Someone Slept On The Hilltop First
Before anything stood on this hilltop, the lead architect camped on it. That detail comes from the News-Times in November 2021, where the agent of the day credited Straus-Edwards Associates of Woodbury and said the nights on site were about orienting the house for the best light and views in every season. No permit or drawing set has been found to confirm the firm, and the current remarks keep the camping and drop the name. The house went up in 1991: 7,937 square feet by the assessor's measure, twelve rooms, six bedrooms, 1.75 stories, style recorded as custom.
Built For The Chairman Of Avon
Title passed to James E. and Faye L. Preston in January 1989, two years before the foundation went in. Preston was then chairman and chief executive of Avon Products. The interiors are of their moment and still whole: a great room under a twenty-foot stone fireplace, a billiard room, a wine cellar with its own tasting room, a media room with a nine-foot screen. A 546 square foot pool house followed in 1993, with a gunite pool and a tennis court. The generator sits behind an iron gate in an alcove blasted out of the rock.
The View Was Given Away In 1918
What the windows face is Macedonia Brook State Park, 2,302 acres of state land whose first 1,552 acres were a gift rather than a purchase: the White Memorial Foundation handed them to Connecticut in 1918. Alain C. White, who made the gift with his sister May, also held the largest chess problem collection in the world, roughly 250,000 of them by the mid-1920s. The forest he saved is second growth. Kent's first blast furnace was built in the Macedonia valley in 1823 and soon employed more than a hundred men, and its charcoal took the original timber. The furnace lies in ruins on the stream bank inside the park, well below this plateau.
What 391 Acres Actually Means
The listing advertises 391.27 acres. That is a two-state total: roughly 152 acres in Kent, across sixteen parcels, and 238.85 across the line in Amenia, New York. The house holds 18.17 of them, assessed at 4,408,500 dollars in 2024. Most of the remainder sits in a forest tax classification rather than an easement, Connecticut's PA 490 on the Kent side and New York's 480-a on the other, which the Dutchess roll stamps as a commitment that runs with the land. The ask is 7,400,000 dollars. In 2018 it was 9,995,000.
