Will the fifteenth time be the charm?

25 close road, built in 2004, erased in 2024, but it lives on in memory and the printed page

25 Close Road, its Russian oligarch’s tribute to garish bad taste having been consigned to the dustbin of history, is back (again) as a land listing, this time asking $9.950 million for its 5 acres.

The history of this property is convoluted: built in 1998-2000 by, I believe, by one of those newly minted Russian oligarchs, it was so lavishly over-decorated that even The Donald might have thought it a tad ostentatious. The Russian disappeared, probably defenestrated in Moscow or resettled in a Siberian gulag, and whoever ended up with its title tried selling it in 2005-2006 for $15.75 million. That didn’t work, it sat fallow, then resurfaced in 2020 for $12 million, an effort that also failed. The house was then razed, and the land was offered in 2024 at $10.995. Now those acres can be yours for $9.950.

I’ll always be grateful to the original owner here because when I was working with Andrews McMeel Publishing to finish up The New Millionaire’s Handbook, their St. Louis-based illustrator couldn’t seem to grasp the full, gargantuan size of what we were seeing go up in Greenwich and other Fairfield County towns; he kept drawing homes that might have dwarfed their peers in Kansas City, but would have been spurned as obscenely inadequate servants quarters by Greenwich domestics. Finally, exasperated, I drove up to 25 Close Road, then still under construction, took some pictures, and sent them west: “Here!” The result can be seen below: