REAL ESTATE

(Page 2 of 9)

My friends have many other houses: in the south of France, a townhouse in New York, a ski lodge in Sun Valley, an apartment in Boston atop Beacon Hill, the aforementioned waterfront estate in Maine and, of course, the family home in London.

I've been to their house in Maine. It sits atop a 100-acre promontory as peaceful as pie for cherubim and seraphim, a place for "people like us" used to nothing less than the baubles of privilege. The setting is as faultless as a moonlit sea. Set in a field of wild lupine and surrounded by a lawn moistened by the sea air, it's so green that you think you're in County Cork. There are separate houses for the boat captain, the staff and the children, leaving the rambling stone and shingled manse on the cliff sublimely chaste for mom and dad to linger over martinis after a game of golf at the nearby country club that hasn't admitted a new member in years. Talk about exclusivity, it makes mincemeat out of the Maidstone or Meadow clubs, no less leaving an upstart golf club like the Atlantic a place for proletarians.

Well, I thought, where do I start? Whose house could possibly be right for such people? What would they think of a fierce evening of dinner at Nick & Toni's—which I'm sure would appear like a sawdusty steakhouse, no less patronized by weeping Buddhas. I had a momentary feeling of panic greater than being lowered into a free-for-all in Paradise Lost.

Certainly few, if any, of our area's great houses are ever for rent. But even some of those would come off as too fussy—what with their manicured chambers, formal settings and other contrivances that are expensively conventional, like display rooms in a department store.