The Crocker Mansion, the historic 55,000-square-foot Mahwah mansion recently and lavishly updated into the 21st century, has hit the market for $48 million, making it the most expensive listing in New Jersey.
The 12.5-acre Jacobean-style estate in the Ramapo Mountains, also known as Darlington, vaults to the top of the list of most expensive homes for sale in New Jersey, because the Stone Mansion, the 30,000-square-foot Alpine mansion initially listed for $68 million and more recently for $48.8 million, is not officially on the open market at the moment. Coming in second is a custom-built 30,000-square-foot Harding Township home on the market for $39 million.
The home, once the center of a 1,100-acre estate, was built between 1902 and 1907 for George Crocker, the son of railroad baron and Wells Fargo founder Charles Crocker, and modeled after Bramshill, an English Jacobean estate built in the early 1600s.
Many of the day's finest craftsmen worked on the home, with its elaborately carved woodwork and ornamental plaster ceilings, most notably in its two-story Great Hall styled after another famed British estate. The library has gold-leafed walls and a hand-painted ceiling in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and the redwood grand staircase has carved newels and piers supporting solid redwood statuettes.
Darlington was also outfitted with the latest modern conveniences -- elevators, a switchboard, ice cream freezers, integrated vacuum sweepers, and in a glowing 1912 feature on the home in the Architectural Record, the writer practically swoons over the basement: "Where Bramshill's cellar housed for centuries lanterns, tallow dips, forest faggots, wooden vessels for the distribution of light, heat and water through personal service of human slaveys, its American reincarnation is a storehouse of miracle workers in the comfort and luxury of modern domestic life."
Crocker died soon after the mansion was completed, and eventually it was acquired by the Archdiocese of Newark, which turned the mansion into the Immaculate Conception Seminary. According to a history on the Seton Hall University website, the 30-foot-high Great Hall, with its Tiffany silver chandeliers, became the chapel, with the altar set in the alcove before the giant marble fireplace. The seminary at Darlington closed in 1984.
In 2008, Bergen County businessman Ilija Pavlovic picked up the property for $8.875 million. Pavlovic, who is the president and CEO of Christie's affiliate, Special Properties Real Estate Services, spent five years on the massive renovation, which included replacing all the mechanical systems, installing 476 new energy-saving windows and a new slate roof, building 19 new bathrooms and seven new powder rooms, and laying the equivalent of 200 slabs of onyx, marble and granite.
The separate his and her master bedrooms feature the spectacularly carved woodwork and grand fireplaces found throughout the home. A new section of the building includes a state-of-the-art wine room with wine cellar, a poker room, a billiards room, a theater and a cigar room. There is a professional kitchen that can serve 250 meals at a time, and a spa with a lap pool, steam room, dry sauna, gym, massage room and beauty salon. Oh, and one of the world's few remaining Aeolian player pipe organs, completely restored and functional.
The grounds include a new professional tennis court and swimming pool, each with its own cabana, an eight-car garage, and a gatehouse that houses the estate's security system.
Property taxes are $232,605 a year, according to state records.
Vicki Hyman may be reached at vhyman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickihy or like her on Facebook.