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The Inn at Pound Ridge by Jean-Georges: First Look | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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The first answer is yes. You should go to the Inn at Pound Ridge by Jean-Georges. That is, if you can get in. A reservation at the restaurant, owned by celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, is the hottest ticket in Westchester since Blue Hill at Stone Barns opened in 2004.

lj012214inn24 The downstairs dining room, which was not open the evening I went, but all lit with beautiful candles anyway.

The second answer: very good. The food is beautifully presented, and the flavors shine with signature Jean-Georges magic: a little heat, a little sweet, a little acidity, a little umami. The chef is Blake Farrar, who formerly cooked in Jean-Georges’ restaurant The Mark in Manhattan.

lj012214inn25 Booths downstairs.

The third answer: gorgeous. The renovations of the building, a former inn and restaurant dating from 1833, will leave you slack-jawed. A big white-brick fireplace is the centerpiece of the dining room. The decor is mid-century-modern (elegant wood tables and chairs), vintage (mismatched silver and linens) and farmhouse chic (reclaimed barn wood, exposed beams), all rolled into one.

lj012214inn26 A fireplace downstairs.

The fourth answer: it won’t break the bank — unless you want it to. Entrees range from $25 to $38. If you’re there for a celebration, you can spend $300 on a bottle of wine. If you’re there on a Tuesday, you can get an appetizer and a pizza and be out of there for under $50.

lj012214inn31 The busy dining room upstairs.

Food writer Megan McCaffrey and I had a reservation for opening night, but because of the snowstorm, we decided to change it to Wednesday. It meant we missed Martha Stewart and Richard Gere, but lucked in to a sighting of Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.

It also means the restaurant had one more day to work out kinks. Besides a little technical difficulty with the check at the bar and the extra salt on our fries, we didn’t notice many.

Because we changed our reservation at the last minute, we could only get in at 5 p.m. (I think I was the first customer at the restaurant!) We ordered drinks at the bar while the staff scurried around, getting the dining room ready for the evening.

lj012214inn01 My Manhattan.

The bar is small — about 10 seats — and there are 10 or so tables in the lounge alongside it.

lj012214inn02 Tables in the lounge.

The lounge and dining room are separated by a banquette (for both). The dining room has a soaring ceiling, but feels cozy nonetheless.

lj012214inn10

This is not a review, just our first impressions of a restaurant on its second night open to the public. But here’s a look at the food. It was all terrific, though a couple of dishes were heavy handed on the salt.

Our first dish was the Peekytoe Crab Crostini with Garlic Aioli ($14). It came on a rye toast, considerately cut into four pieces, which made it easy to share. Sweet and buttery, and just as good as when I had it at ABC Kitchen.

 

 

http://food.lohudblogs.com/2014/01/27/inn-pound-ridge-jean-georges-first-look/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Thirty Somethings Flip-Flopped on Homeownership | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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An analysis by Chris Porter, a senior manager at the John Burns Real Estate Consulting practice, has some frightening findings for the housing industry.  Americans aged 30 to 34 years old in 2012 had the lowest homeownership rate of any similarly aged group before them… yet just five years earlier, in 2007, the same people had the highest homeownership rate at 25-29 years old than any group before them.

Porter calls it an amazing reversal of fortune and possibly the most amazing, underreported demographic fact today.

Using homeownership-by-age data from the Census Bureau, Porter compared households by years of birth to examine how homeownership changes over consumers’ lifetimes.

•            Lowest ever in 2012: 30-34 year-olds in 2012 (born between 1978 and 1982) had a 47.9% homeownership rate. This is a full 6.5 percentage points lower than those five years older had achieved at the same age and lower than any group before them! (This is based on data available beginning with those born in 1948.)  Porter calls them the “Subprime Generation.”

•            Highest ever 5 years prior: Those same 30-34 year-olds had a 40.5% homeownership rate 5 years prior when they were 25-29 years old in 2007. This is 6.2 percentage points higher than 25-29 year-olds in 2012 and higher than any 5-year cohort before them.

‘Our consulting team has been pointing out a real dearth of entry-level buyers over the last several years, which is counterintuitive when you consider that this has been the most affordable time in generations to buy a home. What we learned is that a huge percentage of households bought a home earlier than usual, and that same group has gone through more foreclosures than any generation before them,” Porter wrote in his blog.

