Many homebuyers prefer a blank canvas.
These homes, on the market right now, may not be for them.
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39 Capen St, Hartford
6 bd | 4 ba | 2,896 sq ft | 0.25 ac | $499,925
This quirky two-family home wears its personality on its sleeve, starting with a front portico painted tropical orange and Caribbean blue. Those colors pick up around the exterior, adding in candied purple and Crayola magenta across curved pergolas, a treetop deck and, back at ground level, “resort-style outdoor living” spaces including a kitchen and a lounge. Inside, the colors of one unit’s walls are pastel like Easter eggs, while the other’s are white but covered in representational paint and stickers. Such flourishes even extend to the place you’d think they absolutely wouldn’t: the kitchen cabinets, painted with a grape, glass and carafe motif suggesting a love of wine that outranks a love for resale value.
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301 Bell St, Middletown
3 bd | 4 ba | 3,853 sq ft | 1.51 ac | $600,000
Two equilateral triangle roofs the color of traffic cones, each worn like a hat by a face of windows, unequivocally declare this “architectural showplace”’s bold sensibilities. Inside the home, that torch is carried mostly by the flooring: chunky cerulean blue and off-white lightning bolts tiled across the kitchen and a red, white and blue sunburst blazed all around a 360-degree fireplace.
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6 Spring St, Chester
2 bd | 3 ba | 1,598 sq ft | 0.34 ac | $790,000
Recently employed as a two-unit short-term rental, this conceptual property steps from Chester Center is called “The Recycle House,” as “the majority of its structure [is] composed of upcycled materials.” Mismatched wood surfaces drive the point home just about everywhere you look once you get past the curb, from the covered bridge on one side to most of the walls, doors, cabinets, shelves and window frames inside. From the rear, especially, where a wide waterfall spills and decking climbs the home on mismatched pillars, it’s like a wizard’s cottage-meets-treehouse.
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8 Dillon Rd, Woodbridge
3 bd | 4 ba (2 full) | 1.5 ac | 4,637 sq ft | $975,000
This whimsical yet earthy home with older and newer sections and elements feels like a train put together while driving down the tracks. Added features incongruous with the structural core—a barn dating to 1750—find unity in the fact of their discordant materiality and timing. Architectural elements include a lofted barn-style living room with an enormous exposed black boiler at one end; a pair of adjacent yet for some reason segmented upper decks; built-ins such as kitchen shelving bricked like an old-world wine cellar; a stone patio that’s strangely been painted over; splendid stained glass installations; a stonework balcony above the driveway; a graduated walkway with cobblestones and decorated cement tiles; a long, slender lap pool on a second (and mercifully unpainted) stone patio; and a dock and shack along the pond out back.
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22 Ketcham Rd, Ridgefield
2 bd | 4 ba (2 full) | 6,183 sq ft | 1.56 ac | $2,995,000
Looking fairly standard from the outside, this custom home built by the late hit songwriter Jim Steinman is wildly personal within. The master bedroom features a golden sphinx-flanked altar and a wainscoted ceiling painted like a cloudy night’s sky. An arched great room filled with sculptures (including a human-height depiction of natural mineral shards) is wrapped in a finely milled mezzanine and contains Steinman’s piano, which is reportedly worth a million dollars or more on its own. He used it to write “I’d Do Anything for Love” (performed by Meatloaf), “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (Bonnie Tyler) and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” (Celine Dion), among other big songs, and, along with everything else, it’s included with the house. “To honor Jim’s legacy, it is the estate’s intention to find the next custodian who will be enthralled by the transformative power of Jim’s home and art… The sum total of the individual components in this offering is believed to far exceed the list price”—especially after a $1.5 million-dollar price cut earlier this week—“but the intention is to honor Jim by keeping his sanctuary intact.”
It’s hard to convince a person to buy a home on the premise that it has to be kept the way the previous owner liked it. Then again, maybe there’s someone out there who loves it—and, like Meatloaf, would do anything for love.
Written by Dan Mims. Images sourced from the linked real estate listings.
