A New Taylor Swift Song Tells the Story of Her Rhode Island Home

Table Of Content

• Delevingne and others took to Instagram to show the fun they were having.
• Pickleball to Eras Tour prep: How Taylor Swift’s skorts helped Popflex go viral
• The story of Taylor Swift’s Holiday House — Home to “the Last Great American Dynasty”
• The dark story behind Taylor Swift’s $17m Holiday House mansion
• ‘I don’t have to convince anyone’: How a Kosovo refugee became the biggest name in watchmaking

It turns out that Swift's Holiday House has a long history of wealth and lavish parties, and is renowned among locals for its coastal views. On the 2019 album Lover, she sang about her former New York City carriage house in the song “Cornelia Street,” and on the brand-new surprise album she released on July 24, Folklore, there’s another tune about once of her residences. “The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of a woman named Rebekah, who, the lyrics explain, married the heir to the Standard Oil fortune and purchased a home called Holiday House.

Delevingne and others took to Instagram to show the fun they were having.

After William's death in 1954, it was reported that Rebekah infuriated her neighbors with her quirky and wild antics. Swift includes details in her song about how Rebekah filled the pool with champagne, threw luxurious parties, and played cards with Salvador Dali. The singer also draws parallels between Rebekah's reputation and her own, especially when it comes to their shared tendency to upset society for not always doing what is expected of them.

Pickleball to Eras Tour prep: How Taylor Swift’s skorts helped Popflex go viral

A New Taylor Swift Song Tells the Story of Her Rhode Island Home - House Beautiful

A New Taylor Swift Song Tells the Story of Her Rhode Island Home.

Posted: Fri, 24 Jul 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The "Holiday House" that inspired the song was reportedly bought by the Grammy-winning singer in 2013 for $17.75 million in cash, per Page Six. Since then, the musician has put her hard-earned, lavish home to good use by hosting numerous parties with famous friends, known as her squad. Since Taylor Swift tends to keep her personal life fairly private these days, details about the house have been hard to come by.

The story of Taylor Swift’s Holiday House — Home to “the Last Great American Dynasty”

Swift was so fascinated with Rebekah that another song on Folklore is titled “Betty,” a clear reference to Rebekah Harkness’s nickname. Several other friends of the super star have also shared photos inside the home’s white kitchen. Although the private pop star, 34, hasn’t shared many images of the vacation property herself, several of her A-list pals have given glimpses inside the home while uploading images from the lavish bash — known as Taymerica — to their social media over the years. A Colonial-style mansion, High Watch sits on a 5-acre (2.0 ha) seafront estate that includes a private beach. The estate is situated atop Watch Hill's namesake hillock, which was used as a strategic lookout point during some battles in the history of the United States. We pack a lot of incredible experiences into a state that’s only 37 miles wide and 48 miles long.

The dark story behind Taylor Swift’s $17m Holiday House mansion

She was released on $1,000 personal recognizance and scheduled for a District Court arraignment on July 14, according to court records. The Instagram post of Swift and her "girlies" in Watch Hill "sittin', there by the water" comes after the songstress dropped the re-release of her 2010 album at midnight on Friday. "Speak Now (Taylor's Version)" is the third in her series of re-recordings since the sale of her master recordings in 2020. The album features the 14 original tracks (including singles "Mine," "Back to December," "Mean," "Sparks Fly," "Ours," and "The Story of Us) plus the two bonus tracks and six "vault" tracks with Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams of Paramore. Haim shared some of the photos on their Instagram account Haim the Band, captioning them "single summer." Swift’s house – which has eight bedrooms and 10.5 bathrooms, according to its online particulars – is one of several properties she owns in a portfolio said to be worth $81m.

Taylor Swift’s Holiday House was once owned by Rebekah Harkness

In the above and below verse, Taylor suggests that she doesn’t care about people’s opinions that she’s ruining everything because they’re just people’s opinions and false perceptions of her, she just enjoys her life how she wants to enjoy it and is having such a ‘marvellous time’ doing so. The above verse is packed with a lot of lyrical details and history, as it reveals Rebekah was not a woman to get on your bad side, as she dyed a neighbour’s door ‘key lime green’ after an argument’. Then the story gradually moves to the present, as it is revealed that after Rebekah passed, Holiday House was left unlived in for fifty years, free of woman who were called mad for being different, for their love lives or for their habits, until Taylor reveals she eventually brought Rebekah’s house for herself. This verse (above) reveals that Rebekah’s marriage started off with a charming wedding, and that they came from new money, and they originally brought Holiday House as a place to begin their married life together and were known for through loud but tasteful parties. The last line reveals that perhaps the people of the town they lived in, blamed Rebekah (perhaps they blamed her because people assume it is the woman’s fault, and not the man’s fault but in this case, it was simply a medical issue that was out of theirs and anyone’s control.

It should come as no surprise that Swift has a special relationship with her Rhode Island mansion; just last year, during an appearance on Ellen, the singer said that the property is her favorite place to spend holidays. The name is said to come from the wives of mariners, who would watch for their spouses’ return, often in vain as the ocean took their lives, leaving the women widows. The property spans 5.23 acres and is said to be “the highest point of direct waterfront land on the entire eastern seaboard.” It’s also the most expensive privately owned home in all of Rhode Island. And since celebrity homes are in our blood, especially when they come with their own backstory, we just had to do our due diligence and look up Taylor Swift’s house (and the story behind it), and boy, is it a good one. Sales plummeted 19% year over year in March in this category, which is often viewed as a way to own a home and help pay off one’s mortgage. The median sales price was also up, and by double digits — from $319,950 to $370,000, a 15.64% increase.

