Colgate Mansion has new owners

WHY IT MATTERS: The Beaux Arts-style Colgate mansion, on more than 100 acres, has sold after two years on the market. Its sale price is close to $6 million, which would make it one of the biggest (if not the biggest) sales in Litchfield County this year.
 
SHARON — The Colgate Mansion, a historic 111-year-old home on Amenia Road that has been on the market since 2012, has been sold. 
 
The house is on 109 acres and was most recently listed at $7.9 million. It was purchased by a couple from New York City on Friday, Aug. 8. 
 
Kathryn Clair and Pat Lahoud of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty’s Washington Depot office were the lead brokers for the property. The agency confirmed the sale but would not share the name of the purchasers or confirm the purchase price, which is rumored to be somewhere between $5 million and $6 million. It was originally listed at more than $10 million.
 
The agency asked that the name of the buyers and the purchase price not be published. The sale data is not yet available on the town’s real estate transactions website, www.visionappraisal.com. The previous owner, Paul Leka, purchased the property in 1978 for $305,000 from Mark and Gala Cohn, who had bought the property in 1967 for $150,000.
 
The mansion was built in 1903 using granite quarried from the property and has roughly 12,000 square feet of living space. It was built by Romulus Riggs Colgate, the grandson of the founder of Colgate Soap and Perfume Co., and designed by award-winning architect J. William Cromwell Jr. in the 18th-century Italian Renaissance style as a country home for Colgate and his wife, Susan.
 
The residence has nine bedrooms; five full and three half bathrooms; eight fireplaces; an elevator; radiant heat on the first floor; 9-foot ceilings; a pantry; staff quarters; an in-law apartment; an English barn with six stalls; a gated entrance and a 40-by-50 foot reflecting pool. No room in the mansion is wider than 24 feet.
 
Many of the rooms have marble floors, and the large entrance hall is paneled in English fumed oak. The woodwork, bookcases and paneling in the library/living room were carved from circassian walnut.
 
Leka, the most recent owner of the property, was a songwriter famous for tunes such as “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)” and “Green Tambourine.” He died in 2011.

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