The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
At $44.5M, waterfront parcel on Long Island Sound in Fairfield is 3rd highest in Connecticut
A swath of Fairfield’s waterfront has been packaged anew into a single listing for $44.5 million — making it the third priciest estate in Connecticut after Copper Beech Farm in Greenwich and an undeveloped stretch of Darien’s waterfront.
The centerpiece of the collection of properties known as Sasco Point — or Riegel Point locally — is an Elizabethan Renaissance-style mansion designed by Henry Pelton, known best as architect of the neogothic Riverside Church in New York City. A six-vehicle garage includes upper-level guest quarters, with a boathouse having two large rooms for entertaining and a sleeping loft.
A limited liability company named 1143 Sasco Hill Road is the official property owner, according to a town field card posted on the Vision Appraisal website.
Lehman Brothers financier Brad Jack and then-spouse Karin purchased the mansion in 2001 for $24.5 million, with Sasco Hill Road’s denizens over the years having included playwright Noel Coward and former General Electric CEO Jack Welch.
The couple divorced in 2008, with Brad Jack remarrying and moving to Westport. There, he received probation after being charged with forging prescriptions for pain medication. Brad Jack died at age 60 on Feb. 16, 2019, of complications from pancreatic cancer.
In 2021, Fairfield approved a subdivision of the estate into seven separate lots. That same year, a limited liability company was created for the main property at 1143 Sasco Hill Road and the smaller lots, with Karin Addison Jack’s name no longer appearing in public filings for the property.
Sasco Point was initially listed for $62 million in 2013, a year after the town of Fairfield included the 1143 Sasco Hill Road estate on a list of properties to be auctioned for nonpayment of property taxes.
The Fairfield-based brokerage William Raveis Real Estate has now repackaged the remaining Sasco Hill Road estate and lots for any single buyer at a combined $44.5 million. The subdivided lots are available at prices ranging between $4.5 million and $8.5 million.
In May, the limited liability company sold a two-acre lot for $5 million to Emma Lasry, a New York City art gallery professional and charitable foundation steward whose father Marc lives in Westport and sold off in April a 25 percent stake he had held in the Milwaukee Bucks NBA franchise. Marc Lasry’s investment firm Avenue Capital is listed as the coowner of the undeveloped lot at 1173 Sasco Hill Road.
It was one of three, $5 million transactions on Sasco Hill Road this year, with another house going for $4.4 million. Another 11-acre chunk of the Sasco Point property with water frontage sold in 2015 for $13.9 million, after being carved off from the original estate.