The Upper East Side townhouse where Barbara Jakobson lived among her art for nearly six decades is on the market again, now asking $8.99 million after a cut of more than $800,000 from its April debut at $9.8 million. The five-storey house on East 74th Street in Lenox Hill was the home of the collector and longtime Museum of Modern Art trustee from 1965 until her death in 2025, and for most of that time it doubled as her private gallery, its rooms rearranged as her collection grew.

Built in 1910 and extended by architect John Kingsland in 1956, the 20-foot-wide house already carried a film-world past before Jakobson arrived: director Elia Kazan lived there while making East of Eden and Splendor in the Grass, with James Dean, Natalie Wood and Marlon Brando among the visitors. Jakobson, a native New Yorker, made it her own kind of salon, welcoming artists including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg. She once described the house as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical exercise, changing it constantly as proof of life.

Behind red lacquered doors, the interiors unfold across roughly 6,000 square feet: eight bedrooms and six bathrooms, a parlor floor arranged as formal living room, gallery and salon around a wood-burning fireplace, and a private garden of 350 square feet reached through glass doors from the great room. The house takes its nickname, the Squirrel House, from the bronze squirrels at the entrance. Its grand entry hall is framed by triple arches and wallpaper designed by Peter Halley, while the staircase Jakobson once posed on for Vogue descends to a double-height great room that still bears the pale outline of Frank Stella's 1971 Felsztyn III, a painting sold at Christie's in 2005.

The primary suite takes up the whole top floor, with a light-filled lounge for reading, while guest bedrooms below include two junior suites with dressing rooms. The listing is held by Leslie Hirsch, Edward Joseph, Howard Morrel and Benjamin Anderson of Christie's International Real Estate New York.