No bidding war. No line of buyers down the sidewalk for an open house. Just a quiet closing, and Montclair had a new home sale record: $8.1 million for 159 Gates Avenue. In a town where nearly every big sale comes with a fight, this one didn’t.
How Montclair’s Newest Home Sale Record Happened Quietly
159 Gates Avenue first listed in April 2024 at $8.5 million. By later that year, Montclair Local reported it had come off the market with plans to relaunch in the spring. It never officially went back on. Instead, the $8.1 million sale happened privately, off to the side of Montclair’s usual playbook of bidding wars and best-and-final deadlines, the request sellers make when they want a buyer’s strongest offer by a set date rather than an open-ended back and forth.
Jake Kushner, who now runs Kush Connection, the cannabis dispensary on Bloomfield Avenue, grew up in the house and still keeps an ear to the ground on Montclair real estate. He has a theory about how that works. “I heard that the people who represented the sale, the real estate brokers, they don’t do these standard sales where they list them in a more typical fashion,” he said. “It’s almost like an off-market kind of listing and maybe there’s a specific clientele that they share this with, and maybe that’s how they were able to get that price.” No open house line, just a call to the right buyer.
Before this was a story about brokers and back channels, though, it was a story about a house Kushner grew up in.
From the Kushner Family Home to a $5 Million Renovation
159 Gates Avenue was built in 1910 by architecture firm Van Vleck and Goldsmith, and it belonged to the Kushner family for years before the current sale. Kushner was heading into seventh grade when his family bought the house, and it stuck with him.
“There were wood gargoyles in some of the corners of some of the rooms that were hand carved,” he said. “It was such a spectacular house.” He remembers a staircase that “would flow up” from the front entrance, a living room ceiling carved with an ornate pattern, and bathrooms with rain showers dating to the 1910s or 1920s that, in his words, “probably wouldn’t even be legal today.”
Eric and Tatiana Eichmann bought the house from the Kushners in 2016 for $2.455 million, according to Montclair Local, and spent the years that followed tearing most of it down to the studs. Roughly $5 million went into the renovation, according to a Wall Street Journal profile of the couple, with architects Robert M. Gurney and Jonathan Perlstein reimagining the place almost entirely: a three-story glass atrium, a floating staircase, a rebuilt carriage house with its own two bedrooms and two and a half baths, all sitting on 1.8 acres. For Kushner, watching from the outside, the transformation is hard to picture. “Without going there myself, it’s hard to imagine that it’s significantly that much better,” he said. “Five million dollars worth of work, it’s almost hard to imagine, you know what I mean?”
The Pool, the Netflix Cameo and the Backlash Online
The house came with an indoor pool already, worn down from decades of use. Instead of ripping it out, the Eichmanns kept it and modernized it, then added an entirely new outdoor saltwater pool. Tatiana Eichmann told the Journal the outdoor pool is where the family actually lives. “It’s the real entertainment venue,” she said. That same pool later showed up on-screen in “Office Romance,” the Netflix rom-com starring Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein that filmed partly in New Jersey and premiered this June.
Kushner isn’t sold on the trade. “That said, I was shocked when I saw the price they sold it for,” he said. “It’s outrageous in my opinion that it even sold for that amount. But it was, and is, a beautiful house.” That skepticism isn’t only his. Other Montclair residents have made a broader argument about homes like this one, that gutting historic interiors for contemporary ones is quietly costing the town its character, one renovation at a time.
That argument only matters if 159 Gates Avenue is part of a pattern, not an outlier. It isn’t the only trophy home testing Montclair’s ceiling right now.
What an $8.1 Million Sale Says About Montclair’s High End
Run the math and the margin on 159 Gates Avenue is thinner than the sale price suggests. Purchase plus renovation put the Eichmanns in around $7.5 million all in, meaning their total cost between buying the house and rebuilding it, against an $8.1 million close. That gap is thin once you factor in carrying costs: the taxes, insurance and financing payments that pile up on a house that size while it sits unsold. This is not the kind of return anyone expects from Montclair right now, where homes routinely sell hundreds of thousands over ask. Read more about how bidding wars typically play out here.
It also isn’t the only high-end Montclair listing testing what buyers will pay. A mansion just over the line in Cedar Grove, at 24 Club Way, is asking $20 million for nearly six acres with unobstructed New York skyline views and room for a helipad. Closer to town, a flip at 207 Union Street sold for $2.425 million last July and is already back on the market at $4.5 million, after a renovation that restored the original wood paneling in the dining room, the same kind of period detail the Gates Avenue renovation removed. Meanwhile, a two-family at 82-84 Watchung Avenue has sat since August 2025, marketed either as a six-bedroom estate at $7.5 million or split into two townhomes at $6.5 million, without a buyer.
Taken together, those listings suggest Montclair’s highest end is behaving less like the rest of the market and more like its own market entirely, one where sale price and renovation spend don’t move in lockstep the way they do for a $1.5 million colonial three blocks away.
Kushner, for his part, is mostly just curious what happens next. “I look forward to hearing about who purchased it for that amount,” he said. “That is for sure.” So are we. If you know who bought 159 Gates Avenue, or if you’ve got a theory on where Montclair’s next record sale is coming from, tell us. Send a note to the Pod or find us on Instagram, and we’ll keep digging.
Image credit: Zillow
