Musician Ray LaMontagne asks $5.25M for Berkshires estate
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A farmhouse estate on 100-plus rural acres, nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, has been listed for sale by singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne and his wife, poet Sarah Sousa.
The grand Federal-style farmhouse — all dark wood and beamed ceilings — dates from the early 1800s. “This house has such a loving energy, a kind energy,” LaMontagne wrote in an email to Mansion Global. “It felt like it had been magically lifted from the English countryside.”
It wasn’t magic that elevated the house, however. The family toiled for years to rescue a wreck — with a storied history — that had fallen into grave disrepair.
When LaMontagne and his wife saw the house, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, “it was a disaster,” said Gladys Montgomery of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, who’s listing the house with Herb Butzke. “They fell in love.”
In 2008, the couple bought the property — known as the Bullitt estate — for just over $1 million. It is now for sale asking $5.25 million.
The house includes six bedrooms plus two primary suites. LaMontagne told Mansion Global he used one of those suites “as a writing room with its lofted ceiling and towering soft arching fireplace.”
“So many songs were born in that room sitting at the desk looking out at the sunrise or moonrise past the barn over the field.”
The main house, which covers 11,000 square feet, includes 12 working fireplaces, all rebuilt with antique brick. In the great room, with its 26-foot-high ceiling, bookshelves are reached by a rolling library ladder.
Outbuildings add another 6,000 square feet. They include a three-story barn, a carriage house, a stone cottage, a three-bay garage and the most recent addition — a livestock barn with a non-freeze water spigot and a heated trough, built to house a flock of sheep.
The property sits in a forest, surrounded by 400 acres of protected land. The driveway alone extends 900 feet. It’s 3 miles from the center of Ashfield, a bucolic town with a population of not quite 2,000.
Everything inside has been modernized, and power lines are buried underground to preserve the “rural sensibility,” says the listing.
The Bullitt estate, once a working farm owned by the Pease family, has lived many lives. It was bought around 1920 by a wealthy Philadelphian, William C. Bullitt, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.
When he died in 1967 at age 76, he left it to his only child, Anne Moen Bullitt, who died in 2007 at age 83.
“Anne was an eccentric person,” said Christy Pennoyer, the daughter of Anne Bullitt’s lawyer, Robert Pennoyer, who passed away earlier this month at age 98.
“She had four husbands and no children, and ended up moving to Ireland where she raised and trained horses,” Pennoyer said. “She was kind of a recluse. She used to come to New York once a year to go to the doctor and dentist.”
One of Anne’s few friends was Charles Bartlett, a journalist known for introducing John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier.
“In the 1970s, Anne called Charlie Bartlett and said she needed a lawyer near Rockefeller Center,” Pennoyer told The Post. Bartlett referred her to Robert Pennoyer. “Anne immediately took to dad,” though they met only once or twice.
“In her will, Anne said: I have nobody I care about and no relatives,” Pennoyer said. She aimed to leave her fortune primarily to environmental causes — so Robert Pennoyer created the William C. Bullitt Foundation, which is now directed by Christy Pennoyer.
William Bullitt had two short-lived marriages. He and his first wife, a Philadelphia socialite named Ernesta Drinker, bought the place shortly after they wed. A farmer worked the fields.
“Ernesta was good at decorating,” said Norman Walker, Robert Pennoyer’s lifelong friend, who lives in Ashfield. “It was a farmhouse, and Ernesta replaced the windows. She went around to neighboring farmhouses and offered to buy them new windows if they gave her the old original ones. The original glass was different from modern glass.”
She even wrote a magazine piece about the house, featured in the March 1925 issue of House & Garden. And she arranged for a barn to be relocated and attached to the house.
Anne — known as a wasp-waisted beauty with a fabulous wardrobe — was the daughter of Bullitt and his second wife, Louise Bryant. (The 1981 movie “Reds,” with Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty, told the story of Bryant and her first husband, Communist sympathizer John Reed.) After a bitter divorce, William Bullitt gained custody of young Anne, who traveled the globe with him.
“Anne lived in the house as a child,” Walker told the Post. “The last time I saw her was around the beginning of World War II.”
By the time her father died, Anne had already moved to Ireland, and the house became increasingly dilapidated.
“Anne let a ne’er-do-well fellow with a wife and quite a few children live in the farmhouse,” Walker said. “He didn’t have a job and he shot deer for meat.” That fellow was supposed to care for the place, but Walker remembers stopping by, only to find the house a mess and a dead deer hanging in the living room.
“At one point some delivery person had brought up oil for the furnace and poured it down the water shaft so the water was polluted and we had to drill a new well just to have water,” he said.
By the time Anne Bullitt died, the roof sported a hole, and moss coated the upstairs floor. The dining room floor was rotted and spongy “like a trampoline,” Walker said.
Because Walker lived nearby — in a house handed down from his great-grandmother — “Bobby Pennoyer relied on me to do what had to be done to preserve the house,” he said. “I think we spent about a million dollars out of Anne’s estate on that.”
That work was for structural and foundational support. “The base of one chimney was canted a little bit like the Tower of Pisa,” Walker said. “It had to be straightened out.” The house still needed new plumbing, wiring, insulation and finishings.
Over several years, LaMontagne and Sousa meticulously restored and modernized the house, guided by historic photos. They even lifted the three-story barn — topped by a cupola and weathervane — to add a concrete foundation. Inside the barn, there is space for a car lift.
LaMontagne and his two sons liked to work on cars, Montgomery said. “They liked having projects. They take a great deal of care and great pains with their work, and that’s how they approached this property. There is not an inch of the property that they didn’t revamp or restore or do something new and wonderful to.”
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