A reader asks about a new Sotheby’s listing for a 1725 farm house in Old Greenwich and wonders whether we really have anything in town older than 1967. In fact, we have five houses currently for sale that were built before 1795: 69 Lake, 951 Lake, 275 Round Hill, 549 Round Hill and the Sotheby’s listing, 50 Shore Road. There’s no need to rush out to see these before they’re gone because, with the exception of 951 Lake, they’re priced to stay. 50 Shore Road, for instance, is priced at $5.5 million, which should ensure that it stays on the market for at least another 220 years.
UPDATE: check comments for the true story of 50 Shore Road. According to Tom Gorin, (who was there when the house was built), it was moved down from Massachusetts in the 1950s, sold as original and a law suit erupted. That’s not all that surprising: “Mr. Blandings Builds his Dreamhouse” was set in Greenwich and written way back when – pre WWII?. Regardless, Yankees have been taking advantage of out of town chumps forever. I wonder whether Sotheby’s will consider the transplanted nature of this house to be a material fact worthy of disclosure? Apparently not.
Ah ha! Tom Gorin, owner/operator of Cleveland, Duble & Arnold Real Estate, has informed me that the “Shore Road colonial from 1725″ was, in fact, MOVED THERE from Massachusetts back in the 1950′s.
It later became the subject of a lawsuit because one of its owners didn’t know it had been moved and (naturally) sued the listing broker for not telling him.
There’s a row of such houses along that part of Shore Road. All were threatened by the building of a dam in Deerfield (?), Mass. and got moved to places like Greenwich.
The moral: if you want to know the WHOLE story, use a local broker who’s been around for a while.
P.S. I like your line “Priced to stay” (as opposed to “priced to sell”) Did you make that up? Quite clever.
“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” is set in New Milford, in Litchfield County. The author, Eric Hodgins–an exec at Fortune Magazine-wrote the novel in 1946 based (loosely) on his own experiences in the 1930s when he nearly bankrupted himself building his own dream house. The book was a hit and made into the movie we know in 1948 when Hodgins’ New Milford neighbor Dore Schary, a big Hollywood producer, read it and bought the rights from him for 200 grand–big bucks then.
Hodgins wrote a sequel in 1950 called “Blandings Way,” and it’s just as good as the first.
It is said to have been set in New Milford but there is serious competition for that odd little street in Glenville that cuts down from King Street, just south of where the Merritt Parkway is now, to Glenville center. You can’t really commute from New Milford to NYC, which is what I believe the set up was, but then again, Mr. Blandings obviously wasn’t thinking straight from the get – go.
GF: “if you want to know the WHOLE story, use a local broker who’s been around for a while.”
No problem here in Greenwich. There’s a few that look like they’ve been peddling r/e since BEFORE 1725.