‘I don’t have to convince anyone’: How a Kosovo refugee became the biggest name in watchmaking

In the same year, the "1989" star's then-boyfriend Calvin Harris posted his first Instagram photo of Taylor while she was cooking BBQ on the patio at her Rhode Island house. The 11,000-square-foot estate was built on the highest point of Watch Hill, an affluent coastal neighborhood in the town of Wesley, Rhode Island. To the left, it belongs to Ocean House, a spectacular (and spectacularly expensive) hotel originally built 150 years ago, where celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Simpson, and the late, great Regis Philbin were seen.

A New Taylor Swift Song Tells the Story of the Former Owners of Her Rhode Island Home

In the lyrics of Taylor Swift's song, "The Last Great American Dynasty," she tells listeners that her Rhode Island mansion sat empty on the coast for 50 years before she purchased it. She also mentions a woman named Rebekah, and it didn't take fans long to discover that the woman in question was Rebekah West Harkness, an heiress from St. Louis who once owned the property, as reported by The Washington Post. In a final moment of clarity, Taylor tells us that she had a marvellous time at Holiday House, living her life, even some people unfairly saw it as ‘running everything’ and Taylor had a marvellous time. The last great American dynasty is the ideal song for a playlist, that’s designed to be listened to on a chilled summer evening, or when you want to listen to a good story, sitting around the campfire. The third track off Taylor Swift’s Folklore album is not one to be skipped over if you decide to listen to the album.

Harkness may have filled her pool with Champagne and not flamingo and unicorn pool floats, but she brought in the celebrities of her day, and she installed a dome on her lawn as a rehearsal space for her ballet company. In my head, that dome looks exactly like the enormous 27-foot-tall waterslide Swift had at her 2016 extravaganza. The parallels between the two of them are strong enough that it’s hard not to hear the lyric, “Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever,” as Swift’s own feelings toward my home state. Back in 2015, several of her famous friends — including Gigi Hadid, Joe Jonas and Martha Hunt — shared photos from the fun-filled weekend to their Instagrams. There are rarely more than about houses for sale in Watch Hill at any time, and the average sales price in the past year is $5.4m. One headline sale recently was the house two doors down from Swift on Bluff Avenue, which sold for $17.6m “to a buyer who lives two hours away and wanted a family retreat on the beach,” says Simmons.

Also known as High Watch or Holiday House, the hilltop home by the sea reportedly has eight bedrooms, eight fireplaces, 10 bathrooms and a back patio with a massive pool. Rather than lavish paintings, Swift opted for black-and-white photos of her friends and family — which seemingly line one of her hallway walls. The eight-bedroom property, known as High Watch or Holiday House, was built on the highest point in Watch Hill and boasts over 700 feet of private beachfront. Several stalking, trespassing, and home invasion incidents have been reported at the house since Swift's purchase.

Meanwhile, Martha also posted several snaps of the home’s exterior, showing the tiled patio with white lounge chairs as well as the pool area — which was decked out with inflatable toys and a slide. The home, which has eight fireplaces and 10 bathrooms, sits on 5.23 acres and features a sprawling back patio with a massive pool. Taylor Swift bought an 11,000-square-foot estate in Rhode Island back in 2013 for a whopping $17.75 million — which she reportedly paid for in cash. According to the celebrity insiders at Page Six, “Even though Gigi and Bradley have their own properties in New York, they wanted somewhere more private to spend time getting to know each other and Taylor was only too happy to help,” an insider said.

Another local landmark is the historic Ocean House hotel, which – situated next to Swift’s house - has often served as handy overspill accommodation for her party guests. Harkness was one of the richest women in America, and her own social circle of debutantes was known as the “Bitch Pack”. She inherited her late husband William’s Standard Oil fortune when he died a few years after they bought the oceanfront house set on five acres. Sneak peeks of her private beachfront and her white kitchen were also seen in the snaps she shared. Some photos from Swift and her friends through the years gave the singer's followers a glimpse into her luxurious property.

Hadid shared a picture of herself playing on a make-shift volleyball court in Swift’s backyard and another photo of the three girls posing on a spiral staircase. Taylor Swift is notorious for her autobiographical style of songwriting, incorporating her own life experiences into her music. Whatever you are feeling or going through, we can almost guarantee there is a Taylor Swift song for that. In her day, Harkness was as much of a media darling as Swift is now, and often the target of unfavorable headlines and press coverage. The master’s suite contains a sitting room with a wet bar as well as a widow’s walk terrace — which is a term used to describe a railed rooftop platform with an inner cupola or turret frequently found in 19th-century North American coastal houses. Back in 2013, Taylor Swift paid a whopping $17.75 million for the 7-bedroom mansion — along with 700 feet of shoreline on Watch Hill, in Rhode Island.

First, as soon as she bought the house in 2013, came grumblings from locals about traffic created by the flood of fans who just wanted to see the house. Then they got angry that she dared to stake her claim on the part of the beach she rightly owned, even though people had been using it for years. People claimed her construction — which was to repair damage done by erosion — would impede public access and would ruin the popular surfing spot.

From all the stunning coastal scenery to all the chef-crafted cuisine, all the stately mansions to all the inspiring art, all the centuries of history to all the welcoming locals, a visit to the Ocean State is one you won’t soon forget. “On summer days, you’ll usually see several young girls perched across the street, taking photos,” says Donna Simmons of Mott & Chace Sotheby’s International Realty. The renowned singer-songwriter also talked about the couple's wedding and the home they picked and called the "Holiday House," where they hosted parties.