Jim Steinman, writer of Bat Out of Hell, died in 2021 and you can buy his 6,000 foot-Connecticut home – but only if you opt to live as Jim Steinman. The sale of 22 Ketcham Road, Ridgefield, comes with an expectation that you will buy Steinman’s belongings, art and clothes too, and keep them forever, and exist among them– and two presidents later, still no one has done it.
The 1920 cottage – the “backdrop”, according to William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, “to Steinman’s life and work” – is the place where he wrote “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” for Celine Dion, and “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” for his longterm foil Meat Loaf. Steinman, our most baroque songwriter, was once described as a combination of Richard Wagner and Phil Spector: “every chorus is like losing your virginity, every verse is like killing your parents,” said John Aizlewood in 1993. He found the grace in a laboured lyric. “I won’t do that” – the most talked about line in the playground, and rock’s most salacious ellipsis – merely refers to everything that has just been mentioned in the previous verse.
Steinman’s taste for the baroque was reflected in his home making: in the 1990s, after selling 14 million copies of Bat Out of Hell II, he bought 22 Ketcham Road and doubled its size. Behind a classic white weatherboard façade is a temple of music and gothic lust, with a giant sculpture of four quartz crystal shafts, smaller figures of anthropoid bulls, fashioned from bronze or wire, having sex with human ladies; some gargoyles, a table made from six winged griffins and, most spookily to me, two leather jackets from the late Steinman, who lived alone, and what appears to be his wheelchair.
The Steinman Sanctuary, as it is known, was initially priced at $5,555,569 in 2022, 69 being one of his favourite numbers, which also appears on one wall in large figures, in a house where everything appears to have a talismanic meaning. In 2023 it was marked down to $3,950,000 because no one had bought it yet. Last year it was listed as $2.995 million (“The sum total of the individual components in this offering is believed to far exceed the list price,”) and 40 days later, the option of $1.495 million appeared – around the price of a three-bed terrace in Hackney.
It boasts a recording studio, a sun room, a Great Room and four bathrooms – but perhaps another reason it’s not shifting, along with the leathers and wheelchair, is Steinman’s decision to retain only two bedrooms on the sprawling site: “you’re by yourself, you never have any guests,” his manager, now executor of his estate, pointed out when they first looked around. Thirty years later, you have to admire the attempt at preserving his legacy – though Steinman said nothing of this in his will. This is a “single family property”, William Pitt Sotheby says on its listings. A small family at that – and one that is prepared to live as Jim Steinman.
[Further reading: Bald men are the antidote to Grok’s filth]
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