December 11, 1997 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The tobacco heiress Doris Duke not only left $1.25-billion in cash for her charitable foundation when she died, but she also bequeathed the foundation control of her homes.
She requested in her will that three of the homes, which have an estimated value of $150-million, be turned into operating foundations. Those properties are Shangri La, in Honolulu; Rough Point, in Newport, R.I.; and Duke Farms, in Somerville, N.J.
Shangri La, a Moroccan-style mansion, will probably be converted into a museum to meet Miss Duke’s request in her will that the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art be created “to promote the study and understanding of Middle East art and culture.” The estate contains a collection of Islamic art that Miss Duke collected during her extensive travels. She imported Turkish paneling and Islamic art and had them embedded in the walls and placed throughout the estate.
Rough Point, Miss Duke’s 30-room summer “cottage” built by the Vanderbilts, will be turned into a museum under the auspices of the Newport Restoration Foundation. Miss Duke had created that fund while she was alive to buy 83 historic homes in run-down areas of Newport and restore them to their 18th-century colonial grandeur. She gave the fund $21.9-million over the years. The homes are rented, and the foundation continues to maintain them. It also runs the Samuel Whitehorne House museum, a restored federal-style building in Newport that houses a collection of colonial art and furniture.
Duke Farms, the most elaborate of the properties, is a 56,000-square-foot mansion built by her father, James Buchanan Duke, at the turn of the century. The mansion is located on 2,700 acres that include a 1,000-acre landscaped park with lakes and waterfalls and a farm with a working Jersey dairy herd. It will probably be used to fulfill Miss Duke’s request in her will for an operating fund to be called the Foundation for the Preservation of New Jersey Farmland and Farm Animals.
She also created the Duke Gardens Foundation, which runs an array of 12 interior gardens in greenhouses that Miss Duke designed and are open to the public part of each year. They include English, French, Italian, Indian, and Japanese style gardens, as well as one just for orchids.
The estate also has a collection of Burmese and Thai art, including a Thai village and temple that Miss Duke was constructing. Those works will be under the control of the Foundation for Southeast Asian Art and Culture — another entity Miss Duke created while she was still alive.
Officials of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation say they do not know how much money they will need to pour into operating the funds that will be attached to the properties, but they concede that the costs could chip away from the amount available for grants to charities. All six operating foundations have been legally established, but the Duke fund does not yet have control of the three properties.
Miss Duke gave the trustees authority in her will to take money from her foundation’s endowment if they needed it to maintain the operating funds.
“There’s no question that the properties are a very relevant piece of what we need to do,” says Alan Altschuler, the Duke foundation’s chief financial officer. “But on the other hand, we have a $1.2-billion endowment for which we can give away a lot of money into a lot of good things.”
