Help me price two houses. Both are midcentury modern. One is by Allan Gelbin. The other is by Philip Johnson. Pricing is the eternal hell of a real estate agent. Eventually, we have to recommend a number. A seller expects that number to be based on something more substantial than instinct. Yet the more unusual the house, the less useful the usual evidence becomes.
What do you do when the comparable sales stop being comparable?
The industry has crude tools. Market reports are good at describing markets and surprisingly bad at describing houses. Median price. Average price. Price per square foot. The Zestimate. Tax assessments. Now AI. The answers look more precise as
the data piles up but rarely are.
An individual house contains things that resist the spreadsheet: site, light, condition, architecture, provenance, emotional response. Averages work best on average things. These are not average things. There is no box on the CMA for Philip Johnson,
Landis Gores or Allan Gelbin. Maybe the rules change when the famous architect is attached to a development instead of a single house. In Greenwich, Chilston Court is
78 residences famously designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, with interiors by Bryan O’Sullivan Studio (the hot designer behind Claridges). Two-bedroom units start around $4.25 million. Several listings are above $2,000 per square foot; one three-bedroom asking $8.45 million works out to more than $3,100 per foot. The penthouses start around $11.5 million. Greenwich’s previous condo record was $6.7 million.
And the name does not travel alone. Chilston Court has a 24- hour concierge, 55-foot indoor pool, wellness and fitness spaces, resident lounges, dining rooms, a wine cave and even a speakeasy. About 40 percent of the units are already under contract, according to the developer.
The Quartier in New Canaan makes the comparison harder. It has 21 residences, priced from about $2 million to just over $6 million, roughly $1,500 to $1,900 per square foot. I first thought of it as the less-amenitized alternative. It has full-time concierge service, indoor parking, a fitness studio, sports simulator, entertainment lounge with catering kitchen, private elevators for some residences, courtyards andterraces, EV charging and even a pet-grooming station.
What it does not have is Robert A.M. Stern’s name over the door.
So now I have another pricing problem. The gap runs from roughly $1,700 a foot at The Quartier to more than $3,000 at Chilston Court.cHow much of that is Greenwich?
Amenities? Stern? O’Sullivan? Wechave no idea.
Which is exactly the problem. Miami and Dubai have taken this much further.
Branded residences began largely as extensions of hotel brands: Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, and St. Regis. Hotels still account for more than 80% of existing branded residences, but the category is exploding. Knight Frank counted 169 developments
worldwide in 2011, 611 in 2025, and expects more than 1,000 by 2030.
Increasingly, the brand has nothing to do with hotels. Miami has Porsche, Bentley and Aston Martin towers. Porsche got there early: 132 residences, with an elevator that carries owners and their cars to private “sky garages.” Bentley followed with 216 residences in a 61-story tower. Its Dezervator delivers car and owner directly to the
apartment, where some residences have garages for as many as four cars. One floor plan devotes 1,552 square feet to the garage alone. The proposition is almost comically literal: If you like the car enough, perhaps you would like to live inside the brand.
Dubai makes Miami look restrained. If Miami belongs to the car brands, Dubai has embraced the fashion houses and luxury names: Armani on Palm Jumeirah, Bulgari’s
Lighthouse, Cavalli, Jacob & Co. and Bugatti. Knight Frank reported one Bulgari residence at roughly $3,760 per square foot. Savills counts nearly 140 completed and planned branded- residence projects in Dubai alone.
New York is already in the game. Manhattan ranks among the world’s biggest branded-residence markets, still dominated by hotel names likeAman, Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and Baccarat, while fashion is moving in. Giorgio Armani’s 760 Madison
Avenue has already closed units above $4,600 per square foot, with one penthouse topping $7,000 per square foot.
In Miami, developers borrow names like Porsche and Bentley. In Manhattan, as one industry observer put it, “the city itself is the brand.”
The great luxury houses had already proved how far a name can travel. Hermès began in 1837 making harnesses and saddles. Louis Vuitton opened his first store in 1854 making trunks. Chanel began with hats in 1910. Today, Kantar values Louis Vuitton at about $112 billion, Hermès at $109 billion and Chanel at $62 billion.
Those names escaped their original products long ago. Hermès moved into handbags, silk, watches, and jewelry; Vuitton into fashion, jewelry and perfume; and Chanel into couture, fragrance, cosmetics, watches and jewelry. Armani, Bulgari,
and Cavalli have taken the same accumulated meaning into real estate. Who buys these places may explain some of it. International buyers account for 52 percent of South Florida new-construction sales, representing 73 countries; 86 percent come from Latin America. A buyer in Bogotá, Mexico City or São Paulo may know little about the local developer.
Bentley needs no introduction.
Connecticut is different. Most Chilston Court buyers so far come from Greenwich and nearby communities including Purchase, Rye and Scarsdale. Many are in their 60s,
buying ahead of a future move from a larger house. They already know the market they are buying into.
Which brings me back to my two houses.
Richard Neutra is an international name, one of the architects who defined American modernism. Allan Gelbin is a more local discovery. Neutra is a name a buyer may search for; Gelbin is a name I may have to explain. But a famous name creates another problem. What happens when the lesser-known architect
produced the better house?
Art collectors understand this instinctively. A minor work by a
famous artist does not necessarily outrank a masterpiece by a lesser-
known one. They ask when it was made, where it fits in the artist’s career, how rare it is, and whether it represents the best of the work.
There is another wrinkle. These houses are one-of-a-kind works. A branded condominium borrows meaning from Porsche or Armani; a Neutra was actually designed by Neutra. Car collectors know the distinction. A rare vintage Porsche
can be worth far more than a new one because originality, scarcity, provenance and history have become part of the value.
A house adds another test: how well does it live?
Light, proportion, and siting matter. So do the kitchen, the stairs, the closets, the relationship to the outdoors, and whether a family seventy years later can make the place work.
The same question eventually catches up with the branded towers. Bentley can get your attention. Armani can establish an expectation. Then
you have to live in the apartment. So now I have three things to price that do not appear on the spreadsheet: the name, the importance of this particular house, and how well it lives.
Eventually the research ends.
I stand in the house.
And I recommend a price.
John Engel is a broker on the Engel Team at Douglas Elliman in New Canaan, and he loves old cars that can be slower, less comfortable and considerably more valuable than their modern replacements. He has long wondered why we readily understand originality, rarity and provenance in cars and art, then reach for price per square foot when the object happens to be a house.
Check out John Engel’s Podcast, Boroughs and Burbs, the National Real Estate Conversation here.
Read this article on the New Canaan Sentinel website here.
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