Forbes Estate Comes With History and Celebrity

Timberfield, an 18-room home on 34 acres in Bedminster being marketed for $4.25 million by Turpin Realtors, is a property that comes with history — as a traditional Somerset Hills estate and also as scene of many of the late billionaire Malcolm Forbes' fabled parties with guests such as actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine before his death in 1990, was known for his love of motorcycles and attention in the public eye. According to a newspaper article in The Bernardsville News, Forbes invited Taylor to Timberfield in 1987 to present her with a purple Harley-Davidson motorcycle. 

The estate, listed for the past few months through Turpin Realtors' Far Hills office, still is owned by the Forbes family, and has been for a very long time, "generations," said Realtor John Turpin.

Turpin's father, the late John K. Turpin, writing with W. Barry Thomson, profiled Timberfield in one of their volumes of "New Jersey Country Homes: The Somerset Hills," that chronicled the country estates built in the rolling countryside of Somerset and Morris counties from the 1870s through the Great Depression. The books were published by Mountain Colony Press in Far Hills.

John Turpin said the antique home, with six bedrooms, six full- and three half-baths, is a "great house," in a "gorgeous" location at 95 Old Dutch Road in Bedminster Township.

And, he added, the property carries a "wonderful provenance."