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San Jose Mercury News, April 7,
1995:
Jessica Lange is moving back to her home state of
Minnesota.
Lange and longtime companion Sam
Shepard recently bought a home in Stillwater, Minn.,
planning to move there this summer, says publicists
Leslee Dart.
The couple's children, Hannah, 9, and Walker, 7 - plus
Shura, Lange's 14- year-old daughter with Mikhail
Baryshnikov - are moving with them. They plan to sell
the Charlottesville, Va., farm, where they've been
living for nearly 13 years, Dart says.
St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 25,
2004:
Stillwater estate is for sale for $3.3 million.
The well-known house on North Fourth
Street sits on one of the largest lots in the city --
2.5 acres -- and "provides sweeping views of the town,
the St. Croix River and the historic lift bridge,"
according to a recent listing on a real estate agent's
Web site. It is described as a "quiet retreat like no
other in the city" and "one of the finest residential
properties in the historic village of Stillwater."
The 6,000-square-foot home, built in 1892, was renovated
by Lange and Shepard in the mid-1990s. The property
includes a guesthouse, carriage house, swimming pool,
tiered gardens, small fruit orchard, ponds and woods. It
is fenced for privacy and protected by a security
system.
Sources say Lange, 55, and Shepard, 60, are moving to
New York. Lange said she returned to Minnesota in 1995
so she could spend more time with her mother, who lived
in the house next door to the Lange-Shepard home before
she died in 1997. Her mother's house -- also on North
Fourth Street --reportedly was sold earlier this year.
Lange said, "I'm ready to move back to New York. This is
a nice place to raise children. But there's no reason
for me to be here anymore." The couple's 18-year-old
daughter recently graduated from Stillwater Area High
School; their 17-year-old son will reportedly finish
high school in New York.
St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 1,
2004:
Going, going, gone... Actress Jessica Lange sells
items at auction
Movie star Jessica Lange might be
moving to New York, but at least we'll still have her
18th century commode stand to remember her by. The
Stillwater actress put about 40 of her antiques and
paintings on the auction block at a Roseville auction
house. Watching them sell Wednesday evening - for about
$27,000 - was the hottest ticket in town.
About 300 people attended the sold-out,
standing-room-only event at Rose Galleries, and still
more put in bids over the telephone. Lange's items were
interspersed throughout the general arts auction and
generated a buzz when they were offered.
"She has really beautiful things - not that I can afford
them," said Gina Munter, an auction regular. "I'm
waiting to bid on some paperweights."
Lange's collection included hand-colored French
lithographs, a metal birdcage, Oriental rugs, that 18th
century English mahogany commode stand (which sold for
$1,000), and several paintings.
"Cows and sheep are a big theme for her," Sonia Vacinek,
one of the auction house owners, said of Lange's
Victorian-era paintings.
The most expensive piece sold was a Daum Nancy cameo
glass lamp for $9,500; the least, a pair of matching
Oriental vases mounted as lamps, for $90 each.
St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 1, 2005:
Stillwater Lange-Shepard estate priced to sell
Will dropping the price and dividing the property help
move Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard's sprawling
Stillwater estate? Their real estate agent hopes so.
A year ago, the Oscar-winning actress's well-known house
and property on North Fourth Street was listed at $3.3
million. Now the price has dropped to $2,644,000.
Agent Sharon O'Flannigan said Tuesday the main house and
guest house/pool house are also being offered separately
- for $1,995,000 and $649,000 respectively - although
the preference is to sell them together.
O'Flannigan said that although the price of the estate
has dropped substantially, "realistically, in the east
metro, it's still a big number."
December 23, 2005:
Prospective home buyers wanting a brush with fame
might now be able to step up.
Months after actress Jessica Lange and playwright Sam
Shepard spent millions for a new home on New York's
Fifth Avenue, their yellow Victorian showplace in
Stillwater remains for sale at a drastically reduced
price.
"That's a spectacular property," said Mark Berthelsen of
Keller Williams Premier Realty, who said Lange bought
the former bed and breakfast in 1994 for $415,000. Back
then, he said, "Everyone thought she overpaid for it."
When Lange put the house on the market in May 2004, she
wanted $3.3 million. Now it's going for $1.995 million.
The guest house on the lower portion of the 1.3-acre
property, which was included in the original price, now
can be negotiated separately.
J.L. Family Trust of Beverly Hills, Calif., is listed as
the house's owner. Records indicate the home's taxable
value in 2006, without the guest house property, will be
$809,700.
Sharon O'Flannigan, the property's principal real estate
agent, said that sales of more expensive houses are
"extremely slow," caught in a downturn that might be a
result of a saturated buyer's market.
Unlike others, of course, the Lange-Shepard house on the
"North Hill" has the advantage of its celebrity image.
O'Flannigan said the 1892 Victorian was "literally
rebuilt" after Lange and Shepard moved in.
Excerpts from the March 2006 issue
of Architectural Digest:
Jessica Lange - The actress returns
to her Minnesota roots and imagines an endless spring
"I had this kind of romantic image of
the children growing up not dissimilarly to the way I
grew up in a small town where they could walk to school.
