The distinction between a weekend getaway and a co-primary home is becoming increasingly significant in Litchfield County, Connecticut, as more buyers seek properties that can serve as a full-time residence while maintaining a city presence. According to Bill Melnick, a luxury real estate specialist at Elyse Harney Real Estate, the shift is evident from the first interaction with buyers. "When you start the search, buyers lay out their requirements and how they're going to use the house," he said. "You can tell pretty quickly who is buying a weekend place and who is buying a co-primary."
Co-primary buyers are not looking for a simplified version of their city life; they seek a parallel one. This means full kitchens, finished bathrooms, reliable internet, and typically two dedicated home office spaces. "Often you need two home offices if they're a couple," Melnick noted. "Both owners may be on Zoom calls, even if they're going to an office regularly." To meet this need, buyers are repurposing guest rooms as swing spaces with pullout sofas and desks, converting finished basements into office floors, and outfitting accessory structures like barns and guest cottages as separate workspaces. The appeal of a detached office—a building you walk to and leave at the end of the day—has proven strong among those who have worked from dining room tables for years. Properties that cannot accommodate two working adults without significant renovations are increasingly passed over, making the home office a qualifying criterion rather than a nice-to-have.
Town selection also changes for co-primary buyers. While a twenty-minute drive to a grocery store is a minor inconvenience for weekend buyers, it becomes a logistics problem for those spending half the week in the county. Consequently, co-primary buyers prioritize proximity to everyday services like food stores, pharmacies, and restaurants. Another key factor is proximity to the Wassaic Metro-North station, just across the border in New York State. The station, the last stop on the Harlem line, offers a roughly two-hour ride to Grand Central. For households where one partner commutes to the city two or three days a week, the driving distance to Wassaic significantly influences which towns make the list. "The closer to the train, the better," Melnick said. "Theoretically you can be dropped at the station for a six or six-thirty train and be at your desk by eight-thirty or nine." Towns within a comfortable drive of Wassaic carry a quiet premium for these buyers, though it may not always appear in comparable sales data.
Co-primary buyers are willing to spend more, and they do so deliberately. The property must function at the level of a primary residence, which raises the amenity threshold and lowers tolerance for renovation projects. They want move-in ready homes where they can be on Zoom calls and have children enrolled in school without construction in the background. "They want to feel like they're not sacrificing," Melnick said. "Often it's even more than what they have in the city, because you have the space." At the top of this segment, buyers who have effectively made Litchfield County their primary base while maintaining a city apartment are often trading up from an earlier weekend property. The first house was for weekends; the second is the one they actually live in, and the budget reflects that.
