$12M Westport estate used in music video with ‘living roof’ accepts crypto

“It’s got that rockstar vibe. It needs somebody that has that same sort of vibrancy, and it seems like an entertainer’s house,” she said, jokingly suggesting the music icon. 

With its ultra-modern feel and plethora of amenities, this “entertainer’s house” located in the Bluewater Hill Associate of Westport’s Compo Beach was nicknamed “Xanadu” by Perkins and colleague Susan Carson of Re/Max Heritage’s Spaces CT team, along with their copywriter Michael Kovacic and homeowner Deborah Bono. 

“We were going back and forth, and it was really late one night, and [Carson] sent it to me by a text,” she said. “It was just one word, and I was like, ‘Oh yes, that’s it.’ We looked it up, and literally, the definition is ‘an idyllic place,’ and I said, ‘Yes, that’s it. You hit the nail on the head.’”

Its name has its roots the opening lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” where the English poet describes a place called “Xanadu” that’s located “where Alph, the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.” In the context of Coleridge’s late-1700s poem, Xanadu — or Shangdu — refers to a site north of China’s Great Wall where Mongol ruler Kublai Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty, according to UNESCO.

While the “Xanadu” of “Kubla Khan” is cemented in history in some far-flung corner of the world, Westport’s “Xanadu” is currently on the market for $12 million. 

Built by Peter Cadoux Architects in 2017, the five-bedroom, eight-bathroom home has 7,777 square feet of living space and water views from three of its five levels, according to the listing. But of all the details part of the Bluewater Hill property, perhaps it is the final five words of its listing that are among the most notable: “may be purchased using cryptocurrency.”

For Perkins, the transaction will be the first one of its kind she has worked on, provided a buyer decides to purchase the home using digital currency. Accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment in the housing market has posed a slight learning curve, for her and her brokerage, Perkins said.

“Before we did anything, I went through my brokerage and said, ‘[The sellers] want to do it, I want to do it, can we do it?’” she said. “Our in-house attorney, Adam Hirsch, has been extremely enthusiastic and supportive and has reached out to all the title companies that he knows to see what they had experienced because title insurance is based on dollars. So we needed to make sure you could get a title policy on the house and yes, in fact you can…It’s just making sure that your attorney has done the necessary due diligence on your end.”

Perkins said the types of cryptocurrency she’s seen as the “gold standard” in real estate thus far are Bitcoin and Ethereum, which she noted “seem to be the most stable and widely referred to in terms of real estate transactions.”

While this is not the first house in Connecticut to have been listed in recent months as accepting cryptocurrency, the Bluewater Hill home has other distinguishable elements that make it stand out. With its lofty ceiling height, expansive windows and modern design, Xanadu was used as the backdrop for a music video for hip-hop artists Big Havi and Kyle You Made That. For Perkins, the home was seemingly built for this kind of spotlight.

“They were there [filming] for a couple of days, and we had a great time,” she said. “The house just kind of lends to that hip vibe that house has. It is not a cookie-cutter house. I say that the house is an experience — it’s a very experiential property.”

The “experience” offered by the Bluewater Hill property is one of a “modern, glass fortress,” according to Perkins. For starters, the home has a glass conservatory with retractable roofing to add to its modern glass look. It also has a stainless-steel floating staircase that is flanked by an “obscure glass wall,” according to the home’s website, which “provides privacy and diffused light while creating a natural color display as the sun moves across the glass throughout the day.”

But it’s what is in the center of the staircase that further adds to its modern feel. Hanging from the ceiling as a centerpiece of the stairwell is a replica of a Foucault Pendulum, a device developed in 1851 by physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth, according to the Smithsonian Institute. The original pendulum was the “first satisfactory demonstration of the earth’s rotation using laboratory apparatus rather than astronomical observations,” the Smithsonian notes, using a 52-foot-long cable and a symmetrical bob to do so. While replicas of this pendulum tend to be displayed in museums like Hartford’s Children’s Musuem or the Los Angeles Griffith Observatory, they aren’t typically part of private homes, according to Perkins. 

“You wouldn’t normally see it in a residence,” she said. “It is stunning. It’s sort of the central, artistic feature of this beautiful, open staircase with that floor-to-ceiling obscure glass wall with this pendulum.”

Other items not typically seen in a residence include Xanadu’s regulation squash court that doubles as a half basketball court, its free-form gym with 10-foot windows, its yoga room with a Iyengar rope wall and the indoor chemical-free pool and spa that’s housed by the glass conservatory. There’s also a rooftop deck with “stay cool tile pavers” and separate kitchen, according to the home’s website, as well as a “living roof” that has live plants on top of the roof, which can “reduce both heating and cooling costs, manage rainwater runoff and provide additional sound insulation.” Twenty-nine solar panels add to the home’s energy-efficient features. 

Although it has “five-star hotel”-style amenities, according to Perkins, she holds that the Bluewater Hill home is “a really comfortable house.”

“Sometimes, you go into very formal homes and you feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t relax here,’” she said. “But even though the house has 10,000 square feet, the actual living space in the house is a good, comfortable size.” 

Beyond its myriad interior spaces, the home’s acre lot offers private access to Compo Beach and features a pollinator garden, something Perkins said was important to the current homeowners, who serve on the board of the Aspetuck Land Trust. 

“In the backyard, they planted a native pollinator garden, which is part of the Greenbelt of the Aspectuck Land Trust,” she said. “It’s just blooming with wildflowers, echinacea, all the bee and butterfly-friendly things and all of the beneficial organisms…So in the winter, it just kind of looks like dried flowers. You leave it and let it do its thing, and mow it down at the beginning of spring, and it just rejuvenates itself.”

With a long list of amenities to its “Xanadu” name and its acceptance of cryptocurrency, Perkins said she can envision a few types of buyers for this home beyond rockstar Lenny Kravitz. It could be suited to those with wellness in mind, like spirituality and meditation coach Gabby Bernstein, according to Perkins, because of its yoga, swimming and exercise spaces.

But above all, the home is for a buyer who appreciates its intricacies, its personality and its location, Perkins said. 

“It was a labor of love,” she said of the home. “It was a passion project. You could never recreate it for the list price…It’s even a hard house to comp, because there just isn’t anything like it.”