Mary Tyler Moore’s Connecticut home hits the market for $21.9 million

Mary Tyler Moore’s Connecticut home will be on the market for $21.9 million.

Levine said that the late actress and her husband, Dr. S. Robert Levin bought the roughly 7-acre Greenwich estate for about $10 million in 2006. Moore, best known for her role as a career woman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, died in 2017 at the age of 80.

Levin said the decision to sell the house was “very difficult,” but necessary for him to move on after his wife’s death.

“It’s Mary’s house,” said Levin, the retired cardiologist. “If I was going to get into the ‘what’s next?’ project, I decided I had to move away from home.”

The Georgian-style house, believed to have been built in the late 1800s, includes a spa, a double-height solarium and a billiards room, Levin said.

When the couple bought the house, they maintained a house on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan as well as a 150-acre horse farm in Millbrook, New York, and were looking to keep things simple, Levin said. Greenwich offers the best of both worlds, he said.

“It was very private and protected but very close to Greenwich Street,” Levine said. “We couldn’t completely escape Manhattan. (Mary) needed to fix it, to be able to view the windows.

The couple embarked on a nearly three-year project to reimagine the stone house, demolishing almost everything except the front facade. “It looked like a movie set,” Levine said.

They reused much of the original stone in building their new home and found matching stone from local quarries for the addition. They used elements of the architecture of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate in Virginia, adding windows and rounded bars. In all, they expanded the property from about 7,500 square feet to about 14,000 square feet. Overall, the cost of the project is close to the current asking price for the property, Levin said.

“This was not built for a return on investment,” he said. “It was built for Mary, to fit her image of the perfect place.”

In the entryway, which features a dramatic curved staircase and clown-patterned floors, they installed a wall of windows overlooking the garden. They also added a skylight above the stairs to bring in more light.

The house has a gym with a ballet bar and floor-to-ceiling mirrors for Moore, who was a trained dancer. The spa area includes a massage room, jacuzzi and sauna. The property also has a large outdoor pool.

Among the five-bedroom property’s most unusual features is the solarium. Some of its windows are pieces of stained glass art salvaged from ancient churches and temples, Levine said. He added that his wife, who suffered from diabetes and had been in poor health for some time before her death, loved sitting there in her final years.

“It was Mary’s quiet room, the place where she spent a large part of her life when she could no longer move easily on her own,” he said. “This was her special place.”

The billiard room was inspired by a room Moore’s grandfather had in his home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley when she was growing up. Levin said there are some books on the shelves that her father read to her when she was a child.

The master suite is located in its own wing and has double dressing rooms. Moore specifically requested a closet with 100 feet of linear hanging space for her clothes, her husband said.

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The house was designed to showcase Moore’s collections of antiques, folk and American art, her husband said. “This was a place to live, but also a place to display all her beautiful things so she could be surrounded by all the things she loved,” he said.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to support the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative, a foundation that seeks to preserve and restore sight in people with diabetes, Levine said.

Moore first made her name in the 1960s when she played Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” She was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People.”

Listing agent Joseph Barbieri of Sotheby’s International Realty said he sees continued demand for trophy homes in Greenwich, and noted that buyers are facing a significant decline in inventory. Last month, Copper Beach Ranch, a 50-acre estate in Greenwich, sold for $138.83 million, setting a record for the most expensive home ever sold in the state.