It was the lake that drew Jeanne and William De Lorenzo to New Milford, in Litchfield County, in the 1970s. Then living on the Upper East Side, they heard about Candlewood from a woman they chatted with in a park. When they went there looking for a vacation cottage, New Milford in particular had what they were looking for.
“I needed western exposure,” Ms. De Lorenzo said. “I needed a sunset.”
They chose a rustic cottage within the private Candlewood Lake Club community. Their summers for some 30 years thereafter were filled with tennis, parties on their pontoon boat, gardening, communal dinners, and, of course, lots of sunsets.
“We didn’t have a television there for years,” she said. “It was Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit.”
Now in their 70s, the De Lorenzos have reluctantly put their four-bedroom cottage on the market; it is listed at $549,000. Although in good repair, the house has a simplicity anomalous among the area’s many expanded or rebuilt homes.
But if lake living is no longer the tranquil experience of the past, that hasn’t made it any less popular. More than a thousand homes line the shore, many of them year-round residences. Entry level for a house on the water is about $50,000 under the De Lorenzos’ asking price, but from there the numbers spiral into the millions, said Kevin Donovan, an agent with Advanced Waterfront.
People who want to build new typically buy a house they can knock down, he said. That way they can build within the same footprint, which may be closer to the water than current regulations would allow.
A very active lake in the summer, Candlewood is open to motorboats. Because of increasing traffic, however, a state regulation as of March banned boats 26 feet or longer. Only people who already have big boats on the lake may use them.
Growth has changed New Milford as a whole, too. Since 1970, the population has grown 86 percent, to 28,000. But quite apart from speeding up the pace of life, the new people have also enriched it, by filling the ball fields, expanding the arts and preservation communities, and reviving what is now a much-appreciated downtown.
“New Milford’s really become a lovely town,” said Jeremy Ruman, who works for a law firm downtown and heads a restoration effort for the Merwinsville Hotel, a 19th-century station edifice that thrived when the railroad still ran through town. “You go out downtown on a weekend night and there’s great food and you can go to the movies in our theater. It’s like when you live in a little neighborhood in New York and you go to the local places and you’re just happy. It’s super.”
What You’ll Find
The heart of New Milford is the quarter-mile-long rectangular green that divides Main Street in two. An ongoing renaissance along adjoining Bank Street has, as Ms. Ruman suggests, made the downtown area more of a destination in recent years.
One investor, Gary Goldring, has gradually acquired and restored buildings along the street, beginning in 2007 with what was then a struggling movie theater. Now a four-screen theater playing first-run films, the theater is a major draw, as evidenced by the surrounding array of restaurants and specialty shops. Mr. Goldring has recently expanded his efforts to two buildings facing Main.
Outside of the village, the commercial corridors of Routes 7 and 202 are reliably busy with traffic traveling to and from the usual collection of chain stores and fast-food outlets. During the warm months, Sunday morning traffic can be particularly heavy on Route 7 as shoppers flock to the field that hosts the popular Elephant’s Trunk flea market.
