In the 1980s, when Nasser Nakib was a junior architect working in Soho, he used to slip over to Bond Street on his lunch breaks just to stand on the cobblestones. “In Provence you’re in a lavender field and you think, I could die happy here,” he says. “In New York, this block is it for me.”

In the 1980s, when architect Nasser Nakib was working in SoHo, he used to slip over to Bond Street on his lunch breaks just to stand on the cobblestones. “In Provence you’re in a lavender field and you think, I could die happy here,” he says. “In New York, this block is it for me.”

Built for Louise Grace—daughter of NYC’s two-time mayor and shipping magnate William R. Grace—this stuccoed Renaissance Revival cottage is a rare surviving example of an early American summer estate, set on 3,570 feet of private Maine shoreline.