Bernardsville, N.J.: A Gilded Age Enclave Looking to the Future

After nearly 17 years of commuting more than an hour each way from North Jersey to his company’s headquarters in Basking Ridge, Ray Wierzbicki finally moved last December with his wife, Bernadette, to a house just minutes from his office — an English country-style home in Bernardsville, N.J. Seven months later, he retired from Verizon, where he had worked for 43 years, most recently as a senior vice president.

Joking that he should have made the move south a little earlier, his colleagues tried to encourage him to “stay a bit longer,” to which Mr. Wierzbicki replied: “No thanks, I’m good.”

He’s busy enjoying his new life in the five-bedroom 1885 house on five acres that the couple bought for $3 million, which he described as “something you’d see in one of my wife’s magazines.”

“We feel like we’re very blessed to wake up here every morning,” Mr. Wierzbicki, 69, said. “We love history, and you can spend every weekend driving around and seeing all the houses and learning about their pasts.”

Indeed, as one of the Gilded Age’s premiere country enclaves, Bernardsville is steeped in history. After railroad lines from Manhattan were extended to the area in 1872, the scions of New York City society began flocking to the borough, buying large tracts of land and hiring notable architects to design what they called “summer cottages.”