the new batch of "Showgirl" tracks included "Cleveland!" — an egregious attempted kiss-off that indulges all of Swift's worst impulses. Social media exploded with derisive glee, with some going so far as to say Swift had ruined her own songwriting legacy. Even fans who defended the song called it "rage bait" and "not that deep."

Even if the other deluxe tracks are catchy, polished, and well-structured, they were unleashed at a far too precarious time to receive the general public's benefit of the doubt.

Indeed, many assumed that Swift, ever the tactician, would move on from the "Showgirl" era with haste — and what better way to course-correct than by reminding us how she became a household name?

A reminder of Swift's country prowess is long overdue

Back in 2006, critics were charmed by the precocious lyrics and banjo-laden hooks that populate Swift's debut, from "Tim McGraw" and "Our Song" to "Should've Said No" and "Picture to Burn." At 16, Swift had already penned indelible zingers like "You said the way my blue eyes shine put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, 'That's a lie.'"

Twenty years later, the highlights on "Taylor Swift" stand as peak examples of Nashville-honed storytelling — the kind that helped pave the way for a new wave of country stars like Ella Langley to dominate the charts.

Of course, Swift may still release "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)." It could arrive tomorrow, next week, or years from now. While the "Taylor's Version" project was made redundant when Swift bought back her masters last year, she had already rerecorded her debut by the time the purchase went through. "I really love how it sounds now," she told fans, saying it would be released "when the time is right."

But it's hard to imagine a better window than the one Swift just squandered. If "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" does end up closely following "The Encore," it will no longer live in its own moment, but in the shadow of a critical flop. The triumphant return-to-country narrative has been muddled. Plus, with "Patient Zero" still performing well on the charts, it doesn't make economic sense to release another album that would siphon away attention and streams.

So why did Swift decide this time wasn't right for her debut to reemerge? We can only speculate, though it's possible that Swift's talent for brand management has distracted us from her primary drive, the very thing that made "Taylor Swift" a sensation in the first place: She's a creative, an artist, a songwriter with something to say. Perhaps this was not a calculated choice, but a personal one. Perhaps she simply wrote new songs and decided to share them. Perhaps she anticipated "The Encore" would face more pushback than "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" and decided to do it anyway.

Swift's lyrics offer clues to this effect. "Babylon," the final deluxe track on "The Encore," warns against "using nostalgia as a weapon to hurt yourself" and "missing all the best parts" of the present day. The story is not told from Swift's first-person perspective, but, when read as a meta-narrative, it seems to forestall critiques just like this one — asking listeners not to romanticize the past precisely as she declines the most obvious opportunity to monetize her own.

"Babylon" doubles as a preemptive epilogue to the embattled "Showgirl" era. Swift has recently been accused of devolving, of failing to live up to the heights of her past work — as if her now-beloved albums like "Red" and "Reputation" were never dismissed or ridiculed upon release.

Will "Showgirl" receive the same revaluation? Only time will tell, but it sounds like Swift is feeling optimistic.

"You hate this song," she sings, "but you wake up on the train with your headphones gone / Now that melody is all you want."