Sands Point's Two Guggenheim Estates: One Takes $15 at the Gate, the Other Takes a Membership

Say "meet me at the estate" in Sands Point and you have told your neighbor almost nothing. There are, depending on how you count, three different Guggenheim-era properties within a mile of each other on this peninsula, and each one operates by a completely different rulebook. One will let you in for the price of a movie ticket. One will not let you in at all unless you already belong. And one sits inside the boundary of the first, fenced off from the public trails that surround it, still functioning as private land nobody but a handful of neighbors ever walks.

Most residents know this in a general, half-formed way. Fewer could tell you which brother built which house, or why the one with the beach costs money and the one with the golf course does not take cash at all.

Two Brothers, Two Estates

The public side of the peninsula's Gold Coast history sits inside the Sands Point Preserve, 216 acres now owned by Nassau County and run day to day by the Sands Point Preserve Conservancy. The land started as financier Howard Gould's estate, home to Castle Gould, before it passed to mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim's family, who built the gray-stone Hempstead House on the same grounds. Today the Conservancy operates that property as a park: six marked trails, a beach on Long Island Sound, a playground, and the two mansions open on a tour schedule.

Elsewhere in the village, on Thayer Lane, sits a second Guggenheim property that has nothing to do with the Preserve's public hours. Built in 1916 by Isaac Guggenheim, Daniel's brother, this Italian Renaissance mansion later became the IBM Country Club before the Village of Sands Point purchased the estate outright in 1994. It is now the Village Club of Sands Point, a private, members-only facility on roughly 210 acres facing Hempstead Harbor. You cannot buy a day pass. You cannot pay at a gatehouse. The only way onto that lawn is through membership.

Two brothers, two estates, two entirely different relationships to the word "public." Neither one is more or less part of the neighborhood's identity than the other. They are just governed by opposite logic.

The Fence Within the Fence

There is a third layer to this, and it is the one that trips up newer residents and dog walkers most often. The Preserve's 216 acres are not entirely open to visitors. The southern end of the old Guggenheim grounds still holds a working residential section, including a stable, a barn, and paddocks, that remains private property inside the same perimeter. It is not part of the public park, and it is not marked with a friendly split-rail fence you can peer over. The Conservancy's own visitor rules are direct about it: this section is off limits, and security guards enforce the no-trespassing line.

Combine that with the leash law, which the Conservancy notes is a Village of Sands Point ordinance and not a Preserve-specific rule, and you get a small but real piece of local logic: dogs are welcome on the trails, off leash is never allowed anywhere in the village regardless of whose land you think you're standing on, and the property line between "public trail" and "someone's actual working farm" runs through the middle of what looks, from a map, like one continuous park.

What's Actually Open Before Labor Day

The Preserve's extended summer hours, Wednesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., run through Labor Day on September 7. After that, the fall schedule takes over on September 9 and closes an hour earlier, at 6 p.m., through November 1. That gives residents roughly three weeks of long summer evenings left before the light window shrinks.

Here is what's actually on the calendar in that stretch:

• Ice House Jams, live music in the outdoor lounge, Sundays August 23 and August 30
• Hempstead House Tours, 12 p.m. and 1:30 p.m., August 23 and August 26
• Summer Breeze Blowout, an outdoor concert featuring The Everly Set, Tuesday, August 25
• Beauty's Back(pack) to School Bash, a family event with costumed performers and a backpack-decorating activity, Sunday, August 30

The Conservancy also runs its Four Seasons in Music chamber series, now in its eighth season under Artistic Director Kathryn Lockwood and resident duo duoJalal, staged inside Hempstead House and Castle Gould through the year. The spring installment already ran in May. Anyone who wants the next one should watch the Conservancy's own calendar rather than guess at a date, since these concerts tend to sell out their reception seating fast.

Admission to the grounds themselves is $15 per car, or $4 for walk-ins, with free entry for Conservancy members. That fee is what keeps six trails, a beach, a working pond, and two historic mansions maintained on county land, and it is worth remembering the next time a neighbor asks why the Preserve charges at all when it looks, from the road, like a public park with no gate.

On the Membership Side

The Village Club's version of a summer update looks different, because its audience is members, not day visitors. Club leadership has told members that the Mansion is once again available for private events after a review period, with bookings restricted to members. Separately, the club has engaged a local architect with experience in club and restaurant renovations to redesign the Grille, with plans calling for a clearer separation between the dining room and an expanded bar area, though the full scope has not been finalized publicly.

The renovated Pool House, overlooking Hempstead Harbor, is what the club itself describes as the summer social hub, complete with a Harbor Cafe and Bar running 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on open days. The golf side draws its own crowd to the Tom Doak-designed 18-hole course, and the racquet sports lineup, 12 tennis courts, 6 platform tennis courts, and 8 pickleball courts, gives the club a genuinely different daily rhythm than the Preserve on the other side of the village. As the club puts it on its own site, it aims to be "distinctively exclusive" while still feeling like a family gathering place for members.

None of this is visitor-facing. But it shapes the texture of summer for a meaningful share of Sands Point households, and it explains why some neighbors talk about "the club" with the same familiarity others reserve for the Preserve's trails, without either group necessarily having set foot on the other's grounds.

Same Family Name, Different Gate

Sands Point remains a small village, incorporated in 1910, covering just under 3,000 acres and home to a few more than 900 families, less than 25 miles from Manhattan. That size is part of why the Guggenheim name still organizes so much of daily life here more than a century after Daniel and Isaac built their respective houses. What has changed is which parts of that footprint became public infrastructure and which stayed private, and that split, more than any single event on a calendar, is the thing worth actually knowing if you live here. It decides whether your Sunday costs $15, requires a membership card, or just requires a leash.

If you are weighing what a home near either side of that history is actually worth, whether that means walking distance to the Preserve's trails or proximity to the Club's harbor views, we've written separately about how waterfront and inland properties in Sands Point compare. For a closer look at the neighborhood itself, our Sands Point community page has more on what makes this stretch of the North Shore distinct.

And if you're simply curious what your own Sands Point property might be worth in today's market, whether you're thinking about a move now or five years from now, Batul Morbi is always glad to talk through it. You can start with a Home Valuation whenever the timing feels right.