Tasteful friends- New Jersey historic mansion

New Jersey? No, thank you.

A bit much.

Trash

How many photos do you have to scroll through before you get to the actual rooms? not the computer -graphic furnished rooms.

Nice to see someone renovated this mansion. Its been on the market before and a after renovation. I don't know what kind of family would live there. It should be a corporate or university conference centre, a dry out clinic, a corporate head office, something like that.

[quote] 1906 Aeolian Player Pipe Organ, one of, if not the only one, in the U.S.

Real estate agents are so lazy.

I always thought I'd want a palatial mansion. But the upkeep is staggering. No way do I want to spend my days cleaning, etc.

I'd rather have a small house just outside 100 acres of virgin forest.

[quote]I want the organ!

We know, Blanche, we know.

Didn't they use the exterior of this house for the Luthor mansion in the Tom Welling superman series? Or maybe the Batman as a teen series?

It looks familiar.

Those daggers hanging from the ceiling are bad feng shui on steroids.

I agree with R10. Wouldn't want to sit underneath one of those pointy things.

Tasteful? Not for me. Looks like whoever designed the interior tried too hard to make it "classy". Typical of New Jersey.

Would have preferred Crocker mansion on Fifth avenue in Manhattan, NYC; but it's gone now so that's that.

Exterior looks like a college or other educational facility. Grounds are ok I suppose, but the place isn't Biltmore

How some of it went down in terms of renovation/repair.

Don't see a private individual buying this barn of a place. It doe seem as if renovations had turning place into some sort of event space, or similar use in mind. Installing a bathroom with muliple stalls doesn't sound like something you'd find in a private home.

The exterior looks like my high school which was built at the same time.

Gorgeous - and some of the renovated spaces are extremely well done. But it's for another era - not sure how anyone would feel comfortable in some of those manor type rooms.

They sold off most of the estate for a suburban homes. Seems rather hemmed in by the hoi polloi.

Very handsome house and, despite the Romanian gypsy furnishing, the restoration was well done for the most part - a little over-cleaned in some spaces, maybe, and some of the bathrooms and marble and modern spaces a little overdone.

Nothing much to complain about.

i don't see much that is tasteful in there. a lot of money spent. but that isn't the same thing.

scale is too large to be a private home. it should be an institution of some kind.

wow, so cavernous. It looks like a corporate meeting center or a grand hotel. Is that the original woodwork?

Of course it’s original woodwork. You’d have to be insane to install that today.

This is a mausoleum, not a home. It was designed and built when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Eyes Wides Shut 2.0

The evil thing is that "developer Darlington Associates... had built multiple residential communities surrounding the mansion."

They should never have been allowed to destroy what must have been a lovely estate by clustering overpriced mcmansions around it.

Evil or inevitable, R24? The alternatives would be selling it as one vast estate, it's boundaries intact, but unlikely to attract any buyer willing to pay very steeply for the conservation of land just for it's own sake? Or spending many years in negotiating some complicated land trust to preserve the original estate intact but to sell off the house separately with perpetual use restrictions of a sort only a viable possibility for a very narrow segment if a very narrow segment? Those are the obvious, but both outcomes are very rare because they are difficult and only fit for owners with vast money and time to burn.

It's a wonderful house and much as I would like to see the same end as you are hinting, I'm happy enough to see the house well preserved, not carved into awkward condos or vertical townhouse units, and with a pretty fucking respectible viewshed from the house preserved.

Let’s get together and buy it as Datalounge HQ.

R24

Happened all the time and still is happening all over USA and parts of Europe for that matter. Few families have fortunes vast enough today to pay for a house that large and taxes on all that land surrounding. When fee entail was ended in GB and or attitudes changed among aristocracy (who were often hard up for money) one of first things families did was sell off land if not major portions of entire estate for development.

As Lady Bracknell quips "land, it gives one status, but prevents one from keeping it up...".

Post WWI and certainly WWII as national and or local governments were hard up for cash first place they looked was usual spots; taxes on wealth such as land, income, capital gains, assets, and estate/death taxes. Those things alone forced many families or owners of vast properties to sell up.

Better to sell off land and be able to keep the main house and enough grounds of estate to be sufficient than go broke trying to keep it all up.

Here is the real deal.

Crocker estate in NJ was purchased by Newark RC Archdiocese in 1927. Some fifty odd years later they sold property to a group of investors named "Darlington Associates".

Plan all along was to use large portion of land from estate for housing, while main house and out buildings were to become "corporate meeting center and executive restaurant". This explains the renovation/restoration project as outlined above. You don't install a beauty salon, bathrooms with multiple stalls, etc... for a property to be marketed as a private residence.

I don't know if it's naivete or a desire to imply nefariousness of intention, this peppering of quotes, "Darlington Associates" and "developer Darlington Associates."

Do you really think no one understands exactly how developers work? Or perhaps think that there is a long queue of Mortimer Burns sorts waiting to pay billions for a property worth millions? Or that the county historical society should team with the local bird sanctuary group and buy it with whose money? Or that that a hair salon stuck somewhere amidst tens of thousands of square feet of Jacobean Revival is simply the work of the Devil himself?

Yeah, in a perfect world I might have preferred a different outcome, and recognize that along the way aspects of the total project involving the surrounding new construction could, in that same perfect world, have been done with more deftness, but to imply that properties on this scale are not subject to compromise is nuts.

Sheezzz. Who wants to live in all that? Scary as fuck. A home should be beautiful and also cozy to some degree. Great furniture, great art, great fabrics and rugs - any style that you choose from modern to classic. This big, rotting structure looks like a disturbing psych ward.

Make it a corona virus sanitarium for rich Chinese.

Is it haunted?

Interior reminds me of Greystone Manor in BH. Had a lot of great sex on those creaky staircases.