Following four years of issues related to erosion, billionaire investment fund CEO Barry Sternlicht’s New England beach house has met its fate of demolition, according to Business Insider.
This home is Sternlicht’s second to be destroyed on the same stretch of beachfront on the Massachusetts vacation island of Nantucket, which is approximately 30 miles south of Cape Cod.
Sternlicht bought his first abode on Hummock Pond Road for $610,000 in a 2010 foreclosure sale before paying $1.3 million for an adjacent property in 2019, the outlet reported.
In 2020, hurricanes Paulette and Teddy badly damaged both houses, causing about 60 feet of erosion around them, and the town demanded Sternlicht demolish one, Vanity Fair previously reported.
(“That’s some of the more aggressive and timely erosion that at least I’ve seen in my time on Nantucket,” Jeff Carlson, director of Nantucket’s Natural Resources Department, commented to the magazine at the time. “I hate to say it, but sometimes it just comes down to a little bit of bad luck for folks to be at the wrong spot at the wrong time.”)
Sternlicht — who Forbes reports has a net worth of $3.8 billion — moved the other home onto steel girders, where it sat until its demolition last week. Representatives for the 63-year-old confirmed to Business Insider that the property was slated for demolition without further comment.
“This house was scheduled to be moved about four years ago, then there was significant erosion, a storm that resulted in about 30-plus feet of erosion,” local architect and Sternlicht representative Matt MacEachern told the Nantucket Historic District Commission while requesting an emergency demolition permit earlier this month, the Nantucket Current reported. “But basically there were really no options because all the land was eroded. We have talked to a number of different companies to try move the structure and they told us it’s just not possible”