Even more than that, I wanted to raise them close to
their extended family."
"We had to kind of reconstruct it.
There was quite a bit of work to do on the house. There
was more work to do on the property."
That's a somewhat coy way of
describing the two acres of scrub that had to be cleared
away, the walls and steps of locally quarried limestone
that were installed to terrace the sloping grounds, and
the nine years of intensive gardening that would go into
beautifying them.
Jessica started out modestly enough.
"I was going to work on one little area, a tiny
horseshoe garden by the house that hadn't been planted
or designed or anything. I then had the idea that off of
that central garden I would create three gardens, one
for each of my children. I wanted, through colors and
plants and light and shade, to capture what I felt was
the essence of each of them.
For Shura, Jessica designed a
purple-rich tapestry of lilacs, violets, irises and
hydrangeas; after Shura was married in the garden,
Jessica added a birdhouse modeled after the wedding
cake.
"With Hannah, I wanted to do the kind
of flowers and plants that women encountered when they
first came across the prairie. So there are a lot of
earthy, powerful plants - echinacea, monarda, yarrow."
Her son's patch is equally
distinctive. "There were some beautiful oak trees at the
side of the property. There was something very
mysterious and quiet and peaceful back in that area, so
I decided to make it Walker's garden. I left everything
that was wild, like the toad lilies, trillium, violets
and jack-in-the-pulpit. But I put in a lot of
shade-loving plants, a lot of moss and hostas."
An avid angler, Walker also got a
small pond with a copper fountain of an angel holding a
fish. That inspired the idea of adding water to the
garden. Before long, Jessica was spending eight hours a
day - during Minnesota's warm months - working in the
garden.
"There was a pond, and then there was
a waterfall, and then there was a stream, and then there
was another pond, and then - you know..."
Each of the children's gardens
contains a water feature. Between Hannah's and Walker's
gardens, there is a Monet-inspired pond, surrounded by
yellow-and-blue-flowering plants, and at the bottom of
the hill there's a large lily pond.
"At one point a big tree came down in
a storm, and suddenly there was a space that needed to
be addressed. I had become friendly with the monks and
the Rinpoche at a Buddhist monastery in Minneapolis, so
I decided that in their honor, I would build a Buddha
garden based on the wheel of dharma. Then, because the
Buddha garden looked like it was stranded in the middle
of the yard, I had another pond built."
"Then I saw the pictures of
Sissinghurst and thought, 'Oh well, I have to have a
white garden.'" For that garden she created a quiet
tableau of Casablanca lilies, white thistles, daisies,
white-blooming hostas - "every white flower that we
could grow there."
Set just below the house, the terrace
is a family hub in the summer. "You can see the river
from there, and it's beautiful."
A few years ago Jessica and Sam
acquired an adjacent lot, remodeled its swimming pool
and build a guesthouse on the property. "Suddenly I had
a whole other acre to design. But I kept it really wild.
It's almost all woods except for right around the pool
and poolhouse."
St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 25,
2008:
Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard's estate on
Stillwater's North Hill is on the market - again.
The Oscar-winning actress and the award-winning
playwright and actor pulled their former home off the
market last fall, but it recently was listed for $1.95
million. The real-estate agent is Frank Roffers of SKY
Sotheby's International Realty.
The estate was for sale in 2004 for $3.3 million. A year
later, the selling price had dropped, with the main
house (about $2 million) and the guest house/pool house
(about $650,000) being offered separately.
A listing on Roffers' Web site describes the property as
a "spectacular home and landscape featured in
Architectural Digest."
"Rich in history and architecture, this extraordinary
estate is situated in the quaint town of Stillwater,
just 30 minutes from the Twin Cities," the listing says.
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
September 28, 2008:
Lange's Stillwater house has sold for $1.825 million
The home of Stillwater's most famous couple has been
sold for $1.825 million to an undisclosed buyer. For the
past four years, actress Jessica Lange and playwright
Sam Shepard have been trying to sell their estate,
located at 903 4th Street N.
They took it off the market last fall and then re-listed
it this summer, said Jill Roffers, a real estate agent
with SKY Sotheby's International Realty, which handled
the sale.
Roffers would not name the buyer, citing a
confidentiality agreement. She said the new owner closed
on the house last Friday.
The sellers were asking for $1.95 million for the 1892
Victorian home, which sits on 2.5 acres and offers "a
breathtaking St. Croix River Valley view," according to
the online listing.
In 2004, the couple tried to sell their estate for $3.3
million. They bought the former bed and breakfast for
$415,000 in 1994 and raised three children in the house
for nine years.
Last winter, Lange, a native of Cloquet, Minn., bemoaned
the changes in Stillwater in an interview with the New
York Daily News.
"When we first moved to Stillwater it felt like a real
place," she told the Daily News. "It had a downtown with
a hardware store, a furniture store, a clothing store.
Now it's all gift shops and these terrible condominiums.
It was a little town with a great deal of character.
Everything gets yuppified, I guess."
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