July 2, 2004
Modern Art
My reference recently to bland, cookie-cutter colonial-style houses brought an anguished email from a reader who has loved living in her own contemporary house but is now having a difficult time selling it. Her plight rings true. In Greenwich, it seems to me, there is less and less room for any departure from “traditional” architecture which, these days, I’d define as a massive, stone and shingle pseudo-colonial with fifteen foot ceilings on both floors and a master bathroom large enough to accommodate an Olympic-size swimming pool (and a shower for eight). Cold, gross and impersonal sells very well today, and wise builders are obliging the market.
If you don’t want to live in a mausoleum and are tempted to experience the wonderful light, views and openness a good contemporary design can provide you should probably move out west. Failing that, there are some great houses for sale right now in Greenwich that I think are excellent buys. For instance, Jean Ruggerio has 40 Sumner Road listed for $4,299,000. The house is spectacular, built on over five acres just three years ago. It is large: 10,700 square feet, but it doesn’t feel particularly over-sized and somehow feels warm and inviting. Great views, the best lot on Sumner and constructed to the very highest standards. If you figure that the land it sits on is worth $2,000,000, the house itself is selling for about $200 a square foot. You can’t build a doublewide for that. Moving down the price ladder, Joyce Somm is asking $2,180,000 for a great contemporary masterpiece at 6 Upland Road. I’ll confess that I didn’t get this house, at first. It was designed by its owner with certain windows purposely directed toward the sky, rather than the yard, a decision I initially considered to be a mistake. My fellow Round Hill agent Mary Crist, who has somehow endured twenty years of marriage to architect Aris Crist, opened my eyes, showing me how the space worked and how the windows let light sweep around and through the rooms. She was right, I was wrong, and this is now one of my favorite houses. Finally, Amy Zeeve’s listing at 31 Glen Ridge Road for $1,360,000 is also appealing. Just under three thousand square feet on over an acre, it’s set high on a hill and offers those views I thought were lacking in the Upland house. Any one of these houses would be a terrific place to live; my own clients won’t look at “contemporaries” but perhaps you should.
Wipe Your Feet!
No sane homeowner would welcome a hundred agents with muddy feet wandering through her house during an open house, and we Realtors understand that. On rainy days, a polite request to remove our shoes is acknowledged, usually gracefully, and acceded to. What frosts some of us (me, anyway) is when that same request is made on a perfectly sunny day when shoes are dry. We’re in and out of as many as thirty houses on any given day in the circuit and stopping to remove shoes (well, flip flops) is a pain. But what’s really annoying is when, having complied with the request we step onto the kitchen floor and find the soles of our feet sticking to a disgusting mess of grease and cooking oil. If you insist on making agents partially disrobe before entering your house, won’t you please mop the floor? But don’t do so on my account; I won’t enter a house with a no-shoe requirement in clement weather. I’ll come back when it’s raining, thank you.
Beach House Café There’s been some flack recently from Old Greenwich shopkeepers about this restaurant’s outstanding success or, more accurately, the parking problems engendered by such success. While it is true that finding a parking space on Sound Beach Avenue during lunchtime is more difficult these days, that seems a fair trade off for the vitality the Beach House has restored to this section of town. Some years ago, when the Grand Central Market folded and CVS was kept from occupying the space for over a year (two years?), there was almost nothing going on in Old Greenwich. Van Johnson, then proprietor of the Old Greenwich Book Store, said he didn’t care what went into the space just as long as someone did so that it would draw foot traffic back. I think he’d repeat those sentiments today. As an aside, I highly recommend taking the trouble to find a parking space (try behind CVS) and picking up a pizza from Beyond Bread, right next door to the Beach House. Friday and Saturday nights only, it’s the best thin-crust pizza I’ve ever had, with the possible exception of that served by Andy’s Hideaway, in St. Barts. But Andy has the advantage of offering St. Barts as a condiment. If you’re stuck here, try this one.
