NEW HAVEN – It is all in the details.
Marcella Mascola has a three-page long spreadsheet listing the rooms open to the public in the Raynham house, the five-story structure on the former Townshend property, with notes describing the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the trim and when they were painted.
There is a subtle rose color in the bridal suite on the second floor, while the groom’s quarters feature something called iced marble and a darker toned contrast. Grass cloth covers some of the walls where all the floral wallpaper has been removed, and the outside has subtly different shades of cream with black forest trim on the shutters, doors and mullions.
The north and south parlors are painted a striking black and feature the original chandeliers. The structural changes in the house are minimal with the first-floor hallway opened up, reverting to an earlier version of the structure and the flower room removed to make way for two bathrooms.
All the plumbing and electrical features have been replaced with multiple building surprises dealt with by the new owners, such as removing the seaweed insulation in the walls.Â
Marcella Mascola, her husband Chuck Marcola and partner Salvatore Marottoli, bought the 17-room mansion with its 5th-floor tower that offers a view of New Haven Harbor in October 2021 for $2.6 million and have created an event space in the home most recently occupied by Henry (Harry) Townshend Jr. and Doris (Deb) Townshend, the eighth generation of the family in New Haven.
Most recently there have been several engagement parties, a birthday party and two celebrations marking its historic place in New Haven with the first non-family wedding planned for the spring.Â
“There are a lot of nice spaces to have a wedding and we appreciate all of them,” Chuck Mascola said. “We are going for a portion of the market that we think is not being served right now: really top-end sophisticated events.”
The house, known on historic documents as Raynham, was built in 1804 with the gingerbread Victorian features recognizable today added in 1858.Â
There have been Townshends using the property going back to 1798 when it was part of a 79-acre farm, according to the Townshend’s daughter, Nancy Townshend-Vess. The event business and the 26 acres that make up the current boundary are now known as The Estate, while the corporate name is East Shore Partners LLC.Â
“The most important thing was not to get in the way of what was already here and not force it to be something it is not. She is kind of pretty enough as is,” Marcella Mascola said on a tour of the main house.
The Mascolas and Marottoli plan to reclaim the two barns and a carriage house, as well as other outbuildings. A small vineyard will yield its first wine grapes by 2025 and while a local group is willing to come and harvest them, the new owners are not planning on becoming full-scale wine producers.Â
For the past two years, Marcella Mascola has worked on the decor, choosing all the furniture, rugs, scones and paintings, as the couple also tackled their vision for the property itself with more than  $1 million spent already as structural engineers, arborists, craftsmen  and preservationists got a chance to weigh in.
“My kids have asked me if I am ever going to cook again,” Marcella Mascola said of her full-time schedule at The Estate.Â
“It has been an extraordinary amount of time and effort, but it is also pretty cool to be part of saving it.” She said she has advised family on renovation projects, “but I have never done it  professionally. I wish I had.”
So far, the walk-up bar in the back of the first floor has proven to be the most popular room. It features brass fixtures on dark wood as well as a reproduction of a painting of 1st Marquess George Townshend who lived at Raynham Hall, a huge family estate in Norfolk, England. He was born in 1724 and died in 1807.
 “He never came here, yet he hails over the bar like he owns it,” Marcella Mascola said.
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With the exception of purchasing two heavy sideboards original to the dining room that pay homage to Deb Townshend’s taste, the marquess’s image is the only other historical piece in the revamped mansion.
“We didn’t really want the house to be truly historical because we didn’t want it to get in the way of other people’s festivities. We wanted it to be beautiful, but a blank canvas so people could come in and make it what they wanted,” Marsala Mascola said, referring to future brides who will use it.Â
The bar area, which was the Townshend’s family room, is next to a former office that now features couches and other soft seating, while the terrace and formal salons in front have high top tables and chairs keyed to cocktail parties as a pianist plays music in the background. Â Â
Andy Rzeznikiewicz, a member of the Wyndham Land Trust, recently visited the mansion at the party the family threw this summer  to honor their parents.
The Townshends own about 1,000 acres of forest land in Pomfret, which the Wyndham Land Trust trust has been acquiring to protect as open space. Â Â He remembers being at the house in New Haven and meeting the Townshends decades ago.
“The first time I came here, it was like stepping back in time,” he said compared to the light-filled event space he saw this fall. He hopes the overall estate remains intact as much as possible. “You can’t replicate this,” he said.
Until the barns — one was built in 1804, the other in about 1850 — and the carriage house are refurbished, weddings will take place in a tent that will be erected to the rear of the house, next to a small building that will serve as a separate tavern for the guests. The main entrance to the house will be at the back with  the original gravel paths used to reach  the rest of the property.
The property is protected under a new Special Heritage Mixed Use Zoning District that will allow for development and income-producing activities to support the estate, mainly the hospitality space for weddings and events.Â
Historically significant working farm
As much as they love the mansion itself, the two barns and carriage house, which eventually became a heated garage, open up multiple possibilities for reuse of the massive space, for commercial as well as  educational ventures.
“Literally we were moved to tears over the potential for what could be here,” Chuck Mascola said. This is tempered by the large investment it will take to make it structurally sound, but they plan to seek philanthropists interested in the cause.
Todd Levine, architectural historian for the State Historic Preservation Office, is equally excited about the barns and the general layout of the structures, which tell the story of a working farm in 19th century New Haven.
