4 Coolest Jersey Shore Homes You (Unfortunately) Can’t Stay In
New Jersey may be known for its tourism, but there are plenty of permanent residents who live in some beautiful (and sometimes wacky) houses. Here are four of the coolest Jersey shore homes.
(via Kurfiss Sotheby’s International Realty/Zillow)
This is 315 Goat Hill Road in Lambertville, a home that skilled modern architect Jules Gregory built for his own use. His work spans New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, but this four-bedroom house may be his greatest architectural achievement.
Built in 1961, this property features 10 acres of forest, a sizable guest home, and a footbridge. The entire structure is comprised of organic materials sourced locally. Benjamin Storck owned the house after Gregory, and has attempted to sell it for more than $1 million.
Ricky Boscarino built and now owns Luna Parc, a colorful and silly property in Sussex County with a yard full of cats, crutches, tiled benches, a house with blue bottle walls, a stellar outhouse, a stained-glass chapel, and a giant artichoke. The home is named after an amusement park outside of Rome and inspired by Victorian gingerbread houses.
The inside is just as whimsical, populated with knights, old music makers, mounted insects, century-old back scratchers, art, memorabilia, and knickknacks. The bathroom is covered in almost a million broken pieces of stone and tile, stained glass, gravy boat fountains, and merpeople. A typewriter sits in another room, full of pages that repeat the line “All work and now play make Jack a dull boy.”
Public viewings occur biannually. Boscarino bought a property next door and plans to transform it into Crescent Moon, a center for art education that will feature a garden for teaching purposes.
This home, called Bubble Hill, formerly belonged to actor and comedian Eddie Murphy. He paid $30 million for this property and renovated it for his family. It now has 32 rooms, two pools and a pool table, and a jukebox. The house also contains a studio and theater. In 2012, Alicia Keys bought it for $12 million.
(credit to RGL_Photography on Flickr)
The Dempsey House in Middletown is all that remains of the Dempsey Estate. A pump house made of local peanut stone, no one has ever lived there. As a suburban community grows around it, legends have circulated about mysterious happenings in and near the home.
According to one, the Dempseys were an old couple, and the man was bedridden. Once day, the wife never came upstairs to care for the husband, and he died of dehydration. A local police officer who investigated experienced something terrible in the house that led him to hang himself nearby.
In another story, Mr. Dempsey killed his entire family and then hung himself on Halloween. Dempsey still haunts the house and the basement smells like decomposing flesh, so it might be that he buried the bodies there.
A similar story states that Dempsey was a doctor who killed his daughter and then his wife in the basement before committing suicide by drinking acid.
The township plans to protect the house and its surrounding structures, since they have historical significance. No murders at the home have been officially reported.
You might not be able to stay in any of these houses, but it would be fun to drive by the coolest Jersey shore homes and imagine what could be…