Darien's Most Expensive Rental Comes With Its Own Private Beach

Sixty thousand dollars a month buys a lot of things in the New York area. In Darien, it buys the beach. 25 Contentment Island Road, a brand-new estate in the Tokeneke section of town, has just come up for rent for the first time in 40 years, and its centerpiece is not the house. It is the 180 feet of private beach on Long Island Sound that come with it.

The house itself is nothing to wave off: five bedrooms, five and a half baths, and panoramic water views from a perch above the shoreline, set on roughly 2.88 landscaped acres. The Sound is the amenity package here. Moor a boat offshore, launch a kayak from your own sand, or skip the salt water entirely and take a dip in the heated waterfront pool. On this stretch of the Connecticut coast, waterfront usually means a dock and a view. A genuine beach, all yours, is the rare part.

Tokeneke has been Darien's coveted waterfront enclave for a century, a gated-feeling stretch of shore roads and old estates about an hour from the city. Rentals at this level almost never surface, and certainly not new construction on land that has stayed off the market for four decades. The listing is held by Christa Kenin of Douglas Elliman, and at $60,000 a month it is priced as what it is: the most expensive way to rent a summer, or a year, on the Sound.

Photos by Roy A. Smith, courtesy of Douglas Elliman.