SELLERS: Karen and Raymond Huger
LOCATION: Potomac, MD
PRICE: $1,749,000
SIZE: 5,995 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 7 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Newly-minted reality television star Karen Huger, the self-styled Grande Dame of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Potomac,” is having some trouble selling her home in the tony suburb about 15 miles outside of Washington, D.C. Miz Huger and her information technology entrepreneur husband, Raymond Huger, whom she frequently refers to as “the Black Bill Gates,” a designation we have to assume is meant to suggest something about the heft of their bank accounts, purchased the two-acre spread in February 2003 for $1,554,000. Our research reveals the property first came up for sale almost two years ago, in May 2014, with an in hindsight utopian price of $2.5 million. The asking price fell to $2.2 million before it was taken off the market in late 2014 and re-listed the following March (2015) at the still lower figure of $1,999,500. Since then the price tag has been chopped at least three times and currently stands at $1.749 million.
By our less than scholarly assessment, Miz Huger’s brick-faced residence would seem a less-refined and vaguely Colonial-esque version of the “classic Georgian” pile in rural Connecticut recently acquired by fellow Bravolebrity Fredrik Eklund of “Million Dollar Listing.” Listing details show the Huger home was built in 1995, measures in at 5,995-square-feet, and contains a total of six bedrooms and seven full and two half bathrooms. The interior spaces are certainly roomy if decidedly run-of-the-mill and, for the most part, not particularly upscale in terms of finishes and furnishings. The double-height center hall entry is flanked by formal living and dining rooms, the latter of which has one wall completely covered in mirrored panels and billowing, gold-toned taffeta drapes that hang from a rod that is bizarrely and inexplicably mounted below the top of the window frame. The double height ceiling in the foyer extends into cavernous “great room” that features wood floors, an immense field stone fireplace, and a double-stacked bank of windows with backyard overlook.
Though Miz Huger fancies herself a staunch arbiter of upper-crust social etiquette, drives a $100,000+Mercedes, and carries a handbag that probably cost enough to feed an underprivileged family of four for six months, she cooks — let’s be honest, children — in a $47 kitchen with utterly average taupe ceramic tile flooring, inexpensive and outdated laminate-faced cabinetry of the sort one buys off the shelf at a big box home improvement retailer, and a woefully mismatched collection of dated-looking medium-grade appliances. Listen, kids. There’s no sin in having an average-grade kitchen. Everybody has a budget and there’s no shame in a modest one. But if you go on national television and giddily and repeatedly announce to the world that your married to “the Black Bill Gates,” well, in this property gossip’s humble and utterly meaningless opinion you better have a tech-tycoon worthy kitchen to back that big ol’ boast up. But we digress. The main floor living spaces are completed with a den/library and an en suite bedroom suitable for guests or live-in domestic staff.
Two upper floor guest/family bedrooms — one that steps up to a private study lined with built-in desk and book shelves — are joined by a sizable if hardly decorated and only just barely furnished master suite complete with separate sitting/dressing room, a pair of walk-in closets, and two clean and well maintained but dated-looking bathrooms. According to listing details, the sprawling basement incorporates a recreation room with fireplace and wet bar, an adjoining media lounge, gym, and arts and crafts room plus a couple more “bonus rooms” and an au-pair/guest suite composed of two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a full kitchen. A brick-accented and wrought iron railed dining terrace off the rear of the residence overlooks a well-watered and freshly mown swathe of shrubbery- and tree-ringed grass that wraps around both ends of the house.
No word has reached our inbox about the real estate plans of Mister and Missus Huger. However, if we were the wagering type — and we’re not — we’d bet the proverbial farm the empty nesting couple trade their spacious but stylistically ho-hum family-sized suburban spread for something a bit more manageable in scale but more expensively outfitted and, perhaps, professionally decorated.
Listing photos: Long and Foster Real Estate
