When you park your car in Fontana to the north of the beach but not as far north as Gordy’s or Chuck’s, you can walk to the shore path but not directly. First, you must walk south, along South Lakeshore Drive, with the Fontana beach to your left and the Abbey Harbor to your right, and while this is technically the route of the shore path this obviously isn’t the shore path. When you walk towards the lake after the beach that Country Club Estates thinks is their private beach (it isn’t), you’ll enter what feels like the shore path at the stone fence that runs the boundary between Glenwood Springs and that quasi-Country Club Estates beach. Walk up the hill and over the 1800′ of common Glenwood Springs frontage and through Indian Hills. Then, walk through Club Unique and past a few beautiful lakefront estates that line the small bay between Indian Hills and Rainbow Point, and then keep walking. You’re almost there.
You’ll know you’re there when you see the screened building at the lakefront and a line of white Adirondack chairs facing north. If you feel adventurous you can press your face against the screened house to see the ping pong table inside, but don’t linger too long or someone will likely ask you what on earth it is that you’re doing. This is the Harvard Club, and if you don’t belong here you’re probably going to be told so. Unlike other rare properties on Geneva, the difference here at this club is that membership isn’t abhorrently expensive. It isn’t limited to those who have some ancient connection to the place, to some old owner, or to some metes and bounds land description. The Harvard Club isn’t just one of the most unique lakefront communities on Geneva Lake, it has rapidly become the most approachable and nearly the most economical.
On Friday, I closed on a Harvard Club cottage. This shouldn’t be a surprise. I closed on one during 2010, and then another during 2011, and this one now filled my 2012 void. This cottage closed for $430k, mirroring the one that closed last fall for $365k and the one that closed the year before that last one for $475k. If you’re keeping score at home, you’d be led to believe that the Harvard Club is somehow range bound, that homes here will sell between $365k on the low end and $475k on the high end, and if you were to come to this reasonable assumption you’d be entirely wrong. These are the recent sales but this is in no way indicative of the top end value in this prized little enclave. In fact, value here to the low end has been defined by these three sales, but to the high end that bright blue sky is indeed the limit.
Even though this is my third sale here in three years, you shouldn’t think that these sales are in anyway easy. The Harvard Club has limitations, mostly seasonal water and a ban on dogs during the summer months, and while these can be written in a way that they seem minor they are anything but. If I can find a buyer who doesn’t have a dog, she’ll want to come up in January to stoke a fire and watch the snow fly. If I find someone who hates snow and doesn’t mind the winter absence, they’ll have two dogs named Missy and Mister and they won’t have any interest in the Harvard Club at all.
The nice thing for the Harvard Club is that these three sales represent the only three available properties over that tenure. In other words, there haven’t been five offerings over the past three years and just three of them have been sold. There have been three offerings and three sales, and that is, in fact, remarkable efficiency for a club with some limitation. But what of those limitations? What happens when those limitations are sidestepped and a new owner finds that those limitations fit in well with their vacation home dreams? Well, then what happens is the Harvard Club becomes the absolute best way for a buyer to get as close to the Geneva Lake as possible for the last amount of money, and for that, we should all be clapping enthusiastically.
To the sellers who let me work on this sale for the last year, I’m grateful for your trust. To the buyer, I offer my thanks and one very serious word of advice. Use this house. Use the absolute heck out of it. Use it so much that the house, if it were able to talk, would see you walking down the brick path on every Friday and say, “Really? Another Friday? Is there no rest for this old house!?” If you use the house, it’ll be a lasting reward and a lifestyle changing experience for perhaps generations. If you don’t use it, you’ll wonder why on earth someone ever thought buying an old house by a big lake was a good idea.