Oheka Castle

Otto Hermann Kahn was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1867, the son of a banker, and was nationally prominent in banking from the 1890s until his death. He was also a leading patron of the arts. He became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1911 and served as its president from 1918 to 1931. His country house took its name from his own: Otto Hermann Kahn.

The National Register nomination says three architectural firms competed for the commission and that Delano & Aldrich won with a design that deliberately recalled Clarence Mackay's French-style Harbor Hill in nearby Roslyn. To give his house a commanding site, Kahn had it built on an artificial hill. The official site dates the start of construction to 1914 and completion to 1917; the nomination gives the building period as 1915 to 1917 and notes that the First World War briefly halted work on the house and grounds. As first built, the house had 127 rooms covering about 109,000 square feet by the official site's count, or an estimated 110,000 square feet in the nomination, which calls it the largest house Delano & Aldrich ever designed. The exterior is stucco with limestone trim under a steep slate roof. The estate covered 443 acres, with an 18-hole golf course, terraced lawns, and formal gardens. The Olmsted Brothers worked on the water gardens near the house for about a year from 1917, and Beatrix Farrand resumed garden work in 1919. Farrand's gardens did not survive.

Kahn died of a heart attack in 1934. The nomination says the estate was then sold to the City of New York and used by the Department of Sanitation as a retreat for its workers until the Second World War; the official site says a sanitation workers' welfare fund bought it in 1936 and that a merchant marine radio school used it in 1939. The Eastern Military Academy occupied the house from 1948 to 1978. After that school's bankruptcy the mansion stood empty and was vandalized. Most of the land was subdivided, and the golf course passed to separate ownership.

Gary Melius is the reason Oheka stands. When the Long Island developer bought the house and its remaining 22 acres for $1.5 million in 1984, it had no electricity, no plumbing, no windows and no doors, and years of vandals and weather had left it close to a shell. He began by hauling out the debris, about 9,000 cubic yards of it in 300 containers. He replaced all 222 windows and doors with custom-made duplicates and spent two years on a new roof laid with 4,000 slates from the same Vermont quarry the Kahns had used. Inside, the wrought-iron railing of the grand staircase was refurbished by hand, the library walls were repainted in faux bois, and the plaster moldings of the ballroom and library were recreated from rubber castings of the originals. Outside, he rebuilt the formal gardens from the Olmsted Brothers' own drawings, with eight reflecting pools and three fountains, and planted 500 red cedars in 2003 and 44 London plane trees and 2,505 boxwoods in 2005. A Terrace Room addition in 1996 brought the house to about 115,000 square feet, and Oheka was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The castle puts the cost of the work at $40 million and calls it the largest private restoration in American history; by 2019 about 85 percent of the estate and gardens had been brought back.

Melius did not stop at the building. Under his ownership Oheka became a hotel with 34 guest rooms and suites, a restaurant, and a wedding and event venue, and docent-led tours opened the house to the public. His daughter Nancy Melius, who performed on Broadway in Cats before joining the family business, has served as the castle's director of marketing and design. She decorated each of the guest rooms herself, helps run its events, and has kept the house's historic character and its name at the center of everything the castle does. Between them, father and daughter turned the largest house Delano & Aldrich ever designed from a ruin into a working estate.