Cornelia Guest’s Templeton Home on the Market Again

If you are not sure who Cornelia Guest is, it is not a matter of your grey cells losing color and you inching towards Alzheimer with the progress of age. Cornelia Guest happens to be one of those celebrity wannabes who wanna be everything but rarely amount to something.

Cornelia Guest had style icon C.Z. Guest for a mother and polo champion Winston Guest for her father. Her parents had some claim to fame, the father being a second cousin to Winston Churchill and the heir to the massive Phipps family fortune while her mother was better known for having her portrait painted by Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Diego Rivera.

Cornelia Guest was known as the “Deb of the Decade” in 1986 and in the same year wrote the book, “Debutante’s Guide to Life.” In the recent years, she has had a few roles in movies that have disappeared from the halls faster than you can say “Jack Rabbit!” She also has a catering business and recently started a vegan cookie company.

Templeton, the historic seat of her family in Old Westbury, NY, has been on and off the market for quite a few years. While it was listed for $20,000,000 at one point of time, today it is going for a dismally lower asking price of $11,900,000.

The Templeton estate is spread across 15.52 acres, with the main house covering 11,532 square foot. There are a total of 28 rooms which includes 11 bedrooms and 6 full and 2 half bathrooms. In addition to the main house, the Templeton estate also has a few greenhouses, two cottages, extensive gardens with topiaries, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. It is also the perfect place for an equestrian since the estate also contains stables, pastures, riding rings, and barns.

The house goes back to the time when the America’s east coast became highly popular among the aristocrats and plutocrats of the nation. The 18^th and 19^th century saw most of the rich and wealthy moving to the western end of Long Island, which was also known as the Gold Coast. Here they built lavish mansions and country estates for and very soon, this area became populated with names like Roosevelt, Whitney, Vanderbilt, Whitney, Pratt, Woolworth, and Phipps.

Today, most of the estates in Gold Coast have disappeared. Some have been torn down, some cut up, and others sold off to Wall Street honchos. Few properties stand intact and fewer are still remain in the hands of the descendants of the original owners. One of these houses is the Templeton estates. If for no other reason other than human curiosity we are interested in seeing what the fate of this property is going to be. Will it change hands sometime soon, or be taken off the market just to be put back on at a later stage? Only time will tell.

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