In New Canaan, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon
Married musicians Paul Simon and Edie Brickell are so eager to get rid of their country estate in bucolic (and posh) New Canaan, Conn., they’re willing to endure a bank account-brutalizing multimillion-dollar loss. First listed in the spring of 2019 with a too-rosy price of $13.9 million, the sprawling 32-acre spread has been relisted at a hugely discounted $11.9 million, by almost any standard still a staggering amount of money but a shocking 28% below the $16.5 million the long-married singer-songwriters paid for the spectacularly picturesque property coming up on 19 years ago.
Hidden down a serpentine, gated driveway at the head of a circular drive on a high point of the pastoral estate, with panoramic views of rolling hills and dense woodlands, the Georgian-style mansion was designed by little-lauded architect Harold Reeve Sleeper and completed in 1938. Set amid towering specimen trees with a whitewashed brick exterior, the handsome, elegantly appointed and grandly proportioned (if somewhat dated) multiwinged manse offers six bedrooms and seven bathrooms plus three powder rooms in a bit more than 8,500 square feet over three floors.
The grounds provide a parklike idyll with sweeping meadows, formal walled gardens and a swimming pool scenically sited on a grassy plateau with serene views over a placid private pond. Just inside the main gates and a good distance from the main house, a 2,400-square-foot cottage, which the couple used as a recording studio, makes a perfect caretaker’s home or guesthouse.
Leslie Razook and Anne Krieger of William Pitt Sotheby’s Intl. Realty hold the listing.
Simon has long owned a multiunit combination duplex in a distinguished apartment house along New York’s Central Park West, as well as an enviably secluded 30-ish-acre oceanfront compound in the sleepy Hamptons community of Montauk. Tax records also show Texas born-and-bred Brickell separately owns a 10-plus-acre estate near Lavon Lake on the semirural suburban outskirts of Dallas.
Launch Gallery: Paul Simon's Idyllic Connecticut Estate
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