Billionaire Buys Chappaqua Mansion Featured In Pete Davidson Movie

CHAPPAQUA, NY — Remember that Chappaqua mansion from the recent Pete Davidson movie, Bodies Bodies Bodies, that was one of the Hudson Valley's most unique Patch Wow Houses, noted for its secret passageway? According to The Real Deal, billionaire John Catsimatidis, the CEO of Red Apple Group, which owns Gristedes Foods, just purchased the estate for less than 20 percent of its original asking price.

The Georgian stone manor estate, known as "Rosewood," located at 48 Haights Cross Road, was recently priced at $6.75 million (July 2021) but was de-listed on May 23, of this year. The property, which was built in 2004, is a 20,456-square-foot, 6-bedroom/10.5-bathroom house on 86 acres, according to public records. It also has a two-story mahogany library, billiard parlor, wine cellar, media room, gym, sauna, indoor basketball court and chef's kitchen. The secret passageway can be found in the master wing. The estate also has hiking trails, sports courts, a pool, a cabana and a landscaped pergola.

Apparently, Catherine Zeta-Jones was once interested in the property as well, when it was valued at $19.2 million, according to CBS2. You can watch CBS2's 2014 tour of the inside of the property here.

The property was built in 2004 by Stewart Dauman, the CEO of the debt collection agency Vision Financial, but he filed for bankruptcy before he was able to sell it, according to The Real Deal.

While the property was once on the market for nearly $30 million, the estate was put up for auction in 2019, and eventually became owned by the Town of New Castle, as seen in a June 2022 Request For Proposals.

After it ended up in foreclosure, the supermarket mogul/developer/talk show host recently purchased the large property for $5 million. According to The Real Deal, Catsimatidis has said that the property makes up about one-third of the hamlet of Chappaqua and that he plans to use it as a family retreat.

SEE ALSO: Hudson Valley Mansion Is The Real Star Of That New Pete Davidson Movie

While the estate itself is well hidden from the road, ads for the movie, Bodies Bodies Bodies, released in August, starring Pete Davidson, were hard to miss. "When a group of rich 20-somethings plan a hurricane party at a remote family mansion, a party game turns deadly in this fresh and funny look at backstabbing, fake friends, and one party gone very, very wrong," according to the producer A24's one-line synopsis of the film.

The cabana was where much of the Hollywood misadventure took place in the film.

Chappaqua was chosen as the filming location for Bodies Bodies Bodies because the exclusive enclave "convincingly reflected the high-income demographics of most of the characters in the story." While location scouting, production designer April Lasky said she found the "empty McMansion-style estate that had been on the market for several years, providing an ideal setting for a Covid-era production that had desolation and constriction in its DNA."

Rather than just using the estate for exterior shots, nearly the entire movie was shot on the property, according to the filmmakers.

"Shooting an entire film in one location presents its own challenges, but there are many pros to it as well, the main one being you get to settle into a space and have more time to think about how you want things to look and feel," said Lasky in an A24 release. "With the power outage being central to the story, the colors and sheens selected for the interiors had to be chosen carefully and tested vigorously against the lighting scheme, which includes flashlights, cell phones, and glowsticks in the blackout scenes."

Director Halina Reijn asked for as much prep time as possible in the disused location because she thought the big group scenes, with their complex character dynamics and volatile freakouts, would be challenging to film. "I asked the actors to learn their lines as if we were rehearsing for a play," said Reijn. "In the end they were wonderful — they could do a big, complicated scene in one take."

The house's massive living room became the base for the movie's meticulous rehearsals as well as a place where Reijn and the actors could plan complicated scenes that played out in darkness during the game-play sequences.

"The house gave us ample space to feel out its dimensions which was so liberating," said Stenberg. "Our physical blocking and reactions to each other in motion became an important part of the process in terms of finding each scene."

While the William Pitt Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty listing for Rosewood is no longer active, photos from the listing can still be seen here.

You can also peek at the mansion's interiors in A24's official trailers: