News From FWIW's White Elephant Hunter

I’d missed the non-MLS sale, but bank-owned 309 Taconic Road, 20+ aces, 26,000 sq. ft., has been unloaded for $7.750 million. Readers of FWIW have been entertained (or we tried for that effect, anyway) by owner Stanley Cheslock’s attempts to sell this house since 2005, when he started at $26, then $31 million, to no avail. Along the way, he sold off 9 of its 29 acres for a pittance, and in later years his agents lopped 13,000 sq. ft. off the description, if not the house itself, to reduce its stated size to a less-daunting 13,000 sq.ft. The size remained the same, they just used a smaller tape measure.

In fact, the house was kind of cool — so over the top, yet top-quality construction throughout, with every amenity Cheslock could dream up, including an open birdcage elevator. Fun to tour, and to show clients, but even Conrad Hilton might have been dismayed at its size.

So who’s bought it? I’m guessing some middle eastern sheik, where houses like this pass for “real high-class taste”, but perhaps someone now or formerly from Brooklyn.

Does the sale of this ridiculous house signal the top of the current bubble, and the final terminus of bad taste and grandiosity on Greenwich?