Stunning $2 Million ‘Summer Palace’ Sold for Stunning $200,000

A stunning Nantucket summer home once worth nearly $2 million has sold for just $200,000 — and the owners couldn’t be happier.

Jane Carlin and Ben Gifford, who bought their dream home on West Nantucket in 1988, have been forced to sell their beloved property for a fraction of its value as Mother Nature threatens to reclaim it.

The 1,700-square-foot home, valued at $1.9 million in 2024, now sits perilously close to the Atlantic Ocean after years of relentless erosion have eaten away at the shoreline.

“It’s almost ready to be built,” Jane told the Nantucket Current. “It’s been really unforgiving. It used to be a neighborhood, and you knew who lived where. And now, if you drive up there, there’s not much to see.”

But the couple received an unexpected offer for their Sheep Pond Rd home from their neighbor, Don Vaccaro, a businessman who owns the property next door.

Vaccaro rushed to buy the disappearing house for just $200,000.

“All winter I was frantically trying to see if any of the organizations would take the house and move it, and we would help pay for the moving costs,” Jane said. “I didn’t want to see it fall into the ocean or get demolished. But I had no luck.”

Click here to resize this module

“We said, ‘Wow! We’re not going to say no,'” Carlin added.

“You don’t want to sell to someone when you know a storm could blow it away next week,” Carlin said when asked why they didn’t put the house on the market. “We wanted to be ethical and honest about it. Then this miracle fell from the sky and we sold it to someone for nothing.”

“It was very emotional to leave home the other day for the last time,” she added. “But we’re also really lucky. I’m not complaining at all. Given the dire housing situation on Nantucket, we’re just grateful for the time we had there.”

Vaccaro, who rents his adjacent property for up to $13,000 a week, is well aware of the fate of his new acquisition.

“In fact, the house may not last more than six months,” Vaccaro said. “Inevitably, the ocean will win. The house is only temporary, everything in life is temporary.”

“Since we own 26 Sheep Pond Road, we can do some creative things to extend the life of the house and even if the house is torn down, we could have additional land,” he said.

“We also plan to implement erosion mitigation strategies that will likely extend the time before the house becomes habitable. The simplest is the planting of seagrass, which should be done in the coming weeks. The second solution is to install a low-height (less than 30 cm) V-shaped biodegradable silt fence, which has worked well in a few other areas.”

The idyllic island of Nantucket, a playground for the rich and famous, could be completely wiped off the map by the end of the century, according to alarming projections.

This summer hotspot, known for its pristine beaches and quaint cobblestone streets, faces an existential threat as rising sea levels threaten to engulf large parts of the island.

According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), much of the island could be submerged by 2100.

Nantucket is also projected to experience sea level rise of 1.15 feet by 2040, 2.36 feet by 2060, 4.36 feet by 2080 and 6.66 feet by 2100.

These projections may be just the tip of the iceberg, as they do not account for other factors such as destructive storms, powerful waves and additional erosion.