My reference recently to bland, cookie-cutter colonial-style houses brought an anguished email from a reader who has loved living in her own contemporary house but is now having a difficult time selling it. Her plight rings true. In Greenwich, it seems to me, there is less and less room for any departure from “traditional” architecture which, these days, I’d define as a massive, stone and shingle pseudo-colonial with fifteen foot ceilings on both floors and a master bathroom large enough to accommodate an Olympic-size swimming pool (and a shower for eight). Cold, gross and impersonal sells very well today, and wise builders are obliging the market.
If you don’t want to live in a mausoleum and are tempted to experience the wonderful light, views and openness a good contemporary design can provide you should probably move out west. Failing that, there are some great houses for sale right now in Greenwich that I think are excellent buys. For instance, Jean Ruggerio has 40 Sumner Road listed for $4,299,000. The house is spectacular, built on over five acres just three years ago. It is large: 10,700 square feet, but it doesn’t feel particularly over-sized and somehow feels warm and inviting. Great views, the best lot on Sumner and constructed to the very highest standards. If you figure that the land it sits on is worth $2,000,000, the house itself is selling for about $200 a square foot. You can’t build a doublewide for that. Moving down the price ladder, Joyce Somm is asking $2,180,000 for a great contemporary masterpiece at 6 Upland Road. I’ll confess that I didn’t get this house, at first. It was designed by its owner with certain windows purposely directed toward the sky, rather than the yard, a decision I initially considered to be a mistake. My fellow Round Hill agent Mary Crist, who has somehow endured twenty years of marriage to architect Aris Crist, opened my eyes, showing me how the space worked and how the windows let light sweep around and through the rooms. She was right, I was wrong, and this is now one of my favorite houses. Finally, Amy Zeeve’s listing at 31 Glen Ridge Road for $1,360,000 is also appealing. Just under three thousand square feet on over an acre, it’s set high on a hill and offers those views I thought were lacking in the Upland house. Any one of these houses would be a terrific place to live; my own clients won’t look at “contemporaries” but perhaps you should.
Wipe Your Feet!
No sane homeowner would welcome a hundred agents with muddy feet wandering through her house during an open house, and we Realtors understand that. On rainy days, a polite request to remove our shoes is acknowledged, usually gracefully, and acceded to. What frosts some of us (me, anyway) is when that same request is made on a perfectly sunny day when shoes are dry. We’re in and out of as many as thirty houses on any given day in the circuit and stopping to remove shoes (well, flip flops) is a pain. But what’s really annoying is when, having complied with the request we step onto the kitchen floor and find the soles of our feet sticking to a disgusting mess of grease and cooking oil. If you insist on making agents partially disrobe before entering your house, won’t you please mop the floor? But don’t do so on my account; I won’t enter a house with a no-shoe requirement in clement weather. I’ll come back when it’s raining, thank you.
Beach House Café There’s been some flack recently from Old Greenwich shopkeepers about this restaurant’s outstanding success or, more accurately, the parking problems engendered by such success. While it is true that finding a parking space on Sound Beach Avenue during lunchtime is more difficult these days, that seems a fair trade off for the vitality the Beach House has restored to this section of town. Some years ago, when the Grand Central Market folded and CVS was kept from occupying the space for over a year (two years?), there was almost nothing going on in Old Greenwich. Van Johnson, then proprietor of the Old Greenwich Book Store, said he didn’t care what went into the space just as long as someone did so that it would draw foot traffic back. I think he’d repeat those sentiments today. As an aside, I highly recommend taking the trouble to find a parking space (try behind CVS) and picking up a pizza from Beyond Bread, right next door to the Beach House. Friday and Saturday nights only, it’s the best thin-crust pizza I’ve ever had, with the possible exception of that served by Andy’s Hideaway, in St. Barts. But Andy has the advantage of offering St. Barts as a condiment. If you’re stuck here, try this one.
posted by Chris Fountain at 10:18 AM
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