“To be in the same place for over 50 years is quite something,” announces Daisy Soros, elegantly perched on a chair in her Fifth Avenue living room on a balmy June morning. She is talking about her beloved home in Nantucket—Siasconset, more commonly known as “Sconset,” to be exact. Since 1969, from late June through Labor Day, Soros, 94, along with various members of her family, have decamped to this former fishing village on the eastern side of the island. There, among the tiny cottages covered with salt-licked sea roses, the garden paths, the beaches, and the bogs, Soros and her family have established a fairytale refuge. While Soros lives in the main house she built with her late husband Paul in the early ’80s, her sons, Peter, a financier, and Jeffrey, a film producer, reside in a pair of adjacent properties with their children and grandchildren.

“It’s like no other place I’ve been,” says Soros, who was born in Bratislava, raised in Hungary and Austria, went to school in Switzerland for two years, and then moved to New York in 1950 to study at Columbia University. In the city, at the International House (a private residency program established 100 years ago by the Rockefeller family for graduates), she met Paul Soros, the famed businessman and philanthropist. Together, over their 62 years of marriage, they traveled the world, enjoyed the company of everyone from political leaders (Bill Clinton) to Hollywood royalty (Robert Redford), and worked diligently on their various charities and causes. And yet, Nantucket was always the place they were happiest. “It’s the vegetation and the sky and just the simple life,” Soros says. “I find it very soothing.”


The beach leading up to Great Point Lighthouse, a favorite of Soros’s.

There are no stoplights on Nantucket, and Sconset is even sleepier. There are very few businesses: a post office, the Unitarian Church (where Paul is buried), and the market that sells everything from baskets to ice cream cones. “I wanted a place where my kids could bike alone to get an ice cream after the beach. Or go with their friends to the Sconset Casino and play tennis or put on a play,” says Soros. And while her children have cultivated lifelong friendships, so has Soros, whose luncheons and dinners are a coveted ticket on the island. She prefers substantive conversation on topics ranging from foreign policy to fine art rather than society drivel, and her guests reflect that. Her dinner table is typically a heady mix of ex-ambassadors, museum directors, financial titans, and contemporary writers. Soros may live in the upper echelons of extreme luxury, but there is nothing frivolous about her. While she seems to have traveled everywhere, ultimately her Cheever-style summers have been the perfect antidote to her jam-packed schedule in Manhattan and Palm Beach, where she winters these days.

Even in her tenth decade, Soros is still very active with many of the city’s most prestigious foundations. She currently sits on the boards of the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Foreign Policy Association, and the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where she is now director emeritus. The morning of our visit, she was working on a speech that she would deliver later that afternoon at a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Opera. (The night before, she had been out late for her daughter-in-law’s birthday dinner downtown. Earlier that week, she had attended the ballet.)

In 1997, she and her husband created a trust called the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which provides grants to immigrants and children of immigrants for graduate study for two years. The trust has endowed nearly 800 fellows across the globe since its inception and, out of all her charities, this one seems to be closest to her heart. Every year, she personally calls each of the recipients to deliver the good news.

And then there is Nantucket. “Vhat do you want to know?” Soros asks me, her lovely, throaty Hungarian accent still coming through. For the next few hours, she shared thoughtful family memories and salty yarns of her beloved summer home.

Read the full interview in PALMER On the Road.