Another NY home that I can't afford. People built for permanence back in the old days.

At first, they were five adult siblings and their widowed mother, Lucy, all college educated and opinionated, civic-minded and characterful, all living together in the brick-and-stone, late-1920s house perched like a beached ocean liner high on a hill overlooking the river here.

Maud, Mattie and Jacqueline were schoolteachers like their mother. Charles, a social worker, had been an Air Force officer during World War II. Randolph, named for their grandfather Randall Bell, who had been born a slave, was an electrical genius who worked in shipyards.

They were all single — Maud and Jackie, as she was known, had been married and divorced — in 1966, the year they pooled their resources and bought the estate. With 30-odd rooms, a 45-foot-long living room and nearly 20 acres of land, the place cost $155,000, ample change for the times, but it solved a unique problem: how to house six singular adults and one child, Jackie’s 2-year-old son. In the late 1960s, another sister, June, a former model who had been in the Air Force, moved in after her divorce, and then there were eight. (Their brother James, a noted adolescent psychiatrist who had worked at West Point, also invested in the place and spent weekends there.)

“Growing up, I always thought I wanted a ‘normal’ family, a mom and a dad in the same house,” James Moorhead was saying the other day, wandering through rooms that still wear their period costumes: a ’40s bedroom set in June’s suite, a silver go-go dress in Mattie’s closet, a stack of Look magazines in the octagonal paneled library (and on the same table, three folded American flags from three military funerals). Mr. Moorhead, now 47, was Jackie’s son, but all the siblings doted on him. Mattie taught him French and science; Maud focused on current events and ancient Greece. Charles loved politics and pop culture. And Randolph (Rand for short) was Mr. Moorhead’s constant companion, driving him to music lessons and to school, talking with him as he worked on the house. Rand was the systems guy, the tinkerer, fixer-upper and landscaper, bright, patient and kind to a small boy...

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