Avon, CT (pop. 17,000) in the Farmington River Valley (up towards The Barrister's neck of the woods), was a quaint, semi-rural semi-distant Hartford suburb until the highways came and the prosperous moved further from downtown Hartford.
Avon's schools rank #1 in CT, largely because of its homogeneous middle-upper and upper-middle class population (a town's school "performance" correlates exactly with parental education and income, rendering school comparisons meaningless). Wiki notes that Avon was listed as one of the preppiest places in the United States in the 1980s best-seller The Official Preppy Handbook. A guy can still wear plaid pants or Nantucket Red in Avon without getting stared at, or shot.
With growing prosperity and suburban sprawl, towns like Avon have lost their cornfields and woodlands and chicken farms and dairy pastures. At the risk of sounding like an obnoxious snob, those cornfields have been replaced by graceless architectural abominations - with no relationship or sensitivity to place, proportion, local history, or taste - like these below (many more here and here), currently priced in the $800,000-4,000,000 range, and usually on about 1-acre lots:
More:
I would not be surprised if the construction quality were equivalent to the architectural quality of these visual pollutants. My eyes would prefer cornfields, but I guess I am a snob, because homeless people would love these things, and I am sure they are quite comfortable and spacious inside, with central vacuum, humidity control, industrial ovens, intercoms, etc.
But this is my idea of an Avon home - or of any real Connecticut home, for that matter. This one was built in 1800. $450,000, but it could use a real front door and a couple of fireplaces:
