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.