16 Nathan Hale Drive

The main rooms open onto a terrace that runs the full width of the house, and the lawn below it ends in 265 feet of private shoreline. The pier out there is deepwater, with a gangway and a 30-by-15-foot floating dock; the mooring is separate, and the beach is sandy at low tide.

The house sits on 1.1 acres on Wilson Point, the gated neck of land at the mouth of Norwalk Harbor. The view the listing calls the Long Island Sound Archipelago is the Norwalk Islands: more than twenty-five islands, reefs and mudflats strung along six miles of coast, most of them about a mile offshore. The pool and its pavilion are tucked under a rock ledge, facing them.

The custom renovation is credited to S.R. Gambrel, Inc., the firm Steven Gambrel founded in New York in 1996. Gambrel's practice runs interiors and architecture together, and the listing describes the brief in its own words: comfortable, gracious living, with a woven theme of health and wellness, and seamless indoor and outdoor space.

That theme is literal here rather than atmospheric. There is a hidden gym and a wine room on the entry floor, and outside, an outdoor living room with a fireplace, a jacuzzi, an infrared sauna and a cold plunge, all of them reached off the one terrace. The MLS record for this listing carries 2022 as the year of renovation; the house last changed hands in February of that year.

Entry is a two-story hall. The entertaining rooms are a great room, an expansive dining room, and a kitchen with a marble island the listing calls massive. The smaller rooms are a breakfast room, a den and two private offices.

The primary suite has two dressing rooms and a marble bathroom. Three more bedrooms are in the east wing, which makes five in all, with five full baths and a half. Laundry is on the entry floor. Parking is a tandem four-car garage. The brokerage counts 7,369 square feet; four fireplaces; clapboard and stone outside.

Wilson Point is about 150 acres carrying roughly eighty houses, and it has been private for a long time. Lewis O. Wilson, a New York textile merchant, came into the land through his 1825 marriage to Harriet Belden and by 1837 owned all 240 acres of what had been Belden's Neck, which is how it got his name.

In 1882 the Housatonic Railroad put a freight and ferry terminal on Wilson Cove; the New Haven line ran it until fire took the whole complex in 1899. The Wilson Point Property Owners' Association was incorporated in 1929, and the guard house went up in the 1940s, after the Lindbergh kidnapping made gates fashionable on points like this one. The association beach club, with two tennis courts and a tennis pro, is a short walk from the house; the Norwalk Yacht Club is also on the point.

One thing the record does not settle is the age of the house. This listing prints 1890. The brokerage's own page for the February 2022 sale of the same address prints 1939. Both numbers come from the MLS, four years apart, and nothing we could read resolves them, so the copy does not assert either.

The frames are Neil Landino's, shot for this listing and supplied from his own folder. Landino works from the Connecticut shoreline on gardens, landscape architecture and houses, and has done for about two decades. Nothing on this house appears to have been published yet, which makes this set the first look at the finished rooms.