Hillandale (Oakley Court)

This entry rests on weak evidence and should be treated as provisional.

The former goldcoastmansions.com site described Hillandale, which it also called Hillendale and Oakley Court, as an English Tudor manor house of whitewashed brick at Mill Neck, built in 1936 to designs by Henry Corse for Mrs. Watson Dickerman. It said the house stood on 42 acres on one of the highest points on Long Island, that Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt bought it and renamed it Oakley Court, that Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney owned it later, and that it served as a set for the film Hair. None of those statements could be confirmed from an independent source in this research.

The closest independent match is a house now called Wychwood in Mill Neck. In October 2021 the Long Island Press reported that Wychwood, an English Tudor manor house on 13 acres, was completed in 1937, was designed by Henry Corse, and counted Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney among its past owners. The article described nine bedrooms, formal living and dining rooms with fireplaces, a library, a heated pool and a carriage house with staff quarters, and it gave the asking price as $27 million. The shared architect and the shared owners suggest that Wychwood is the house the old site meant, but no source found in this research names Wychwood as Hillandale or Oakley Court.

Two details in the old account need care. First, the Dickerman name points to a different place. Watson Dickerman named his horse farm in Westchester County Hillandale Farm; it grew to nearly 500 acres in Mamaroneck and New Rochelle. He died in 1923, and in 1925 his wife sold a large part of that land to the Ward family; it is now part of Ward Acres. Whether a member of the Dickerman family later built a house at Mill Neck and reused the name is not established. Second, the Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt whose houses are best known lived from 1877 to 1915, two decades before this house was finished. If a Vanderbilt of that name owned the Mill Neck house, it must have been a later member of the family, and the sources found here do not say which one.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney is named as a past owner by both the old site and the 2021 article, so that ownership is the best supported part of the story, though neither gives dates.

The house is a private residence and is not open to visitors. Its street address is left out of this entry on purpose until the identification is confirmed.