A lakeside home for sale on a small central Maine pond used to be a nuns’ retreat and still has the chapel to show for it.
The 5-bedroom, 3-bathroom estate on Litchfield’s Buker Pond was built in 1900. It is on the market for $1.4 million. While it’s been a private residence for the last few decades, both it and an abutting property were once a nuns’ retreat, said the property’s listing agent Dan McCarron.
That neighboring property has since been broken up, but the home for sale in question still has vestiges of its former monastic life: some stained glass, and a small chapel with eight pews.
“It’s probably been at least 20 years or so since it’s been a place of worship, but nothing’s really been touched in that part of the house,” said McCarron, the managing broker of Portside Lakepoint.
The property owners live in Maryland and use this home seasonally, so they haven’t made many updates to the space — and its chapel — in the 10 years they have had it. While prospective buyers have floated the idea of utilizing the chapel space as a business like a yoga retreat, most are interested in it as a private residence and didn’t have plans for it, McCarron said.
It’s an attractive property with over 4,000 square feet of living space and plenty of natural wood. It also has a sunroom overlooking the water and a three-car garage.
Given those features, its 2.5 acre lot, 650 feet of waterfrontage, private dock and boathouse, the property would easily fetch over $2 million if it were on a busier nearby body of water like Great Pond in Belgrade or Cobbosseecontee Lake in Manchester, McCarron said. Buker Pond is small at just 75 acres.
“That is extremely hard to come by. Most of your lakefront houses have 50 to 100 feet,” McCarron said of its water frontage.
Another quality that makes the property special — and something increasingly attractive to buyers as Maine’s lakes grow more and more developed — is peace and quiet. Buker Pond is one of the five bodies of water in the Tacoma chain of lakes. These lakes have plenty of classic camps around them but aren’t too well known amongst “big money buyers” and offer great opportunities for fishing and boating, McCarron said.
The property has been on the market for a year but was re-listed a few days ago, he said. It’s sat for longer despite its desirable location and quirky history because it hasn’t been updated since it was built and needs some aesthetic upgrades.
“It’s move-in ready, but because of its age, it definitely needs work,” McCarron said. “All the systems work. It’s a little bit dated, but still completely usable.”
The prospective buyers for this one have been a mixed bag of locals and those looking from out of state. McCarron’s company mostly sells lakefront real estate in central Maine, and he says about 40 percent of his business comes from out-of-state buyers mostly drawn from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut.
Despite its longer days on market, McCarron feels good about the property selling soon. He had a bustling open house over the weekend, and inventory is up overall in Maine right now. This is the time of year — around Memorial Day weekend — that lakefront home sales really kick off in Maine.
“Things around the office have been very busy,” he said. “Everybody’s just starting to open their camps, and vacationers start showing up in a few weeks. So I’m feeling optimistic.”
