New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Parmelee Farm homestead offers ‘an artful space’
Living at the Parmelee Farm Homestead in Killingworth is about lifestyle and experience.
“The house is really big on atmosphere and the property is really about evoking an environment,” seller the Reverend Christopher Solimene said. “It’s about living in a space, sort of an artful space.”
John Campbell, listing agent for Page Taft Christie’s International Real Estate, echoed Solimene’s comments.
“The first thing that struck you was environment,” Campbell said. “It just struck me as soon as I pulled in, it had nothing to do with the beautiful home and the way it’s laid out, it was just the property.”
Solimene purchased the sprawling four-acre property in 2006.
With gardens, stone walls, a pond, outbuildings, room for chickens geese and ducks and an antique home with original paneling, wide planked floors, wainscoting, and hardware, he said it answered his wishes.
According to Campbell, the property is a distraction from the world’s current challenges.
“If somebody is looking for a beautiful tranquil escape, it’s spectacular,” he said.
Built in 1755 by Balazel Farnam, the home was owned and completed by Abraham Pierson, the first rector and president at Yale and a deacon at what is now Killingworth Congregational Church.
Based on the home’s high ceilings and elaborate paneling, Solimene speculates Farmam “must have had some means.”
“Completely in original condition,” when he bought it, Solimene said, the home was restored by a previous owner who was the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“It’s a nice marriage of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries,” Campbell said. “You’ve got all the comforts of today’s world married with the old.”
A center cape Colonial with a large center chimney and three fireplaces, the home’s keeping room – original kitchen – sits in back with a wide hearth and a working beehive oven.
On one side of the keeping room is the former buttery, where items that needed to kept cool were stored. It has been converted to a bathroom. On the opposite side is the borning room, where women gave birth or elderly family members lived. That is now the south-facing kitchen overlooking the pond and abutting 44-acres of grazing land.
Given to the Griswold family by King George III, the property has been in the same family since the 1700s and will never be developed.
Next to the kitchen is the large dining room with a fireplace.
At the front of the house are two parlors overlooking stonewalls where Solimene places pumpkins and “where you may glimpse a cow or your amber waves of grain,” he said.
There are two staircases, one off the keeping room and the other in an enclosed area behind the front door.
Exposed beams hover above the second floor, “so you can see the pegs and the post and beam construction, which is really in its glory and has never been touched,” Solimene said. There’s a gallery with built-ins and three bedrooms, including the charming master with beautifully colored, wide-planked wood floors, bright large windows overlooking the property and what Solimene described as “little adorable windows.”
Hand split cedar shakes cover the exterior of the home and there are three outbuildings – a potting shed that was a laundry in eighteenth century, a building with a chicken coop on one side and a space to park a tractor on the other, and a three-car garage replicating an eighteenth century barn with a cupola.
There are perennial beds with old roses, old fashioned peonies, wisteria and herbs, and along the thick stone walls are mature trees.
The property is perfect “for someone who likes to experience your world full in the five senses,” Solimene said.
Listing agent: John Campbell, Page Taft Christie’s International Real Estate; cell: 203-415-5439; office: 203-245-1593; email: jcampbell@pagetaft.com