When Thomas (Terry) Fitzgerald, founder and managing partner of Longbow Capital Partners, bought a plot of land in Bridgewater, Connecticut, in 1993, he and his wife Libby were looking for a “counterpoint to our children’s life in the city,” he says. “One that would be defined by nature and all manner of outdoor activities.”
The land they settled on had been owned by the same family for more than half a century and consisted of about 200 acres and a 10,000-square-foot house.
The house itself is somewhat unusual: the property’s previous owners hired the architecture firm Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn (the designers of Colonial Williamsburg) in the late 1930s to move an 18th-century saltbox tavern to the site and combine it with the existing house in what Fitzgerald calls “an architecturally sympathetic manner.” As a result, one half of his house dates from the early 1800s, and the other is from about 1789.
Over the years Fitzgerald added adjacent parcels to the property, which they call Greyledge, and for a time operated a working farm; today the land totals about 319 acres and spans the Roxbury and Bridgewater town lines.
But after using the property for nearly 27 years, the couple is putting it on the market with the Madonna & Phillips Group of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty for $16 million.
“We’ve purchased a place on the eastern end of Long Island which informs how we allocate time,” he says. “Our decision to sell is a difficult one, because the property has been such an important element in our family’s life.”
The Improvements
When Fitzgerald first bought the property (at the time, he was at Solomon Brothers), the house hadn’t been updated for years. Immediately, the family began a series of major updates and renovations.
They removed the roof, added drainage, reinforced the foundation, redid the electricity, HVAC, and other systems, and updated most of the rooms.
As they did so though, they maintained the building’s historic character. In one of the upstairs room in the wing that was once a tavern, “there are references carved into the pine panels about the date a piano was delivered,” Fitzgerald says.
Even as the family renovated the house, they’d still spend weekends on the property. “The house is of such a size where we could stay in one side, and then as construction progressed, we’d move to a different part.”