A Fully Restored Gilded Age Mansion Lists Near Tanglewood

(Bloomberg) -- At the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, Ethan Berg quit his job as a management consultant for Monitor (a consulting group that was later acquired by Deloitte in 2013), sold some investments, and began a journey with his wife Jamie, cycling in different places around the globe and “talking about what kind of life we wanted to have in the future,” he says.

“We decided we wanted to live in a small town,” says Berg, where sustainable food was grown locally, a close-knit community was in evidence, and outdoor activities were abundant.

A bucolic sentiment certainly, and not one that would logically lead to the purchase of an 11,700-square-foot Gilded Age mansion in Lenox, in western Massachusetts. But that’s exactly what Berg bought, for around $2 million, in 2002.

“It was just great value,” he says of the property, which he purchased before it went into foreclosure. “And it was an extraordinary opportunity, with a lot of potential, to create something special.”

Now, 18 years after he first bought the 31-acre property, Berg has decided to sell it, listing the home with the Compass broker Robin Kencel for $5.9 million.

“We took our time, and the goal was to renovate the mansion and bring it back to its original glory,” he says. “We’ve viewed ourselves as caretakers of the property.”

A “Cottage” 

The home’s origins read like an abbreviated tutorial in America’s industrial elite.

The first mansion was built in 1875 by Henri Mondad Braem, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark who was married to the daughter of Edward Bech, a partner in the Cunard Steamship Co. The house, which was called “Ethelwynde,” joined nearly 75 other “cottages,” a euphemistic name for mega-mansions built by industrial titans from New York and Boston.

Braem then sold the house to Kate Winthrop, whose father Moses Taylor founded National City Bank of New York, the precursor of Citibank. Winthrop, who Berg says was an “enthusiastic gardener,” planted elm, beech, spruce, chestnut, and poplars that survive to this day on the property.

When Winthrop died, the house was sold by her descendants to Halstead Lindsley, a mining magnate who controlled, among other interests, the massive Falconbridge Nickel Mine in Canada, with his brother Thayer.

Lindsley rebuilt the house (with ample nickel flourishes, including the bath fixtures), changing its facade from wood shingles to stone and filling its interior with carved paneling, ornamental plaster, and chandeliers. “He spared no expense,” Berg says. “He had logs floated up the Amazon and shipped here to create the wood paneling for the library.”

After Lindsley came a sequence of New England luminaries—a direct descendant of the painter John Singleton Copley, next a chairman of the Boston loom company H.F. Livermore Corp., then the widow of the founder of the Schieffelin Liquor Conglomerate—until it was finally sold to an engineering company, which used the house as its headquarters for nearly 25 years.

A Hidden Bathtub 

When Berg bought the house, “it was obvious the property hadn’t been touched” for years, he says.

There was inadequate heat, the plaster was peeling, the lawns were overgrown, the bushes hadn’t been tended, and the house’s grand conservatory had fallen into disrepair. “We knew what we were getting into, because we could see it,” he says.

Still, elements of the house’s charm were still in evidence: “The stonework was still gorgeous,” Berg says, “there was a gorgeous, huge veranda and a beautiful slate roof.”

Berg and his family still had a house in Cambridge, Mass., more than a two-hour drive, so the renovation proceeded slowly. (Albany, N.Y., is about an hour away.) “We just decided to take our cues from the house,” he says. They’d remove one wall and then: “Boom, there was a hidden bathtub,” he says. Or they’d lift up a tile floor and underneath, there’d be “a gorgeous hardwood floor.” 

Even as they began to remove the fluorescent lights and false walls that the engineering company had put up in the house, they also began to renovate an 1,800-square-foot, 1950s-era guest house on the property, accessed via a separate driveway.

Unsurprisingly, that project was completed first, in about 2006, at which point the family moved from Cambridge to Lenox.

As the renovation progressed, Berg spent time in the mansion while never living in it.

“We were cozy and happy and fine,” he says of his time in the 1950s house. “The only way I can explain it is that my wife is just as happy camping, or living in a tiny house.”

Meanwhile, they hired landscape designer Gordon Hayward to create a master plan for the gardens’ restoration. “He understands the aesthetics of the property, how to preserve and protect” the plants, Berg says. “He created a whole design” that the Bergs used to restore the grounds.

Thanksgiving for 25

The result is a house that’s very similar to the one that was built 100 years ago. The ground floor contains a formal entrance hall, library, music room, dining room, chef’s kitchen, formal dining room, and a large conservatory. Upstairs are 13 bedrooms. The house has a total of 10.5 bathrooms.

Berg, who has a private investment partnership, works out of the wood-paneled library. He and his wife have hosted Thanksgiving dinners with 25 people (“It was nice, because everyone could stay in all the bedrooms,” he says), and they’d regularly host fundraisers and concerts for the Lenox library and Tanglewood, the music festival that’s about a four-minute drive away.

The star concert pianist Emanuel Ax has played in the house, as has Yo Yo Ma and a quartet from the Philadelphia Orchestra. There have  been readings and talks with authors, including Simon Winchester, and such other events as an olive oil tasting and “an evening of French art songs and arias,” Berg says. 

They’ve also offered the property as a venue, renting it out for weddings and events.

Only in the last few years, Berg says, has he considered the property’s renovation truly complete. “We love projects,” he says, “and in a sense, this is no longer a project.”

He imagines the property could appeal to a family “interested in outdoor sports, or someone interested in classical music and culture.” The area, he says, “is for people who want to live healthy and who want to live in a stimulating community.” 

For his part, he says that he and his wife “plan to live nearby. We’ll likely embark on another restoration or adventure.”

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