Welcome to Darlington, tasteful friends

Wow - 58 fucking rooms. It's gorgeous and they did a really good job restoring / renovating it.

But what kind of buyer wants to live like that? And not enough pics of bathrooms or kitchens.

R1 if I had the money I’d love to live like that.

It's fabulous -But can you imagine the taxes, insurance, upkeep, and staffing costs??? I could retire in a 6-bedroom beach house with that...

I'll take the pipe organ. You can have the money pit.

Apparently, it was built for Betty Crocker!

[quote]1906 Aeolian Player Pipe Organ, one of, if not the only one, in the United States

WRONG

The guy who renovated it bought it in 2008 for $8.8 million.

It’s no Pemberly.

It looks like the kind of mansion and grounds where wealthy, old eccentrics gather to hunt the deadliest prey of all...man!

Not that there would have been any reasonably easy way for OP to have found this, but there was a previous thread

And another Tasteful friends thread on another Crocker house

Made to be donated and turned into a school or orphanage. Impressive the owners restored it - but will never find a buyer.

[quote] Not that there would have been any reasonably easy way for OP to have found this, but there was a previous thread

Not that there would have been any easy way for you to have known, but I participated in that thread. If only I had a memory.

From the title, I'd hoped this thread would be about the residence in Remains of the Day. Nevertheless, this house may be the ne plus ultra of Tasteful Friends postings.

The outside looks like nothing so much as a 1930s-era high school.

It’s in Mahwah.

A perfect place to install a bog to cultivate Darlingtonia Cakufornica, the carnivorous Cobra Plant.

The wood paneling and details are gorgeous. The exterior is a bit overblown, but imposing.

I dare say it will be torn down by the Toll Brothers for McMansions in a development called Kuntly Acres.

Haha, R13/OP. I didn't mean to chide you or call you worse than Hitler. I have a good memory for Tasteful friends threads...if I happen to have seen them. That one didn't have a very helpful title to search on, but knowing it exists makes it easy enough to find. Not knowing it exists makes it more of a needle in a haystack.

A great house, overly restored and 5-star-resorted but still. They were asking $48M when listed in 2017, not sure what they want now. For that range of price, I'd buy a proper Jacobean or Elizabethan country house in England for a third this price, and spend the rest of my days furnishing it (not quite in the taste of the owners of Darlington.)

Cakufornica = Californica. Apologies/

Boring architecture. It looks like a high school from the early 20th century.

It's all about the interiors and the gardens, for me.

A detail about houses of this kind - they were often designed with ivy plantings in mind, this the "dull" over-bricked appearance. As people realized that ivy could be highly destructive, more and more of it was removed, leaving numerous Tudor and Jacobean Revival structures, both houses and schools, looking more than a bit plain.

I suspect that's the missing element for this house.

Impossibly big. I don’t think I know enough people to fill the dining table.

The removal of the ivy and the death of the elms destroyed the Harvard Yard of my youth.

On the other hand, the chairs are a great addition.

You’d have to have a large staff for it to work as a home. The unseen kitchen is described as “restaurant.” It’s probably in the basement. Very few people want to live like that today. It will need a commercial or institutional buyer, but it’s really set up as a home. Tough sell.

It was going for 39M in September, down from 48M in 2017.

Perhaps a home for wayward youth?

The Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers.