A 110-Room Elkins Park Mansion Just Reopened After 84 Years, and Preservation Money Followed
Lynnewood Hall sat on the market for most of a decade with no buyer at any price. A preservation nonprofit's 20-year restoration plan is what finally moved it.
Lynnewood Hall, the 110-room neoclassical mansion on 33 acres in Elkins Park, opened to the public this month for only the second time in 84 years, hosting the "Fleurs de Villes: The Gilded Age" flower show through October 4. The Lynnewood Hall Preservation Alliance bought the property in 2023 and is three years into a 20-year restoration plan to stabilize the structure for use as a preservation and education site.
The building sat vacant for roughly 30 years after a 1996 sale to a church group. It was listed for sale at $20 million in 2014 and still hadn't sold by 2019 at $11 million. A property this size, with this much deed-restricted historic fabric, doesn't move on price cuts alone. It took a mission-driven buyer with patient capital and a multi-decade timeline to find a use a decade of asking-price reductions couldn't.
If you or a client owns a stalled historic estate, mill, or mansion anywhere in the collar counties that's been sitting through repeated price cuts, this is the buyer profile to target next: a preservation group or institution that can commit to decades, not a developer underwriting a five-year return.
Source: PhillyVoice, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Why it matters
An 84-year-vacant mansion needed a preservation nonprofit's patient, multi-decade capital to find a use. Stalled historic properties in the collar counties are worth pricing to that buyer type before the next markdown.
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