An elegant, iconic Berkshire estate located on a country lane in prime Monterey. The driveway takes you past open fields and towering oak and maple trees up the rolling hillside to the most perfect setting in the Berkshires. Distant views stretch out from the pool and beautifully landscaped grounds. Generous public rooms including a living room with wood-burning fireplace and French doors opening on to a stone floor 3 season porch, formal dining room with wood-burning fireplace, guest bath, butler’s pantry, period kitchen with arched windows, a master suite with two full baths, guest suite with distant views, and two additional bedrooms. Renovate the guest suite in the detached garage for additional room. An extraordinary property and setting with limitless potential.
What’s the most compelling thing about this property?
Fiddletop has what is most likely the finest setting of any estate or home in the Berkshires. Drive down the quiet country lane and enter the 15-acre property through the stone gates. An open field lies on one side beyond mature oaks, and on the other are beautiful views cascading across acres and acres of protected land. Past a stone wall, beautiful mature landscaping frames the home as you get a glimpse of it just ahead. Wind up the hillside and walk through the Dutch front door – right away the sweeping view embraces you across the entry hall, drawing you outside right past the enormous living room with timbered beam ceiling and the gracious dining room with a wood-burning fireplace. As you stand on the back lawn looking across your land to the distant mountains beyond, you’ll immediately relax, realize there’s no road noise, just peace and quiet and you will know you are home.
For whom is this house perfect?
Do you desire the utmost privacy without isolation? Do you love a timeless, gracious, and distinguished home, especially as a foundation for creating your own 21st century sanctuary? Do you seek broad views, elegant, mature landscaping and tranquility? Are you seeking a ‘forever’ home?
What’s the most fun thing to do within five miles of this house?
Swim at the secret swimming hole at Konkapot Falls or enjoy a good book from the wonderful Monterey library (just about to undergo a huge expansion), relax at the Monterey town beach on Lake Garfield. Step back in time and tour the Bidwell House Museum, hidden down a dirt road where the center of Monterey was over 200 years ago – an authentic Colonial home which was the 1750’s residence of the Reverend Adonijah Bidwell, hike the trails on its 192 acres of fields and forest, wander through the heritage vegetable garden, or attend near weekly events and lectures during the summer. Hike the trails at 12,000-acre Beartown State Forest, or nearby Sandisfield State Forest with both West and Abbey Lakes. Visit Rawson Brook Farm for locally-made delicious goat cheese, or the Gould Farm Harvest Barn for great coffee, bread, baked goods and eggs. Eat breakfast or lunch at Roadside Cafe – and sometime soon at Monterey General in the heart of the village where a cafe, a mercantile space and Brockman Real Estate will all be under one roof in the 1790’s General Store, and you will also be able to get food-to-go, and shop for beautifully curated, useful goods for the home and garden. While Great Barrington is just 12 minutes away, you can drive down the old North Road and end up right at the Old Inn on the Green for dinner with just candlelight in the dining rooms and 5-star food and wine, let your kids run through the grass while you eat at Cantina 229, or inside a colonial barn at Gedney Farm…. All that and more is within 5 miles of this incredible estate.
If this house could talk, what secret would it tell about its history?
There’s a very simple reason that this iconic property has only had four owners since it was built in 1932. All four could have lived in any number of wonderful homes in the Berkshires, but they did not. They built or chose Fiddletop. In 1964 the legendary conductor Eugene Ormandy told the New York Times “My wife, Margaret, and I have a beautiful home in the Berkshires, but we can never spend much time there. Now with the Saratoga season, maybe we can. We bought it several years ago from (the virtuoso violinist) Zino Francescatti.” After the Ormandys, Bill Brockman and Jack Jefferson, founders of Brockman Real Estate, called it home.
Once you experience Fiddletop, spending time just relaxing in the landscape, sitting in the gracious rooms watching the light skim the walls and warm wood floors with the glow of the wood burning in the fire places or the sun reflected back on the distant mountains, and imagining how you can make this your ‘forever’ home, you will know you want to stay for decades, too.
