Clapboard, stone walls and old orchard. A market that rewards patience and quietly punishes weekend enthusiasm.
Two hours from Manhattan is the figure everyone quotes, and it is broadly true on a Friday morning and wildly optimistic on a Friday evening. What the two hours buys you is a genuinely rural county that has not been suburbanised.
What the houses are
Predominantly clapboard, predominantly eighteenth and nineteenth century, and almost always altered. The good ones have been altered carefully by three or four generations. The difficult ones were altered once, in the nineteen seventies, by someone in a hurry.
The mistake weekend buyers make
They buy in October, when the county is at its most photogenic, and discover in February that the drive is longer, the house is colder and the village is closed. The buyers who stay are the ones who came back in March before they offered.
Land matters more here than square footage. A house with six acres and a stone wall holds its value in a way that a larger house on one acre does not.
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