LOCATION: Pomfret, CT
PRICE: $1,500,000
SIZE: 3,400 square feet (approximately, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: While snacking on some dry toast backed up with a stiff, mid-day gin & tonic pick-me-up Your Mama received an unexpected press release that announces Oscar-winning actress Renée Zellweger has listed her rural retreat in puny and purdy Pomfret, CT on the market with an asking price of $1,500,000.
Miz Zellweger has been a bright light in Tinseltown for quite some time and is best known perhaps for her roles in Cold Mountain, Jerry Maguire, Chicago, Nurse Betty and the Bridget Jones's Diary franchise and for her long list of high-profile man-friends and who include Jim Carrey, George Clooney, Jack White, Kenny Chesney–to whom she was married for about 8 minutes–Luke Perry, John Krasinski, André Balazs, Dan Abrams and, for about 2 years until their March 2011 bust up, Bradley Cooper who People magazine named as "The Sexiest Man Alive" for 2011.
Anyhoo, property records show the sinewy and squinty-eyed movie star procured her pastoral Pomfret property in November 2004 for $1,320,000. The press release we received reveals Miz Zellweger acquired the 39 acre farmlette, located in the northeastern corner of Connecticut about 3.5 hours by car from Midtown Manhattan, as a "vacation retreat." She renovated, updated and upgraded the property's primary structures, which include a vintage main house, separate guest house, and fully detached recreation barn while retaining respect and admiration for the age and integrity of the antique structures. The actress also spent handsomely on extensive landscaping improvement that include various gardens, terraces and dry-stone walls that look as if they pre-date the late-18th century spread.
The main house, a quirky and humble but dignified Federal-style Colonial built around 1770, measures around 3,400 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms that include a commodious (if casual) master suite with vaulted ceiling with heavy, exposed rough-hewn beams, private en suite facility on a dressing area with, as per press release, "an extensive suite of closets."
Visibly aged and pleasantly worn wide plank wood floors–either original or reclaimed–spread throughout the main lounging and entertaining areas that spoke off around the center stair hall and include a cozy formal living room with fireplace and an army of 9-over-9 pane sash windows, a formal dining room with fireplace and antique crystal chandelier, and a ebony-paneled library also with fireplace plus floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases.
A fourth fireplace–this one with brick fireplace original built-in bread oven–warms the family room/media room and the well-equipped (and surprisingly over-sized) and natural light bright kitchen has custom white-painted cabinetry, butcher-block counter tops, high-grade commercial-style appliances, a massive center island lorded over by a heavy-duty pot rack laden with a cacophony of pots and pans that could easy ensnare a bouffant hair do and/or mentally incapacitate an elderly person if it were to fall unexpectedly from the white-painted wood-paneled ceiling.
A sunny sun porch with pitched ceiling and original (or antique reclaimed) wide-plank wood floors looks out past the mature tree branches, through a mossy split-rail fence, down a gentle planted slope to a tree- and lawn-ringed amorphous swimming pool with wide flagstone coping.
A separate guest house has a living room, bedroom, kitchenette and full bath while an antique barn located across the large gravel motor court from the main house has been re-purposed into an airy entertainment pavilion with soaring exposed wood vaulted ceiling, hardwood floors, a old-timey (but probably new-fanged) wood stove and hefty, rough-hewn posts that anchor the massive antique timbers that cross the interior of the capacious space.
The high-profile but low-key Miz Zellweger has owned a number of other prominent properties that include a secluded ranch-style residence in the Hollywood Hills she bought in March 2000 for $1,875,000 from The Wallflowers front man Jakob Dylan and sold a few years later when she snatched up a 6,410 square foot mansion in a plum section of Los Angeles' hoity toity Bel Air 'hood that she owned only briefly and sold in July 2003 for $7,000,000 to Will & Grace alum Debra Messing. Most recently she sold a pair of rambling apartments–or a trio of contiguous units, depending on how one counts, that comprise about 5,000 square feet in a grand Beaux Arts townhouse building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for a combined $7,950,000.
As far as we know Miz Zellweger still owns a charming farmhouse in East Hampton, NY she acquired in April 2003 for $2,150,000. In early 2010 there were scads of rumors and reports Miz Zellweger and her then man-beau Bradley Cooper picked up a contemporary house in the Rustic Canyon area of Pacific Palisades but to be honest children, we don't know anything about this house at this point...meaning it's not clear if it was purchased by Miz Zellweger, Mister Cooper or if they bought it together, which we sort of doubt. We have no inside intel about whether or not Miz Zellweger plans to continue to lighten her real estate load or if she'll hang on to her house in the Hamptons.
listing photos: Coldwell Banker Previews International
