Marcel Robins Briarcliff Manor House Made up of Hexagons

The developer Marcel Robins was best known for his long-running collaboration with the architect Harry Wenning. They spent the mid-1960s building Robinwood, a unique Westchester sprawl of warm, barn-inspired post-and-beam homes that was named to the National Registry. Then there’s 57 Holly Place, which may be Robins’s strangest home.

Price: $999,000 ($32,882 annual tax estimate)

Specs: 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms

Extras: Swimming pool, patio, two-car garage

Closest Train: Scarborough (Metro North Hudson Line)

Twelve-minute driving radius: Downtown Ossining, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, The Jacob Burns Film Center

Listed by: Sharon Bodnar Briskman, Nancy J. Beard

Built ten minutes away in Briarcliff in 1968, the six-bedroom house has the duo’s trademark wood and glass, open floor plan, and clerestory windows. But unlike those other homes, 57 is arranged in a series of four hexagons. This was at the request of the owner, whose family would prefer to remain private, and who has spent 54 years filling the odd angles of their odd honeycomb-shaped house.

One enters through the smallest honeycomb — a hexagon with travertine floors and a high, hexagonal cedar ceiling. Hook a right and you’ll find yourself in the next hexagon, built as an entertainment wing. It’s been divvied up like a pizza cut six ways. Three slices make up a great room with a dining and living area whose high windows look up into the trees out front and whose wood-lined ceiling features a dramatic hexagonal skylight. A fourth triangle is the home office, paneled in honey-colored wood. And a fifth triangle is the family room, a hangout space with a fireplace and sliding glass doors that give way to the yard, where a concrete and brick patio is paved in — you guessed it — hexagons, which lead to a pool. The sixth triangle of this entertainment wing is the kitchen. Walk through it, and you reach another hexagon devoted to the more utilitarian functions of the home: a two-car garage, laundry room, pantry, rec room, and guest room. If you enter the home and head the other way, you’ll find yourself in a hexagon of bedrooms.

The home also has 16 closets and, thanks to the hexagonal shape, they are mostly deep and oddly shaped. “Some of those closets are delicious,” says agent Nancy Beard, who has the listing with agent Sharon Bodnar Briskman. “Like Narnia.”

The original homeowner recently passed away, and it’s the first time the home has ever been on the market. (Though it’s been visible to the public before — in was used as Josh Brolin’s home in the 2007 Ridley Scott film American Gangster.)

As Briskman and Beard have shown the place, they say they’ve noticed a very specific perk of its bizarre layout. They can take separate clients into separate wings and demonstrate how their voices don’t carry over — a major selling point today, Briskman says. “In COVID, everybody was desperate for office space. ‘Where will be my office? Where will I Zoom from?’ And this affords all of that,” she says. “I think that’s very unusual in a home to have no sense of what other people are up to. What worked in 1968 really is working in today’s post-COVID market, too.”