What does this mean? It is more difficult than usual to sell entry-level homes today, but the pent-up demand for entry-level housing is huge, he said.

 

 

http://www.realestateeconomywatch.com/2014/01/thirty-somethings-flip-flopped-on-homeownership/

At $130M, Nation’s ‘Priciest’ Manse is No Longer the Priciest | Pound Ridge NY Homes

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Copper Beech Farm, the 50-acre Greenwich estate that roared onto the market last May with a record-setting $190M price tag, has been mercilessly slashed, first down to $140M and now again down to $130M. At 68 percent of its original ask, the property is no longer home to the priciest mega-mansion in the country, having ceded the throne to Dallas’ Crespi-Hicks estate, which is still holding strong at $135M. (Jackson Land and Cattle, a 1,750-acre estate in Jackson Hole, Wyo., has been asking $175M for a while, but there several homes on that ranch and most people would consider it a working farm with investment potential instead of, say, a single-family home.)

But, please, back to the blockbuster home at hand. Owned by timber mogul John Rudey, the property is stocked with a 12-bedroom mansion, a whopping 4,000—yes, four thousand—feet of water frontage, and not one, but two offshore islands. Rudey originally told the Journal that he was selling the spread, which he bought 31 years ago, because his kids had grown, but that may have been only half of the truth. According to a followup piece in the Times, Rudey’s timber holdings have been decimated by transportation issues, endangered species conservation, water limitations, and the spruce budworm, a tree-burrowing insect. These setbacks might not have impacted the Copper Beech Farm property at all had Rudey not used the sprawling waterfront estate as collateral on a series of huge loans. At one time, according to the Times, the debt attached to the property totaled a whopping $203M. (After the 2006 collapse of one of Rudey’s timber holding companies, the banks came calling. In 2011, Bank of America began foreclosure proceedings on a portion of Copper Beech Farm. The bank later backed off, but Rudey may have been forced to sell off much of his remaining timber holdings, and his $16.5M Fifth Avenue apartment, to keep creditors at bay.)

 

 

http://curbed.com/archives/2014/01/22/at-130m-nations-priciest-manse-is-no-longer-the-priciest.php

Perfectly Staged Florida Bayfront Mansion Asks $16.9M | Pound Ridge NY Homes

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Location: Osprey, Fla. Price: $16,900,000 The Skinny: Consider, for a moment, the staged perfection of listing photos: coming home to a house that’s been meticulously polished to its Platonic ideal as this one has must be like arriving at your front door only to find that your grandmother’s front sitting room, with its strictly off–limits knick-knacks and vacuum-sealed sofas, is now every room in your house. Do you dare muss the taut bedclothes, or move the towel that’s so artfully draped over the edge of your tub (as if someone just happened to casually lay it down in the most picturesque way possible)? Is it permissible to flop down in your favorite easy chair, or will your weight irreparably deform its perfectly fluffed, better-than-new, cushions? And as for making a crumbly peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the sterile operating theater standing in for the kitchen—well, no. All chin-stroking aside, this four-bedroom, eight-bathroom bayfront home, which the listing thoughtfully assures us is “architect-designed”, is asking $16.9M.

 

 

http://curbed.com/archives/2014/01/15/perfectly-staged-florida-bayfront-mansion-asks-169m.php

5 Twitter Marketing Tactics | Pound Ridge NY Realtor

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5 Twitter Marketing Tactics for Building a Fanatical Following

If there’s one group that’s well-versed in developing large and loyal  audiences on Twitter, it’s bloggers. They do, after all, have a content strategy  built into their title — ahem blogging — which means that even when  they’re promoting their personal brand, it’s more likely to be with content that  their followers find helpful or otherwise more interesting than, say, a random  company selling bar soap.

Bloggers who want to be successful have a kind of urgency to directly engage  with, build and look after their following, as there’s really no better way to  attract visitors to their sites. (Can you imagine a blogger running a TV  campaign ad, particularly before they’ve had any measure of success? Yeah,  no).

But of course, not all bloggers have thousands of followers, so, what  separates the superstars from those that hover indefinitely in the middle of the  pack?

Let’s take a look at a few bloggers and their Twitter marketing tactics who  really knock it out of the park to see if we can’t glean a lesson or two.

