It’s easy to miss the discreet white gates that lead to Copper Beech Farm. Tucked into high stone walls covered in foliage, they swing open onto a winding 1,800-square foot driveway surrounded by woods in nearly every direction. Hidden from the street by the copper beech trees for which the property is named, sits a grand white Victorian mansion and behind it, as that long driveway ends at a cul-de-sac once used by horse drawn carriages, a breathtaking panoramic view of the boat-studded Long Island Sound.
This is Greenwich, Conn.’s last Great Estate, an opulent robber baron-era property enveloping 50 prized acres along the tony New York suburb’s waterfront. And it all contributes to an equally breathtaking price tag: $140 million.
Copper Beech Farm first came to market in May asking $190 million, an unprecedented number that made it far and away the most expensive home for sale in the U.S. In September, that staggering sum was slashed by $50 million, or 26%, to $140 million.
At the current asking price, it is still the most expensive home publicly listed for sale, meaning it is being marketed on the Multiple Listing Services. More technically however, one other home unofficially asks more: the “off-market” Owlwood estate in Los Angeles that’s quietly being shopped for $150 million. If this Greenwich compound were to fetch a sum remotely close to its asking price, it would dash records to become the biggest home sale in American history.
FORBES has been offered an exclusive tour of the property.
On a sunny autumn afternoon, Copper Beech Farm’s real estate broker, David Ogilvy, whose eponymous firm is affiliated with Christie’s International Real Estate, strides across the lawn, past lush gardens displaying palmettos, rose bushes and an alley of flowering crepe myrtle trees.“The star of this property is really the water that’s all around,” he says, turning toward the sea. “We use the word unique in our business way too often but this really is.”
Copper Beech boasts roughly one mile of water frontage including a strip of private beach and a tree-studded island off the coast that the owners row a boat out to on summer weekends for picnics. A 16-sided pool faces the Sound, accompanied by an adjoining spa and a nearby Victorian tea pagoda turned pool house. The banks of the property are perched above a sandy beach accessible by wooden stairs. The backyard sits 40 feet above mean tide, meaning it remains safe from storm surge associated with hurricanes like Superstorm Sandy.
A cast iron gate swings open onto gardens meticulously manicured, the landscaping updated by an alum of the New York City’s Botanical Gardens. Tropical plants like palm trees grace the terraced lawns, which move into a hot house at the edge of the property during the winter. There’s an apple orchard, and past that, a grass tennis court.
Stairs lead from the gardens up to the back of the French Renaissance-style main house, a white manse comprised of angular windows, ivy-covered columns and terraces stretching the length of the structure. “It seems like a Newport Mansion and is very reminiscent of the same period, only a lot closer to New York,” says Ogilvy.
Greenwich’s $140 Million Copper Beech Farm
The house spans 13,519 square feet across four floors. It has 12 bedrooms scattered among the top two floors, seven full baths and two powder rooms. A dark cherry wood-paneled library with curving corners and glass-fronted bookcases typical of the Victorian era sits off of a three-story wood-paneled entry. The dining room has oak columns, a fireplace and an ornate plaster tracery ceiling. There’s also a garden room, with walls of windows looking out on the water, and a solarium with stone-tiled floors and a fountain adorning the back wall. The kitchen, tucked down a hallway accessed by discreetly hidden doors in the wood-paneled entry foyer, sits at the end of the house. Its dumb waiter allows access to the home’s original kitchen, located in the basement among the former staff quarters.
Fireplaces adorn nearly every entertaining space and many of the bedrooms open onto sleeping porches once used during summer months before the advent of air conditioning. In the entry space, an antique open-air elevator that one might expect to find in a throwback Parisian hotel chugs slowly between floors at the push of a button.
Yet despite all of these features, the home itself could use some updating. It doesn’t have central air conditioning, for example, because the current owners prefer to live without it. And the private beach doesn’t have a dock either.
So why the nine-figure price tag? “There were several appraisals done on this property by the owners…and the appraisals came up with numbers that are extremely high,” says Ogilvy. He adds that other waterfront properties in Greenwich has commanded between $4.5 million and $9 million per acre.
The lofty value of Copper Beech Farm can be sourced to its acreage, which used to be a gentleman’s farm (it still hosts several greenhouses and a cow milking station inside a stone carriage house). The property’s size is unmatched in the high-end New York suburb and it has the ability to be subdivided. Currently it has been approved to be divided into two major parcels, one comprised of 20 acres and the other of 30. But development could potentially include as many as 10 to 12 lots, estimates Ogilvy, given the fact that this area of Greenwich is a two-acre zone and that development beyond the two large parcels would require a builder to relinquish about eight acres to parkland according to the town’s laws.
That possibility has extended the buyer pool beyond billionaire house hunters to investors as well. Still, the initial $190 million asking price proved too pricey, spurring the owners chop it significantly. So far, says Ogilvy, it’s drummed up fresh interest: “When you start exploring at a different [price] level, it opens the buying public to a very different group.”
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