18 Burton Road, Salisbury, CT 06068

Salisbury's land records carry 18 Burton Road as one parcel of 3.59 acres in the town's RR-3 district, the larger-lot rural residential zone, with a build year of 1985 and two dwellings standing on it. The main house is a clapboard Colonial: frame construction on a concrete foundation, asphalt shingle roof, oil heat with the tank in the basement, water from a private well. The second building sits detached behind it. Both are reached from Route 44 by way of Lincoln City Road, the same turn that carries Salisbury Central School.

Inside the main house the kitchen cabinetry was made by hand in oak, and the ceilings are paneled in pine. A wood-burning stove holds the middle of the plan, which runs semi open from the living room through the dining room without a hard break. Two bedrooms, two full baths. The primary bedroom has an office of its own and a second office sits on the main floor, which is the arrangement two people working from home usually have to build for themselves.

The guest house is one room: an open studio loft under a vaulted ceiling, with its own office, bath and laundry on the lower level. The listing puts the combined heated area of the two buildings at 2,493 square feet, and notes that the figure is exactly that, a combination. A second dwelling on a single deed tends to get used three ways in a decade, as guest quarters, as a studio, as a source of ancillary income, and nothing here has to be altered to move between them.

Burton Road sits in the Lakeville section of Salisbury, in the northwest corner of Connecticut where Litchfield County meets the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley. Lake Wononscopomuc lies just south, 348 acres and 102 feet deep, the deepest natural lake in the state, and the Hotchkiss School has stood on its shore since Maria Harrison Bissell Hotchkiss founded it there in 1891 on a gift of 65 acres. Northeast in Salisbury village, the Scoville Memorial Library has been lending since 1803 and was the first free town library in the United States supported by public money. The listing calls the area one known for its institutions. These are the institutions.