EAST HAMPTON, N.Y.

LIMELIGHT, at least the reflected kind, is again shining on Grey Gardens, a 10-bedroom 1897 house near Georgica Pond here. Thirty-four years after its former residents, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and her namesake daughter, who was called Little Edie, were introduced to the world in the Maysles brothers’ classic documentary, and three years after their life in the tumbledown raccoon-infested mansion on a wildly overgrown lot became the basis of a Broadway musical, HBO is rolling out a feature-length movie about them, also called “Grey Gardens,” this weekend.

The two Edies have become famous for the way they lived at Grey Gardens — the squalor of their home was especially striking given that Big Edie was an aunt and Little Edie a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — and they will soon be even better known after being portrayed by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore in the HBO film.

The house’s current owners, who restored it after buying it from Little Edie in 1979, are celebrities themselves: Sally Quinn, the writer and Washington hostess, and her husband, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post. The couple have taken up residence at Grey Gardens every summer for decades, and have used it to entertain friends like Lauren Bacall and Norman Lear.

Image Grey Gardens in about 1900. Credit... Courtesy of Sally Quinn

But one person intimately involved with the property is unlikely to be known to even the most hard-core Grey Gardens buff. For 23 years, Victoria Fensterer, an artist who designed and maintains the current gardens, has worked year round to preserve something of the wild spirit of the Beales’ Grey Gardens, on grounds that can nevertheless be navigated. “It is so lush, it’s on the edge of becoming decadent,” said Eden Rafshoon, a retired interior designer who has visited the Bradlees every summer for the last decade. “It’s extremely romantic, it’s very fragrant, and it’s extremely sensuous. It’s full of secret garden rooms and mystery.”