pandemic stories: northwest corner attracts two NYC families and a fairfield county transplant
/
By Nicole Funaro | Published on May 17, 2021
Litchfield County saw a real estate boom during the pandemic as New Yorkers — mainly Brooklynites — flocked to the country for fresh air and wide open spaces.
But it wasn't only city dwellers. At least one Fairfield County resident fled the "rat race" for the northwest corner too.
Here are the stories of three families and why they chose to settle in the Litchfield Hills.
Jane Cohan and her husband James, owners of the James Cohan Gallery in New York City, have long called Brooklyn home. But when the pandemic hit and the closure of Canada’s borders blocked access to their family vacation property, Jane said that she and her husband quickly saw their ability to access the outdoors dwindling.
“That's our major outdoor time,” she said of their Canadian property. “We love to be outdoors. My husband is a road biker, I love to hike, and I love to swim. And so, very wisely, he realized getting to Canada [wouldn’t be possible], and we need to make plans for the summer. And he got on it very quickly through artists we’ve met.”
After an “intense” spring in Brooklyn, the Cohans connected with Elyse Harney Real Estate agent Holly Leibrock, who helped them secure a rental near Lake Wononscopomuc in the Salisbury/Lakeville area for the summer of 2020. When their Tribeca and Lower East Side galleries reopened in June on a semi-remote basis, Jane said she and her husband were already shopping for houses in Litchfield County to make the area a more permanent vacation destination.
They considered purchasing their rental and even put in an offer on another property that they ultimately retracted before landing on their final purchase: a renovated one-level schoolhouse in Amesville, a hamlet in Salisbury, that feels “like a loft apartment,” according to Jane.
“We’re just loving being up there,” she said. “It turns out that we have a lot of friends who are here. So when the social life comes back, we know we're going to be quite busy.”
While they don’t know yet if they will continue their semi-remote work in the city, Jane offered that she and James are finding some parallels to their Brooklyn life even amid very obvious changes in scenery.
“We're very much in the woods — we're right on the Appalachian Trail,” she said. “But it's also a neighborhood … We know our neighbors [and] we can walk to the town. So we have a little … not urban, but just kind of a village life that harkens back to a different time.”
For Tricia Brown, returning to Litchfield County is something of a homecoming. Having grown up in the Berkshires, the Marc Fisher Footwear sales representative said she and her husband are making their move to the northwest corner a permanent one. Brown raised her two daughters in Darien and now as an empty nester, she said she and her husband Jim decided they “wanted to live somewhere where we had a lot more land and a lot more privacy and way less of a rat race.”
Initially, Brown said they honed their search on Lakeville, Salisbury and Sharon, but as COVID — and its ensuing competitive market — took hold, they expanded their search to include towns such as Roxbury, Warren and Washington. After hoping to see several homes that were “bought over the phone, sight unseen,” she said they landed on the Warren home they ultimately purchased seeing it during a snowstorm at the end of February 2021.
The home Brown purchased had an accepted offer on it the first time she saw it on a Saturday; when it looked like that offer would fall through, Brown said she and her husband went back “on a snowstorm Sunday and grabbed it.”
While Brown and her husband are just beginning to move into their home in Warren, she said their new home has just what they need to keep working from home.
“One of the reasons we bought our house [is] because there's an unfinished … apartment over the garage,” she said. “But it already has the electric, it's halfway done and we're turning it into a big spectacular office space.”
Despite the roadblocks encountered in the buying process, Brown said she is ultimately glad to have made the purchase and the move to Litchfield County.
“We're absolutely thrilled,” she said. “I think at our age, we’re winding down and probably starting to think about retiring in the next four or five years. It’s a nice ‘work into it slowly’ type of thing.”
For Janine Yorio, having a second home was a “nice to have” luxury, but then “the world had other plans,” she said. Yorio said the pandemic made finding a second home a “must have” for her family of four, and they kicked off their search in April 2020.
“Having two kids in an apartment in the city with … no services, no restaurants…it was a hard time to have that living situation,” she said.
Yorio, a co-head of Republic Real Estate investment platform, and her husband originally sought out a home in the Catskills and greater Hudson, N.Y area. After a “fruitless” weekend of house hunting, her husband suggested stopping in Lakeville, Conn. — an area he was familiar with due to his car racing at Lime Rock Park. That stop changed the course of their home search process.
“We drove into town and I was like, “This is the most picturesque, idyllic town I've ever seen,” she said. “The fact that it has a racetrack when he's such an avid racecar guy…it was just the perfect storm.”
Yorio connected with Bill Melnick of Elyse Harney Real Estate and set about searching for a Lakeville property that “wasn’t just some ho-hum house like every other house” and had “some aspect to it that was unique and breathtaking.” By June, Yorio said they entered into a contract on the home — a contract that almost didn’t happen, as the seller was having trouble finding a new home of her own. But Yorio said they closed on the home Labor Day weekend of 2020.
While the COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing competitive market delayed the renovations on their home until February 2021, Yorio said that hasn’t stopped her family from settling into the property.
“We bought it as a second home, but it's become our primary home,” she said. “I think when we started looking, we were like, ‘OK, this will be over in September, and we'll come back [to the city]…And then, the world had other plans for us. Our kids are in school up here. We're living and working up here. It's sort of evolved and become our primary residence.”
With pandemic uncertainty still present, Yorio said she is grateful for their Lakeville purchase.
“Every time I get my car and drive around here, I'm sort of vindicated in our decision because it's so beautiful,” she said. “It's such a beautiful unspoiled part of the world. In some ways, I hope people don't find out about it.”