“It is a beautiful, beautiful site. We are thrilled the new owners have reached out to us,” Levine said. “They are significant agricultural buildings,” he said of the connected Vermont-style structures with a living space that once housed the carriage driver. Â
There were also stables at the other end, as well as a corn crib and piggery and kennels for the Townshends prize-winning hunting dogs.Â
Marsella Mascola envisions the upstairs space at the carriage house as a wine tavern that would be open to the public. There is also a small room where Henry Townshend crushed the grapes to make wine. She said other ideas they have include maybe a gift shop or a spa. “There are lots of ideas for what it could evolve into,” she said.Â
All that would take further land-use approval. Use of the main house is also limited to the first floor, with the exception of the bridal and groom suites, which would be used the day of the wedding. No one will stay overnight in Raynham.
There is another building that the family called the clubhouse, which has an open space the Townshends referred to as the ballroom. It is full of Fort Nathan Hale paraphernalia as it was often used as a meeting room for fort events. “It isn’t opulent. They were utilitarian, not opulent,” Chuck Marsala said generally of the Townshend’s taste.
One of the eight outbuildings that has been renovated is the three-bedroom house at the back that has been a home for decades to a caretaker, and there is  someone living there now.
 “There is someone on the property at all times,” Marcella Marsala said.Â
Darlene Brunzell said she and her former husband were the caretakers from 1999 through 2007 while she was a postdoctoral student at Yale University studying at the Department of Psychiatry at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. She is now a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.
“It was a wonderful time. Â It was perfect. Â I felt like Anne of Green Gables living on the estate,” Brunzell said. She said the Townshends treated them like adopted children as they were close in age to the couple’s children.
 Brunzell said one of her main jobs was acclimating the family’s English setter dogs to  people. “I would walk around the estate with them. I got a puppy from a litter that I helped whelped down in the basement. Raymond Hill Bonnie — the pick of the litter.”
Visiting the updated house at the tribute to the Townshends, Brunzell said the layout is the same. “The character feels very similar,” the main difference being the kitchen with modern appliances. “They used to have an icebox.”
She remembers Harry Townshend liked genetics and grew hybrid grapes on the property, while also breeding chickens that were a cross between bandies and English game hens.
 The configuration of buildings naturally divides the working part of the farm, which would be the site of any potential commercial development, from the formal lawn used by the family and now by guests at weddings and events, as well as any future homeowners on portions of the property that will support housing.Â
Anyone  strolling the grounds will also come across a quartz boulder that a relative, George Townshend, had moved to the site from an area west of Woodward Avenue. A sign says it was used to grind corn by the Quinnipiac Indians. It was moved when the Townshends sold a large portion of their land down to the harbor for single-family home construction starting in the 1920s.Â
In the 1980s, more land was sold off for construction of the Raynham Hill condominiums on the northern portion of the property.
New homes in the planning
Chuck Mascola said he envisions 10 single-family homes on either side of the Raynham house, but that is still flexible.
Those in the north field would likely have three facing Townsend Avenue with the rest running along the perimeter of the property. Â He said they are also planning to have an orchard that will create a buffer for some of the new homes on this side.
In the south field, some homes would face Townsend Avenue and others would run alongside Raynham Hill Drive. Â
A community garden to be shared by any new homeowners is also on the drawing board.Â
He said no existing neighbor would have a direct view into the events going on at the mansion.
 Mascola said since they started on their plans two years ago, high interest rates are threatening construction of single-family homes, although he is still pledging to build single-family homes on the front parcels.Â
“The backwoods are another story. There will be development back there that is yet to be determined,” Chuck Mascola said. Â He said the land cuts up to a cliff, which restricts what can be built. He said they have been talking to contractors about what is the most realistic to build and what the market will support.
Originally, the Mascolas had estimated building a total of 50 housing units on their property. He said they are now looking at “50-plus” units, and they are investigating all the options with some condos and/or apartment units  in the mix on the back acres.
“Things have changed pretty dramatically from when we originally planned all of this,” Chuck Mascola said.
‘Whatever happens back there, it is so insulated from the neighborhood and from everyone else, if we have to go for more density up in the backwoods, that is what we will do,” Chuck Mascola said.Â
The land devoted to housing in the back  is about 12 acres, three of which are wetlands.  Mascola said they hope to enhance the wetlands by getting rid of invasive species.
Good memories
Hervey Townshend of Madison, one of the Townshend’s five children, said he is impressed with the decisions the Mascolas have made to celebrate a new chapter in the life of the large estate.
As the new guardians, “there is a tremendous devotion to doing the right thing,” he said. “I was the manager of the place. I know how much work has to go into it.”Â
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Lisa Marro, who cleaned the Townshend house for 20 years starting in the mid-1990s, said the Mascolas have “done a great job. It brings back a lot of happy memories. Mingling with the 135 people who attended the tribute to the Townshends, she said it reminded her of the mansion’s heyday. “Deb always welcomed so many people here. There was always something going on,” Marro said.
Jamie Lawson has ties to the Townshends going back to his father who was in the artillery division in World War II with Harry Townshend. Â He said his parents lived for a time at the mansion, while they waited for the owners of the home they bought on Fort Hale Road to vacate. Harry Townshend later helped his father get a job as a machinist at Marlin Firearms.
Lawson was close friends with Timothy Townshend, the youngest of the five children, traveling with him to the property they owned in Pomfret, as well as Montana. Â Lawson said he feels the event space will do well, but he was nostalgic for the house he remembers. Â “It was a home. Now it is a venue.”
He described Deb Townshend as fun and educational. “There was always something to learn when I came to Timmy’s house,” Lawson said.
Townshend-Vess, one of three daughters, said coming to the memorial service this fall was the first time she was back since they packed up the house as it was going on the market. “I am totally in awe of what has happened.”
She said the house “had great promise to remain a functional piece of the neighborhood, and I am really very, very glad that it is evolving in that direction.”Â
“I can still feel myself here. Now it is a venue, but not a museum. My mother was so attached to making everything like it was, whereas the Mascolas are trying to make it forward thinking. I can see their vision,” Townshend-Vess said.
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