The land first
Nearly twenty-two acres on the bay side of East Dennis, behind a gate at Sesuit Neck Road, with a long drive that runs through the trees before the water shows itself. The listing counts 200 feet of private beach on Cape Cod Bay and protected conservation land along the borders, and the aerial photographs bear both out: lawn, woods, a pond, and then the dunes and the bay to the north.
The parcel changed hands in December 2012 for a little over three million dollars, and the house that stands on it was raised the following year. Everything since has been about the setting rather than the structure, which is the right way round for a piece of coast this size.
A Cape built for the view
The 2013 house is a two-story Cape in the East Dennis manner, shingle-sided with a wood roof and dormers across the front, 2,955 square feet in eight rooms with four bedrooms, three full baths and a half. The photographs show a white kitchen and living room opening to the bay, a screened porch with its own fireplace, and bedrooms that look straight out over the marsh to the water. A detached barn and a two-car garage sit apart from the house, and there is an outdoor shower for the walk back from the beach.
The listing also notes the potential for an additional substantial residence on the land, which at this acreage is the real proposition: a compound on the bay, on a stretch of waterfront the listing calls virtually impossible to replicate in East Dennis.
Sesuit Neck
Christopher Crowell took up about a hundred acres on this neck in 1713, running from Cape Cod Bay to the Sesuit Creek marsh, and the Crowell homestead at the Old Town Lane corner was still in the family this spring, when the Dennis Conservation Land Trust bought it as Sesuet Farm. The Trust, which now holds roughly 500 acres in Dennis, keeps its offices at Not Enough Acres Farm, 107 Sesuit Neck Road. That is the neighbourhood: working farmland, a land trust, and the bay.
