Own a Piece of Camelot: Jackie O’s Childhood Home is Now For Sale

Paging America’s one percent: If you’ve ever wanted to own a piece of Camelot, now is your chance. Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ childhood home is currently selling for a cool $49.5 million.

Merrywood, a 23,000-square-foot Georgian-style estate sitting on the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia (a suburb of Washington, D.C.), is the brick manse where the pre-Kennedy Jacqueline Bouvier was raised in the 1940s by her parents: socialite mother Janet Lee Bouvier and Standard Oil heir stepfather Hugh Auchincloss.

Originally built in 1919, Merrywood features nine bedrooms, 11 full baths, two partial bathrooms, an exercise studio, two pools (indoor and outdoor), a tennis court, and climate-controlled wine cellar, as well as an office, staff accommodations, and even a separate carriage house that includes a four-car garage, all sitting in aristocratic, stately grandeur on seven lush acres, according to Architectural Digest.

Since 2005, the historic estate has been owned by America Online cofounder Steve Case and his wife Jean, chairman of the National Geographic Society. The Cases are currently selling the sprawling home through Sotheby’s International Realty because, as they recently told the Wall Street Journal, they “are empty-nesters and are traveling more.” The property is currently the most expensive listing in the area, and would become record-setting if it goes for anywhere near its asking price, at $2,152 per square foot.

With all the renewed pop culture interest in the Kennedys’ Camelot fairytale — Stephen King’s best-selling time-travel novel 11/22/63 (soon coming to screens with James Franco in the lead) and Natalie Portman’s critically acclaimed biopic Jackie, and that’s just in 2016 alone — and the profound and lasting impact of our love affair with JFK, we’re pretty sure that Merrywood will have no problem finding a loving and deep-pocketed new owner, sticker shock or not.

To wit, in 1996 the sale of Jackie’s estate topped $34 million — or more than seven times the original auction estimates by Sotheby’s — with “buyers seeking a piece of a myth.”