End of Week Tidbit: Copper Beech Farm

Last spring (2013) a timber tycoon John Rudney heaved and hoed Copper Beech Farm—a 50 acre water front estate in Greenwich, CT—on the market with a searing $190,000,000 price tag. Most high end property watchers and people Your Mama talked with whined and complained and guffawed with righteous anger about how the original sky high price was little more than a cheap (if enormously effective) publicity ploy. And maybe it was. In the fall the price plummeted by an elephantine $50 million to a still astronomical $140,000,000 and just after the first of this year (2014) the price dropped to $130,000,000.

Well, buckle our real estate safety belts, butter beans, because as ridiculous as the squinty-eyed peanut gallery thought the astronomical asking prices were, Copper Beech Farm has been sold, as was first revealed in the CTNews.com, to an as-yet unidentified buyer for a record breaking $120,000,000, the most ever paid for a single family home in the United States.

Not only does the recorded sale price blow away the $102 million some otherwise unidentified French billionaire—or maybe Michael Milken—paid for Suzanne Saperstein's ludicrously opulent Fluer de Lys in Beverly Hills it also edges out the $117.5 million Japanese multi-billionaire Masayoshi Son paid in late 2012 for a nine acre spread in the Bay Area community of Woodside. (Stan Kroenke and his Wal-Mart heiress wife, Ann Walton Kroenke, reportedly paid somewhere around $132.5 million for a state-sized working ranch in Montana but at 123,000 acres it's really in a different real estate category than Copper Beech Farm. Anyways...

The sprawling and extensively landscaped estate, used by the Rudeys as a vacation retreat and previously owned by the Carnegie Steel heiress Harriet Lauder Greenway, includes a hulking, 12-bedroom mansion originally built in 1898, a 12-sided swimming pool, a grass tennis court, a greenhouse, and a carriage house with clock tower.

listing photo: David Ogilvy & Associates