April 30, 2004

Going to the Country
Old movies from the Thirties often sent a couple out of New York and into the country for adventure. “Bringing Up Baby”, for instance, or “Holiday Inn”. The intrepid pair would motor along something resembling the Merritt Parkway until they reached a town very much like Greenwich, where they would pull up in front of a classic New England home. Now, I realize that these films were shot on Hollywood sets, but the sets themselves were based on certain Platonic forms of the ideal house. June Peters has just listed exactly that house, located at 160 Bedford Road and asking $5,300,000. Set on eight acres of rolling lawns and woodlands, with ponds and brooks running here and there, this 1937 classic colonial is just superb, as you might expect from a house built at the height of the Depression—anyone who could build a house of this quality in those dark days had money, and obviously felt free to lavish it on this dream house. Six bedrooms and four baths in the main house and a separate pool/guest studio a short stroll away. This would be a perfect house for a weekending NYC couple (like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, with leopard) or as a permanent residence for a family. But I wonder if it will survive. The demand for gracious, elegant houses is weak, while the appetite for huge coliseums continues unabated. I worry that this one will be wiped out and replaced by some towering monstrosity. Hope not.
504 North Street
This is a house that you have no doubt admired for as long as you’ve lived in Greenwich—I know that I have. It’s the narrow, pink house set at the corner of North and Dingletown Road amid a three plus acre lawn. Narrow, but certainly not small (well, 5,684 square feet probably feels cramped to today’s wunderkind, but they can always add on). Built in 1931 and modeled, I’m told, on an original Bermudian design, this is a real beauty. A great, two story entranceway, high ceilings throughout and wonderful views of that lawn. It needs work; probably a lot of work, if it is to be completely modernized, but it was a real pleasure to finally get inside this home and satisfy my curiosity after appreciating its exterior’s charm for almost fifty years. Jan Milligan’s got it, for $3,995,000.
Old Greenwich Waterfront
208 Shore Road has been returned to the market with a lower price (now asking $4,250,000) and a few completed renovations. It looks like a good buy, now, although I found nothing particularly objectionable about its original price. How often, after all, can you get ahold of property that is smack on the water, with views that include the Stamford Harbor light house and which stretch all the way down Long Island Sound? Complete with membership in the Lucas Point Association and your own private lap pool. Nancy Healy’s listing at, appropriately enough, Shore and Country.
Move It!
John Horton, a fellow recovering lawyer who has the misfortune to be my office-mate, displays a keen insight on real estate on those few occasions when I shut up long enough for him to get a word in. One such instance came last week, when he observed that the way people shop for homes has changed dramatically from, say, the 1960’s. In those days, potential buyers would climb into Betty Moger or Jane Newhall’s car and be driven around to look at what was available. Their first exposure to a house would be from this tour, and they had plenty of time to go home, mull things over, ask questions and, finally, make an offer. No longer. Everything is on the internet now. Home buyers conduct their initial search via computer, downloading statistics, pictures, school reports and the like long before they ever call a Realtor. By the time they visit a property in person, they’ve got a pretty good idea of whether it meets their needs and they are ready to move on it if they like what they see. I am speaking now of our most active segment of the market, roughly the two million dollar and below price range. In that segment, buyers don’t have the luxury of time. Any good agent can bring a new buyer up to speed in a hurry, but if you’re just starting to look, be prepared to lose out on a number of houses before that happy condition is achieved. And start doing your homework, now.

