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(Bloomberg) -- One of the most expensive homes ever listed in the Hudson Valley is for sale for $25 million.

When Suzy Welch bought her Red Hook, N.Y., mansion in March 2020, it was, she says, “a complicated time.”

For most people, she continues, the dominant preoccupation was Covid-19, which was just making its way into the global consciousness. Welch’s husband Jack Welch, the influential former chief executive officer of General Electric Co., had just died, “and I was looking for a place to go and process that,” says Welch, an author, TV commentator, and business journalist.

As the pandemic dragged on, the mansion became the primary residence for Welch and her family. Welch slowly updated and renovated the 16,600 square-foot structure, set on 290 acres overlooking the Hudson River, with the help of interior decorator Bunny Williams.

Now, with the Covid-era behind her and a teaching job at NYU on the horizon, Welch is putting the house back on the market, listing it with Compass’s Candy Anderson and Byron Anderson for $25 million. “Life changed in a way that I didn’t expect, and I’m back in New York City all the time,” Welch says. “I poured my heart and soul and all my creativity into the house, and I’m just hoping the owner loves it as much as I do. It’s a house that’s easy to love.”

The estate, known as Steen Valetje, was built in 1851 and became a centerpiece in the sprawling, interconnected history of American wealth and power. The house was a gift from William Backhouse Astor Sr. to his daughter Laura, who married Franklin Hughes Delano, a businessman and great uncle to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Franklin and Laura, who were childless, left the house to Franklin ‘s nephew Warren Delano, who lived there with his wife Jenny until he was killed in an accident involving a spooked horse and an oncoming train. He, in turn, left the house to his son Lyman, who would often entertain First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1949, Roosevelt mentioned the house in her “My Day” column, writing that “in spite of being built in the Victorian era, [Steen Valetje] has more charm and sense of being a house where people have lived and really understood and loved their possessions than some houses where you have a feeling that perfectly impersonal decorator was called in to hang the curtains and lay the rugs and choose and place the furniture.”

The property remained in the Roosevelt family until 1966. It went through several owners before Welch purchased it in 2020 for what Anderson, the broker, says was $16.5 million.

The main house has 10 bedrooms, two designed as primary suites with their own dressing and sitting rooms. The property also has two four-bedroom guest cottages; a carriage house with four apartments used by staff; an additional two-bedroom gatehouse; an eight-stall stable with its own office, tack room, and viewing lounge; indoor and outdoor riding rings; and a pool house with dressing rooms and showers.

When she bought the property, “the owners directly before me had it for several decades,” says Welch. “And nobody hurt the house. All the original tile was there, the ceilings and beautiful floors were there. Really, they just had different decorating taste than I did.”

Apart from refurnishing and repainting many rooms, Welch made some significant upgrades. She redid the bathrooms in the main house and in the guest houses, installed fiber optic cable for the property, updated plumbing and electric in most of the buildings, added new HVAC to the main house and both guest cottages, and built a new kitchen in the main house. (The house has two: a “family” kitchen and a catering kitchen.)

“I love to cook,” Welch explains. “Maybe someone else would have said, ‘It’s fine for me,’ but I wanted one to my specifications.” Overall, “it wasn’t like you had to peel things back to find the historic house,” she says. “I had to sand and rebuff them back up, but it’s not like a bomb dropped.”

The other major addition she made was to put in electric systems to automate the house. All of its major functions can be controlled by phone. 

“On many levels, the history was in the background for me,” she says. “It was functioning as a family home. I wasn’t thinking about the history as I was decorating it. I didn’t want to make it a museum.”

Were she to return it to its original style, “that would mean the house would have to look Victorian, which is not my personal style—and pretty much not anyone’s,” she explains. “So my vision, and Bunny’s, was to do a beautiful blend of historic and modern that made it a livable home.” 

During Welch’s tenure, the stables remained empty. “I’m not a horse person,” she says. “But I’m told by all my horse friends that the facilities are absolutely state of the art.” The historic barns on the property, she says, “are really just so beautiful and even predate the house.” Currently, they’re used to store lawn mowers.

The lawnmowers have a lot of work to do.

The sprawling grounds include a tennis court, pool, and a lawn that slopes down to a half-mile of river frontage. “It has all of these places where you can take a lot of walks and play a lot of tennis,” Welch says. “And it’s the greatest house for sledding in the history of humankind.”

The house is in turnkey mode, massive, and historic. It’s also much more expensive than anything on the Hudson Valley marketplace. (The only area property that’s more expensive is a $45 million contemporary house at the river’s edge in Hyde Park.) This makes it difficult for potential buyers to reckon an accurate valuation. “The highest price to date has been about $18 million” for the area, says broker Anderson. “But there are numerous properties up here that have far more than that into them. They’re just not available for purchase.”

The problem, Anderson continues, is that such estates—particularly in this condition—come to market so seldom that it’s nearly impossible to find comparable properties. “We priced it to sell,” she says. “When I saw it and saw the improvements that have been made to it, I thought of a much higher price, but the owner wants to sell so it’s a terrific opportunity.”

The furniture in the house isn’t included in the asking price. “You buy the furniture of the home, and the house has a certain scale,” says Welch. “I could be wrong, but my feeling is, someone who really appreciates the house is going to want to purchase some or all of the furniture, and we can have that conversation.”

Welch is selling “with very complicated emotions and mixed feelings about it,” she says. “But I understand you have to go where your life takes you.”

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