The biggest house in Hewlett Bay Park has spent six months on the market asking $15 million. Next month the asking price stops mattering. The waterfront mansion that Snapple co-founder Hyman Golden built at 1245 Veeder Drive heads to auction in November, with online bidding open from November 6 to November 20 and opening bids expected between $3.5 million and $5 million.

Around the Five Towns it has never needed an address. It is the Snapple House, and this is the first time in its existence that anyone outside the Golden family has had a shot at the keys.

The house an iced tea empire built

Golden and two partners started Snapple in Valley Stream in 1972, selling juices to health food stores long before the radio ads and the bottle-cap facts. In 1994, Quaker Oats bought the company for $1.7 billion, one of the biggest beverage deals of its era, and that same year Golden and his wife, Mitzi, finished the house that deal paid for.

They did not build small. The home runs 11,031 square feet across three levels, with five bedrooms, five full bathrooms, three half bathrooms and an elevator connecting the floors. Architect Norman Wax designed it and Qualico Contracting built it, with a hand-laid slate roof over a stucco exterior. Inside there is a dedicated entertaining wing with its own bar and a temperature-controlled wine cellar, and the primary suite looks out over the harbor with two walk-in closets and a spa bath with a soaking tub and sauna.

The grounds may be the better half of the sale. The property covers 2.09 acres across a double lot, rare in a village where land almost never assembles, with 240 feet of water frontage and a private dock. Behind the formal gardens sits a pool with a cabana that has its own full kitchen, changing rooms, bathroom and a second sauna, which is to say the pool house is better equipped than most Long Island starter homes.

From $15 million to whatever the room says

The family listed the estate for the first time in April at $15 million through Shawn Elliott, Zachary Elliott and Richard Golden of Nest Seekers International. A sale anywhere near that number would have shattered the record for the Hewletts, which Realtor.com puts at about $9.5 million.

Six months later, the strategy has changed. The home is now in the hands of Concierge Auctions, the luxury auction house that sells trophy properties to the highest bidder on a clock. Registration closes November 5 at 5 p.m. Eastern, bidding opens the next evening, and the auction runs through November 20. The sale is also slotted into a global November auction event at Sotheby's in London, with a live bidding session on November 17, meaning a buyer for a South Shore Nassau mansion could surface in a London salesroom.

Getting a paddle costs less than most people would guess. Bidders put up a $10,000 deposit to register. Where it ends is the open question: expected opening bids of $3.5 million to $5 million leave an enormous distance to the old ask, and auctions of this kind are designed to let the market, not the seller, name the final number.

What it means on this side of the hedges

Hewlett Bay Park is one of Long Island's smallest and most private villages, a few hundred residents on winding lanes behind Woodmere, and its real estate almost never trades in public view. An open auction on its largest house is the opposite of how the neighborhood usually does business, and brokers across the South Shore will be watching the closing number as the new honest measure of what the top of the Five Towns market is worth.

For everyone else, it is a rare open window into a famously closed corner of Nassau County, and a piece of genuine Long Island business history changing hands. Snapple was born here, the fortune was made here, and the house that fortune built is about to belong to whoever wants it most. If that turns out to be someone with $3.5 million and good timing, the Snapple House could become one of the great Long Island real estate bargains. If two bidders fall in love with that dock, the Hewletts could have a new record by Thanksgiving.