April 23, 2004

New Listings
For some time now I’ve been meaning to describe Lenox Drive (behind Whole Foods) as the best in-town street on which nothing was for sale. Margarita Krackow, of Country Living Associate has forced me to revise that plan by listing #8-10 Lenox and I’m glad she has. This is a wonderful old house built in 1913 with high, high ceilings, three full stories and a walk-out basement, and an absolutely perfect location if you to prefer to walk to Greenwich Avenue. It is presently set up as a multi-family residence but it would be no effort at all to use this house for what I think is its best use: a gracious single family residence. General Phil Sheridan once said that if he owned Texas and Hell, he’d rent out Texas and live in Hell. I’m not equating our Back Country with Texas, mind you, but if someone out there were tired of trying to maintain fifteen thousand square feet of a builder’s bad taste and a four acre yard, this would be a great alternative.
Another very, very nice house that’s new to the market is Jan Milligan’s listing in Pemberwick at 11 Green Lane, a quiet dead end just above the Byram River. It’s a completely renovated cottage with an excellent kitchen, master bedroom and so forth. By no means huge, it would be a great starter home. Very smartly priced, I think, at $699,000. Another house I really liked was Ward Davol’s listing at 101 Londonderry Drive (off Stanwich). An unprepossessing house at first glance, the more I saw of it the more it grew on me. It’s a 1966 Peter Ogden contemporary, with six bedrooms, five fireplaces and tons of light and great views from every room (those views are of Burning Tree’s golf course, so as long as people play golf, the views should be safe). Huge amounts of space (5,804 sq.ft.) including a finished office/guestbedroom suite, with fireplace, in the walk-out basement and an approach via a courtyard with a fountain, pool and goldfish (if this were further out in the country, Ward would no doubt describe the pool as “a trout pond” but he showed real restraint here). An excellent house.
Old Greenwich
Continues to be hot. 39 Arcadia Road, across from the Post Office, came on the market at $985,000 and was snapped up instantly. This was a 1909 house that needed work but the location is handy to everything and I wasn’t surprised to see it go so quickly. The recently renovated 1926 house at 3 Fairgreen Lane (Shorelands) came on priced at $1,850,000 and I am certain (but don’t actually know) that it went via bidding war for far more than that over the weekend. This was a very nice house as is, although it could be expanded, and had great water views. Nothing not to like.
Bamboozled!
I had not heard of using bamboo as a substitute for hardwood flooring until Tuesday, when an open house listing (for an excellent house on Locust Street) touted its virtues. I came, I saw, I admired, and then noticed the same material in two more houses the same day. Three such occurrences make a trend, I suppose, so I Googled the stuff to find out more. Turns out, bamboo is very hard-about as hard as maple, for instance, and more stable (doesn’t absorb atmospheric humidity) than red oak. The flooring product is made, surprise! in China so you’d think that it should be as cheap as chopsticks, but it’s not: best I can discern, it’s comparable in cost to hardwood, although, because it’s a laminated product and comes pre-finished, it is simpler to install and can be laid directly over concrete. What its manufacturers (and a number of Berkley-type eco organizations) tout are the environmental advantages of substituting bamboo for, say oak. Bamboo regenerates in five years versus one hundred years for oak, it is easily harvested without trashing the countryside, and there’s a lot more of it than there is bongabonga rainforest wood. It can be finished in any color and, again according to various websites, has been successfully used in all sorts of high end residences, retail stores and corporate headquarters. So if that college kid of yours is kvetching about your fifteen thousand square foot mansion plans constituting a heinous rape of the land, placate her by specifying bamboo floors. She’ll be so much more comfortable and her poolside summers won’t be ruined by a guilty conscience.

April 9, 2004

Crime and Punishment
The Planning and Zoning Board of Appeals recently denied a homeowner a variance for a bit of building that offended our setback rules and ordered him to tear down a shed and his brand new deck. This is one of our town’s most sensible boards (a distinction it does not share with its lesser sibling, the Planning and Zoning Board) so it is illustrative to see why imposed such a harsh remedy. The answer it seems, is that the homeowner indulged in that all-too-human fallibility, procrastination. When his extra-legal building activity was discovered and he was ordered to correct the situation, he ignored the demand in the hope that the entire unpleasantness would go away. I am entirely sympathetic to that reaction but unfortunately, it’s not a wise course of action when dealing with governmental bodies (the IRS, for instance). What he should have done was, when his violations were first discovered, to immediately apply for a variance; the Board would probably have granted one because, as I’ve said, they’re a pretty reasonable bunch of people. What he did instead was to force the enforcement officer to take progressively harder steps until, finally, the whole matter ended up in the quasi-judicial “courtroom” of the Board of Appeals. They saw the matter as one of defiance rather than wistful thinking and lowered the boom. I do not advise flouting the law and performing midnight construction projects but, were you to do so, you might take some comfort in knowing that there’s a statute of limitations of six years on such activity; don’t get caught and you’ll be okay. But if you are caught, play by the rules. Apply for a variance and, while there may be some finger wagging in your direction, you’ll probably get away with it (assuming a modest transgression). However, not withstanding the Navy’s adage that it’s easier to receive forgiveness than permission, I’d suggest that you approach your building project the right way and, if you need a variance to add that deck, apply for it before setting shovel to dirt.
The Market
A very busy week. Forty-eight houses sold, twenty-five went to contract and one hundred and four new properties came on. 4 Waterfall Lane, which I mentioned last week, went in eleven days. 209 Taconic, at $9.8 million, took a year but, lest you think all big-ticket homes take that long to sell, 55 Baldwin Farms South, asking $5.95 million, went to contract in four days. Hectic.