1. Get targeted

Twitter is a pretty reciprocal place, so you could hop onto the  platform every night and just randomly add people, and in the morning you’d have  a fair amount of people following in return. But having a mass of followers doesn’t mean much if they’re not  engaged, and if one new follower is all about muscle cars while the next is  all about creative applications for doilies, you’re going to have quite the time  appealing to all of them. And if they’re not engaged, they’re certainly not  going to share your work and help you grow your following.

One great example of someone who does this kind of singular focus right is  Heidi Swanson of 101  Cookbooks. Originally started as a way to share her many recipes with her  friends, Swanson’s site features a wealth of healthy recipes and is also home to  her cookbooks, which have a “supernatural” focus.

Clearly, Swanson is targeting not just cooks but also those with a crunchier  bent. You can see this hyper-focus on her Twitter feed:

5 Twitter Marketing Tactics for Building a Fanatical Following

While Swanson does do some retweeting of causes close to her heart and  recipes from likeminded sites, the majority of her tweets are links to her  content, prefaced with a listing of ingredients. This fits well with the  mentality of Swanson’s site, which allows users to search for recipes based on  ingredients, and it does what it needs to do simply before getting out of the  way. This is just what her avid audience, on the hunt for seasonal recipes, is  looking for.

What This Means for You As a rule of thumb, keep in mind that it’s  better to be hyper targeted than too broad; you can always expand from your base  once you get going. While you may not need to get as targeted as this, having some kind of theme is crucial — all the better if you can turn that into  a hook, a la @shitmydadsays. In fact, sometimes just getting a great Twitter  handle can frame all of your activities. Once you have that, get as creative as  possible within those confines.

Who can you follow that clearly shares your interests? What kind of content  can you retweet? How can you mix up the content? Give your followers not just  information but actionable insights, and you’re sure to grow.

2. Help each other

Call it guest posting, call it co-branding, call it coasting on each other’s  tail winds — whatever. There are few strategies quite as effective for growing  your following than teaming up with or regularly giving press to another blogger  or business. Teaming up with someone else not only gives you great material for  your Twitter feed (and who couldn’t use a little bit more meat to feed the  social-content beast?) but it also exposes your work to a much wider audience.  And while not everyone in that audience will be primed to follow you, if you’ve  done a good job of picking a partner whose interests parallel your own, you  should gain a sizable chunk.

Blogger DIY Victoria E. Barnes, who focuses on renovations of her Victorian  home, does this in a number of ways. Sometimes, it’s as simple as retweeting a  fellow blogger’s contest:

5 Twitter Marketing Tactics for Building a Fanatical Following

Sometimes it means riffing on popular culture, a la this Mad Men Spoof:

5 Twitter Marketing Tactics for Building a Fanatical Following 3

Whether it’s directly teaming up with someone or just a playful tease, being  in on it with someone else is a great way to gain exposure

Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/01/16/5-twitter-marketing-tactics-for-building-a-fanatical-following/#C6SjYvwkFbaEvxKh.99

Porch partners with Lowe’s just 3 months after official launch | Pound Ridge NY Homes

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Porch, a 3-month-old startup that’s taking the home remodeling industry by storm, has announced a strategic partnership with Lowe’s that will equip the employees at some of the home improvement store’s locations with tools that will allow them to use the Porch network to connect customers with local professionals.

As part of the partnership, Lowe’s employees in 139 stores in North and South Carolina and the Seattle area will quickly be able to use in-store kiosks or a special mobile app to pull up local professionals on Porch who provide services that Lowe’s doesn’t offer through its installation program, and then refer those professionals to customers, Porch said in a statement. Professionals who offer such services include handymen, painters and landscapers, according to the statement.

“By partnering with Porch, Lowe’s can help our customers achieve their home improvement dreams by providing them with the confidence of knowing who their neighbors have used successfully, and benefit our professional customers by providing them greater opportunities to grow their businesses,” said Jay Rebello, vice president of new business development and corporate innovation at Lowe’s.

Porch, which is one of Real Estate Connect’s “New Kids on the Block” and raised $6.5 million in seed funding in October 2012, claims to provide data on 90 million home projects and 1.5 million professionals. The startup has obtained that data mostly through an array of private partnerships that it cultivated for a year before officially launching three months ago, according to CEO Matt Ehrlichman.

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/2014/01/14/porch-partners-with-lowes-just-3-months-after-official-launch/?utm_source=20140114&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlinesam#sthash.HBQV39yy.dpuf