Apartment Look

As beautiful as parts of Connecticut are, the state’s landscape will never be mistaken for the mountain ranges of northern New England. However, step onto the property at 2910 Mountain Rd. in Suffield and it’s easy to forget that. Built in 1981, the 6,178-square- foot house features a four-car garage, an in-law apartment, and a 28-by-40-foot barn with solar panels. The house has plenty of updated features, including new kitchen appliances, a new HVAC system, and new roofing. But it’s the nearly 30 acres of land in scenic West Suffield near the Massachusetts border that sets the property apart. Included in that acreage is a professionally landscaped yard with fruit trees, a perennial garden, an invisible fence, an outdoor patio and a gazebo. Situated on a hill overlooking Mountain Road , the front of the yard faces west and features scenic sunsets and views of distant hills. “It’s views of nature at its best,” says agent Sharon Dillon Rispoli of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices . M...

When our children were 11 and 9, young enough to still be entirely inside the family circle but old enough to remember, we splurged on a “once in a lifetime vacation ” and rented a small farmhouse in Southwestern France outside the village of Saint-Cyprien. Each day, our son and daughter would say goodbye to the donkey that hung around our patio and we’d climb in the tiny rented Renault and drive somewhere in the fairy- tale beautiful Dordogne River region . On one of these excursions, we stumbled on the provincial city of Sarlat. An accident of history and several centuries of stagnant economy had left Sarlat’s center virtually unchanged architecturally since the days of siege engines and knights galloping over drawbridges. City fathers had wakened one morning in the late 1950s to realize that, leaning above narrow and winding cobblestone streets and alleys, they had one of the largest collections of intact medieval architecture in Europe. The French government subsidized restor...