Classics of the Week
There were two of them, in my opinion, but I’m a sucker for gracious old houses and these may very well not be your taste. With that caveat, the first is Aja Ohman’s listing at 29 Pine Ridge Road (off of Stanwich) for $3,450,000. This is a beautiful, 1928 house that was renovated in 1999 with a big new kitchen and updated baths. Not really a rambler, but plenty of rooms spreading in both directions for great entertainment or privacy. 4,645 square feet (with plaster walls), a heated pool, over an acre of land (with Pinetum nearby) and gardens. Just a great house in every way.
And further up the price scale is Ann Simpson’s listing at 152 Indian Head Road in Riverside. Another old (1915) house that’s been completely redone without destroying what made this so good to begin with. Direct waterfront facing west over the harbor, an acre and a half plus of lawns, 7,711 square feet, a million bedrooms, wine cellar, pool, high, high ceilings and so on. Asking price is $12,500,000, a figure that seems about right: 58 Dawn Harbor (right down the street) sold in October for that sum and, while that one was new and this one is renovated, they’re both beautiful waterfront homes. You worry, no doubt, that a nice young family will have to scrimp to afford this but I’m sure that, as I write, some Wall Street tyro is busy trading ahead of his customers, scraping up the down payment.
And Another One
It was built in 1998, not pre-war, but Barbara Mckee’s listing at 25 Fox Run Lane might still be considered a classic. This one’s on just under two and a half acres, with the requisite heated pool but what sets it apart from most houses is its design: the listing sheet describes it as a Normandy with a “traditional” floor plan but it’s much more interesting than that; go see for yourself. $4,495,000 which seems right to me. Nice place.

April 2, 2004

Gone in Sixty Seconds
The market is in hyper-drive and I find that unsettling. It’s reminiscent of 1986, when buyers were told to make up their mind on a property as they stepped in the doorway; if they thought about it overnight, they’d lose it. Buyers living in New York were out of luck, then and now, because anything available midweek was gone by the weekend. 1986, of course, was followed by 1987 when bad things happened. Will we see a repetition? Stay tuned. I’m more sanguine over long term prospects, however. In 1986 we all—lawyers and agents—thought that the market was positively insane, and it was, but anyone who got into Greenwich in 1986 has done very, very well.
Prices
On a related subject, a number of us (I, anyway) are having a hard time estimating prices in this environment. If we use sales from last fall as comparables, we’re out of date, but how high should a price be? I recently lost an opportunity to list a very nice house in Cos Cob because I insisted, firmly and foolishly, that it should be priced at $1,825,000. It went instead to another broker who set its price at $1,995,000 and sold it in two days. I am not alone in my confusion, but that hurts. It is still possible to over-price a house and there are dozens of such houses languishing on the market as I write, so I still advise setting a less than maximum, “only in your dreams” price and hope that the market will reward your conservatism with a nice bidding war. My brother Gideon recently put his own in-town house up for sale (and, like any smart broker, placed it in the multi-list system for full exposure—we in the industry not only like to receive commissions, we’re willing to pay them because we know how well the system works) for $749,000. I believe he was hoping that multiple bids would drive it into the Eights; two days later, it went for well over one million dollars. Soooeee.
So What’s Available?
Not much, and what is will be gone by the time you read this. I really liked Pam Chiapetta’s listing at 4 Waterfall Lane, asking $879,000. This is a tiny cottage (a relative term—the New York Times just profiled a couple living with their infant in a 245 square foot apartment) that sits right next to (and owns, in fact) the waterfall that gives the street its name. Almost a half acre in its own right, it borders Pinetum for an additional couple of hundred acres of hiking territory. Three bedrooms, one bath and even an “eat-in” kitchen although I thought placing a child’s toy table and chairs in the room was stretching reality a wee bit. A very nice house in the North Street school district.
41 Grove Street (Marianne Broekmeijer) also offered affordable housing at $679,000, but it sits on a third of an acre in the R-7 zone and will certainly have been snapped up by a builder by the weekend. Too bad, as it was a nice house with a nice yard.
Way up north, at 236 Bedford Road, Kathy Wasilko has listed a 1758 house for $1,800,000. A bit of ill-advised “renovation” was performed upstairs at some time but most of the house is untouched, including its two-foot-wide planked floors and a small tavern in the basement. Right on what Kathy calls a lake and what I’d refer to as a pond. Great house, great property; I fear for the house, though.
Russ Pruner has listed 320 Sound Beach Avenue for $1,995,000 and it, too will disappear before you read this. A rambling 1900 house that was brought entirely up to date in 1990. Nice yard, great location. In Riverside, 49 Oval Avenue has the railroad as a neighbor but this is a very good, four bedroom house asking $1,275,000. In this market, easily the best house at that price in Riverside (it may be the only house at that price in Riverside). I think it’s a very good buy.
Stoned
Saw a new house in the Mid Country the other day that was quite nice, if far too large for my taste, but it was faced on the front with stone while the other walls were clapboard. I understand that in Nantucket in the old days something similar was effected, using clapboard on the street front and cheaper shingles on the rest of the house. Fine for Nantucket, with its heritage of skinflint Yankees, but on a nine million dollar house, I think a partial stone facing looks like the owner ran out of money. In this town, today, that’s an unpardonable social faux pas.