Issues → May/June 2007 → Home & Garden →
House For Sale: Winchester, Massachusetts
A rare country property in the heart of suburbia.
by The Moseyer
If you were planning to move to a town in the immediate Boston area, Winchester would have to be one of the top choices on your list. It's a town known for its great schools, quality community life, and fine (and, sure, expensive) homes, and of course, it's an easy 15- to 20-minute commute to downtown.
On the other hand, if your happiness depends on being in the country with no other houses in sight, where you can have a goat and a few chickens and be surrounded by old trees and stone walls, well, guess you'd better cross Winchester off your list. But wait! Not so fast!
Believe it or not, we've moseyed onto a chunk of historical, true country property right in the heart of suburban Winchester. The house is a three-story, nine-room Georgian-style farmhouse built in 1711, set back 120 feet off Ridge Street atop a hill and surrounded by so many magnificent old trees -- including an 80-foot catalpa and ancient 15-foot-high rhododendrons -- that there's complete privacy. No other houses in sight. Also on the property is an office/garage/workshop, once a barn, with a 30-foot tower from which you can see over the trees to Boston; a tree house that would be any child's dream; and the cutest little house that's home to a batch of chickens.
One rainy morning, we paid a visit to owners David Pill, an architect originally from Newton; his wife, Hillary Maharam, a landscape designer from New York; their two young children, Jake and Liza; and their Alaskan husky, Maizie, who was limping around on a bandaged foot, hurt earlier that day on something she stepped on while romping around in the nature preserve that separates the property from Vinson Owen Elementary School. When they bought the property in 1994, they became only the second family to own it in almost 300 years.
The day before our visit, we'd read a long history of the property David had sent to us and noted that the occupations of the various descendants of the original family included surveyors, house wrights, a tanner, a wheelwright, teamsters, a butcher, a cordwainer (maker of leather goods, mostly shoes), church deacons, town clerks, and an Army commander who fought Indians in nearby Billerica. Of course, all of them were farmers, too.
The history also mentions that the property consisted of 103 acres in 1743, 68 acres in 1886, and 64 acres in 1922. It's now just 1.26 acres. The original Johnson/Thompson family sold off most of the land in 1966 when a few Winchester suburban types (who, no doubt, were brought up in a city) made it plain they didn't enjoy the sounds of farm animals nor the smell of manure spread over the fields every spring. But at least the remaining land cannot be divided any further. The Johnson/Thompson family had that stipulation put into the deed.
As we settled ourselves with cups of tea around the dining room table, we asked what had brought the family to Winchester 13 years ago. "This property brought us [here]," Hillary replied, adding that they'd been living in Brookline (a town surrounded by the city of Boston) at the time but were looking for "more of a country place." When David answered a small ad in a local newspaper that said, "Old historic house, country setting, apple trees, old farm" and then discovered it was in Winchester, they could hardly believe it.
"The house itself needed a lot of work," said Hillary, "but fixing up a place was what we wanted to do." They replaced ceilings and windows, installed new wiring and plumbing, redid floors, installed a new boiler, put on a new roof, relined the four Count Rumford fireplaces with stainless steel, and then, besides all that sort of thing, David designed and built bookshelves, window benches, and such. They left the basic layout of the house intact, with the exception of opening up one wall from the living room into the dining room.
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