Friday, January 24, 2014 | Greenwich Time | A5

NEWS

By Maggie Gordon

An Italian-style mansion built in 1900 by Greenwich developer Joseph Sawyer made its way onto the mar-ket for the first time since 1957 late last week, with an asking price of $6.3 million.

Called Buena Vista — which means “good view” in Spanish — the white stucco palace, sprouted with red tile-topped turrets that peek through the trees on Palmer Hill Road, is awe-inspiring. The home, which was built as an extension of the ground’s contours, is a symbol of Greenwich’s opulent past.

But it appears the house will become part of that past. The magnificent structure’s future is in seri-ous doubt.

“You don’t really see anything like this in Green-wich,” said listing agent Bill Andruss, of Sotheby’s Inter-national Realty.

With 9,342 square feet of space inside the rambling mansion, which spans 228 feet across the center of the 9.72-acre lot in Old Green-wich, that seems like an understatement.

Boasting stone fireplaces intricately designed with carved lions and family crests, elaborate chandeliers hanging from the 10 1/2 foot ceilings and stained-glass windows flooding the stairways with sunbeams, it seems time has stood still inside the wainscoted walls of Buena Vista — perhaps for too long.

“For me, the idea of reno-vating the house is not an option, and I’ve known it for some time,” said the estate’s executor, who asked not to be named.

For more than a half-cen-tury, the house was home to Laura Grey Morgan, along with her husband, J. Robert Morgan, until his death in 1988. And with no massive renovations or updating, much of the house has fallen into disrepair. In fact, Andruss is only opening five of the home’s 38 rooms to visitors due to con-cerns about safety.

“Anybody looking at this house almost instantly comes to the conclusion that it’s a teardown,” said the ex-ecutor, who grew up playing hide-and-seek in the home’s nooks and crannies and has 57 years worth of rose-col-ored memories of the Gilded Age masterpiece that has not suffered time well.

As a result of the condition, the property is being market-ed not as a chance to own one of Greenwich’s great estates, but as an opportunity to pick up the largest land parcel in all of Old Greenwich — a once-in-a-lifetime prospect for a developer and one that has kept Andruss busy ush-ering potential buyers past the thick wooden door under the 114-year-old porte cochere since the property listed last week.

“We’ve had a lot of inter-est,” he said Thursday morn-ing, standing near a large 12-place dining room table that had once been used for conferences in the executive suite at the Seagram’s head-quarters, where J. Robert Morgan once worked.

The property occupies a part of town zoned for one-acre lots, which Andruss said positions it well as a location for cluster housing. With the mandate to set aside 15 percent of the 9.72 acres, the remaining parcel comes out to 8.26 acres. But once a road and other necessary changes are made, Andruss said there would likely only be space for about six houses.

Instead, he thinks the best approach for a devel-oper would be to set aside about 30 to 40 percent of the land for town use, in exchange for the ability to build a cluster development of about eight or nine homes on half-acre lots. “Maybe sell some $3 million houses there,” he said. “Something like that may fly.”

Old palace in Old Greenwich asks $6.3MON THE MARKET

Contributed photo

For more than a half-century, the house was home to Laura Grey Morgan, along with her husband J. Robert Morgan, until his death in 1988.

Standing inside the home, where scratches on the original oak floors sum-mon images of women in ball gowns waltzing from one end of the house to the other during lively parties of yesteryear, the thought of a bulldozer breaking through the sunroom’s windows may be a sad one.

“I certainly am not going to be around the day the wrecking ball hits,” said the executor. “It will be the end of an era.”

But in a way, it will just be a continuation of the proper-ty’s evolution.

The home was built by Joseph Dillaway Sawyer, a wealthy Bostonian who at the turn of the 20th century set his sights on Fairfield County, where he developed real estate communities and earned huge profits.

In a booklet released last fall, the Darien Historical Society succinctly summed up Sawyer’s approach to development: “Buy a large tract of cheap, abandoned farm land, carve off what you want to keep for your-self, and slice up the rest into ‘estates.’ ”

Sawyer built Buena Vista as his home, before develop-ing the surrounding land into Hillcrest Manor, a pri-vate community of 16 homes that still exists. He sold the homes for $10,000 up to $100,000 — about $2.5 mil-lion in today’s dollars.

In 1914, Sawyer penned “How To Make A Country Place,” a book that chroni-cled how he turned the land of faded farms from pastures to palaces, first at Hillcrest and then in Darien’s To-keneke Association, which he founded along with Ev-ermont Hope Norton and Miner Davis Randall shortly after Buena Vista was built.

In the book, Sawyer notes that a modest farmhouse once “queened” his Greenwich property before he set out to improve and modernize the landscape, making room for Buena Vista, of which he wrote: “Extravagance in pan-eled wainscot and beamed ceiling ran riot, as in leaded lights, arch-windowed tur-rets, and the copper-flashed, tiled roof, viewed from the lookout of which Buena Vista seemed like a miniature city.”

Now, 114 years after Saw-yer’s community was first constructed, the cycle is set to begin again.

“There is a part of me that is going to miss this house,” said the estate’s executor. “But time marches on. Time marches on.”

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon

At top, the back of Buena Vista, the Old Greenwich estate that went on the market last week, with its 9.72 acres, for $6.3 million. “You don’t really see anything like this in Greenwich,” agent Bill Andruss of Sotheby’s International Realty said of Buena Vista.