SELLER: Scott Pelley
LOCATION: Darien, CT
PRICE: $3,985,000
SIZE: 7,532 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: The Darien, CT, Colonial-style mini-mansion of award-winning veteran television journalist Scott Pelley has come up for sale at $3.985 million. We don’t know if Connecticut’s luxury property market simply didn’t favor him or if he’s in a hurry to unload it but unfortunately for the Texas-born “CBS Evening News” anchor and long-time “Sixty Minutes” correspondent, the asking price is an itty-bitty bit below the $4 million property records indicate was paid for the bucolic 2.41-acre spread in August of 2007.
Current listing details show the 7,532-square-foot residence, on a quiet, zigzagged cul-de-sac with five bedrooms and five full and two half bathrooms, is approached by a paver-tiled driveway that circles up around a tree in front of the decidedly traditional and casually stately home that features plenty of decorative columns, perfectly appropriate multi-paned sash windows, and gleaming oak floorboards. A columned portico opens to a double-height foyer with double staircase flanked by ample formal living and dining rooms, the former with fireplace and the latter lined with a cream and beige harlequin pattern wall treatment. Just off the living room there’s a cozy wood-paneled office/library with another fireplace and built-in bookshelves.
A center island kitchen, fitted with sedate banker’s green slab marble counter tops atop a blasé mix of medium brown and ordinary white raised panel cabinetry, opens to a lounge area with a third fireplace and informal dining set in to a wide bay window. The baronially scaled neighboring family room, more than 600-square-feet, has a fireplace set between built-in media and entertainment cabinets as well as four sets of arched French doors that lead out to the backyard. Four generously sized en suite guest/family bedrooms on the upper floor are joined by a media room/children’s den plus the master suite that’s complete with raised ceiling, fireplace, French doors to private balcony, 27-foot long walk-in closet/dressing room, and roomy bathroom slathered in probably profoundly pricey but definitely decoratively dull beige stone.
A service area off the kitchen provides a dedicated home office and mud room just inside the attached three-car garage while, as was noted by the celebrity property gossips at Zillow, Mister Pelley maintained a fully functional studio in the finished basement where he wrote and recorded tracks for his “60 Minutes” pieces. Listing photographs don’t show the basement studio but instead show an immense central room surrounded by several sizable storage rooms. The vast middle space, rather depressingly turned out with humble unpainted bead board paneled walls, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, and a dread-worthy dropped ceiling, is furnished with little more than foosball, pool and air hockey tables along with a puffy, brown leather sectional sofa in front of a large flat-screen television. A low, stacked stone wall rings a stone terrace outside the kitchen along the back of the house and overlooks an unquestionably picturesque, park-like backyard. There does not appear to be a swimming pool but there is what listing details describe as a “skating pond” fed by a natural stream and traversed by a postcard-ready arched bridge.
Whether Mister Pelley, who has interviewed hordes of international movers and shakers and reportedly hauls in around $6 million a year for his anchoring duties, and his wife, former newscaster Jane Boone Pelley, plan to snatch up another family sized mini-manse in one of southern Connecticut’s affluent communities remains a mystery but property records do reveal that last summer, in July 2016, they shelled out $2.25 million for a modestly sized but luxuriously outfitted two-bedroom and two-bathroom condominium on a lower floor of a contemporary, full-service building just a couple of blocks off Union Square in the trendily expensive and conveniently central Flatiron District.
Listing photos and floor plans: Houlihan Lawrence
