Standing on Kipling Avenue in Mount Airy, Cincinnati, Ohio, sits a Tudor Revival mansion on a hilltop.
The house was built in 1928 as the home of radio manufacturer Powel Crosley Jr. The Franciscan Sisters of the Poor bought it in 1963 and used it for retreats.
Cincinnati Preservation has owned it since 2011, and caterers ran it as a wedding venue starting in 2012. That business closed at the end of 2025, after 14 years. In January 2026 the city's zoning examiner denied the variances a hotel plan needed.
The estate is for sale again at $1.75 million, with 19.86 acres and three buildings. The mansion is maintained and the gardens keep their restored layout.
Pinecroft started with a trip to Europe
Powel and Gwendolyn Crosley toured Europe in 1925 and came back wanting a country house. The English houses on that trip settled the style.
He could pay for it. That year his company was called the largest radio manufacturer in the world.
The family was living on Davey Avenue in College Hill, in a house with an attic where Crosley did early radio work.
Other wealthy Cincinnati families were moving out to Indian Hill.
The Crosleys stayed near the neighborhood where they'd both grown up and bought farmland instead along Banning and Kipling roads.
The last piece came from Clarence and Margaret Wood on December 31, 1926.
A house built to look centuries old
John and Mable Ringling recommended their own architect, Dwight James Baum, who had built Ca' d'Zan for them in Sarasota.
Crosley wanted a house that looked centuries old.
Baum put a long, two-story Tudor Revival mansion on a hilltop off Kipling Avenue in Mount Airy, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Rustic brick, visible timber, steep roofs, and a shape that changes from side to side, as though an English manor had been altered over generations.
Construction started in 1927, and the family moved in a year later.
The house runs 13,334 square feet, with five bedrooms, six fireplaces, and a wine cellar.
Inside there's mahogany paneling, teak floors, and Wheatley and Rookwood tile.
The stained glass shows hunting, fishing, polo, and the University of Cincinnati.
Pinecroft's polo field doubled as a runway
The estate was a farm and a private sports club.
Formal gardens, bridle paths, a short golf course, tennis courts, an Olympic-size swimming pool, stables, kennels, a vineyard, and a milking barn.
The polo field was also a landing strip, so Crosley's plane could fly in and out of his own lawn.
The 5-acre lake below it, stocked with bass and bluegill, read as an arrow from the air and helped a pilot find the field.
The Italian Lawn Garden had the swimming pool at its center, with bluestone steps between levels.
The house held several safes, two of them walk-in, and staff later counted about seven concealed ones.
One hidden space was used for liquor during Prohibition.
33 years on the hill
Pinecroft was Crosley's base while everything else got bigger. WLW had its commercial broadcasting license in 1922.
In 1929 the company moved into the Crosley Building in Camp Washington.
In 1934 he bought the Cincinnati Reds and started running WLW's 500,000-watt transmitter in Mason.
A pipe organ stood in the entrance hall.
Its pipes came out of the attic and were reused in the organ at Cincinnati Union Terminal, now the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Tuberculosis kept Gwendolyn at Seagate, the couple's Florida house, for long stretches.
She was there on February 26, 1939, when tuberculosis ended her life.
Powel kept the estate through three later marriages. He had a heart attack at Pinecroft on March 28, 1961, at age 74.
The sisters, then the hospital next door
His daughter, Marth Page Crosley Kess, handled the property afterward. The family didn't keep the compound with its milking barn.
The Franciscan Sisters of the Poor bought the place in 1963 and used the mansion as a retreat house called Pinecroft House of Peace.
A retreat needed less alteration than apartments or offices, so the paneling, tile, glass, and carved ornament stayed.
Sisters were still holding retreats there in 1985.
The land around it went another way.
St. Francis Hospital bought part of the estate in 1969 and opened Providence Hospital on it in 1971, later Mercy Hospital Mount Airy.
Hospital buildings, parking, and roads ended the 73-acre tract. The swimming pool was filled in.
14 years of weddings in the garden
The mansion entered the National Register of Historic Places on December 17, 2008, listed for its association with Crosley.
Federal listing documents a building without stopping a private owner from altering or removing it.
Mercy Health donated the mansion and 18 acres to Cincinnati Preservation in 2011, and Funky's Catering took over in 2012, running the estate for weddings, corporate meetings, and tours.
A seasonal Garden Pavilion went up on the old tennis courts, seating 325 to 350 guests.
The largest room on the property was a tent, which kept the business to warm weather.
The formal gardens came back in three phases, using Baum's own planting drawings.
Crews marked the filled-in pool's footprint with rectangular coping. Funky's became DelightMore in 2023.
The hotel plan the city turned down
In 2023, Cincinnati Preservation's board decided to sell, since one property was absorbing resources and staff time meant for work across the region.
The estate listed in late June 2024 at $2.4 million.
By October 2025 it was under contract to a company planning a hotel: 13 guest rooms at first, 32 eventually, a permanent event hall to replace the tent, a restaurant, and a rooftop bar, at $7.5 million to $8.5 million.
The Mount Airy Community Council backed it. Madi's House, a mental-health program next door, objected to a rooftop bar beside people in recovery.
On January 27, 2026, the city's zoning hearing examiner denied the use variances, since the applicants hadn't shown that the current use or another one allowed there was economically unworkable.
DelightMore had closed the venue at the end of 2025, after 14 years.
Pinecroft went back on the market in April 2026 and is still listed: $1.75 million for 19.86 acres and three buildings, with the mansion maintained, the gardens in their restored layout, and nobody booking a wedding in them.
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