Lara Spencer is the rare subject on this site whose house you can see in detail and whose house you cannot price at all. She has given filmed tours of her Connecticut home to HGTV, to daytime television and to magazines, and she has built a second career on the argument that a good house is furnished with things bought cheaply and fixed up. What does not exist anywhere is a purchase price, a listing, or a property record.
That inversion is worth taking seriously, because it is the point of her work.
This guide covers where she lives, the houses that came before, what her decorating philosophy actually is, and why the financial side of her property record is blank.
Who is Lara Spencer?
Lara Spencer is an American television presenter, born in 1969, best known as a co-anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America. She has also worked as a host of The Insider and as executive producer and host of HGTV’s Flea Market Flip.
Flea Market Flip is the relevant credit. Contestants are given a small budget, typically around $500, to find something at a flea market, restore or repurpose it, and sell it at a profit. She has written books in the same vein, including I Brake for Yard Sales, and has kept an antiques presence at a gallery in Stamford, Connecticut.
She married David Haffenreffer in 2000 and Richard McVey in 2018. She has two children.
Where she has lived
Spencer has been based in Connecticut since around 2000, with one interruption. In 2008 she moved to California to host The Insider, living in a 1960s house in Beverly Hills, and returned to Connecticut in 2011.
The Connecticut houses she has described over the years include a 1901 carriage house and a 1920s farmhouse, and her current home has been described as a midcentury property. She has renovated repeatedly rather than moving up, including work on a guesthouse during the pandemic.
She has been direct about why she stays: she has said she loves living in Connecticut and raising her family there. Connecticut’s Fairfield County is close enough to Manhattan for a network morning show, which requires an extremely early start, and it is where her second career in antiques and flea markets is physically rooted.
The current house
She lives in Old Greenwich, on the Connecticut coast, with her husband and children.
From the tours she has given, the house is open-plan, with several living areas, a modern kitchen, a swimming pool and a substantial patio, a garden large enough for her dogs, and a separate guest house. She has described the interior style as a mixture of midcentury modern and antiques, and, in one memorable phrase on daytime television, as a bit of a mish-mosh: a little yard sale, a little redo.
That is not false modesty about an expensive house. It is an accurate description of a method. The furniture in the rooms she films in has genuinely been bought second-hand and reworked, which is why the house functions as a demonstration of her argument rather than as a backdrop to it.
Why there are no numbers
No purchase price, sale price, square footage, or valuation for any Lara Spencer property appears in any reliable source.
Two things explain it. The first is that she has never listed a home. Almost all celebrity property journalism starts with a listing, because an agent wants the publicity; without one, there is nothing for a property reporter to write about. The second is that Connecticut transactions do get recorded but are not routinely written up for figures at this level. A well-off television presenter buying a family house in Fairfield County is not news in the way a nine-figure Los Angeles sale is.
There is also a third factor specific to her. The financial story her work tells is about a $40 chair, not about a mortgage. Publishing what her house cost would be beside the point of everything she does, and she has never volunteered it.
Sites that give a value for the Lara Spencer house have produced it from an estimated net worth. Compare a renovation-focused presenter whose transactions genuinely are documented, in the account of Joanna Gaines’s lakehouse, where a purchase and a sale price both exist.
Where does Lara Spencer live now?
Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
This is well supported. She has filmed inside the house repeatedly for television and has discussed living there in interviews across many years. Her family is there, her Good Morning America job is a commute away in Manhattan, and her antiques interests are local to Connecticut. There is no reporting of a sale, a listing, or a move.
What is not documented is the specific property, what it cost, or what it is worth. This article does not estimate any of them, and it does not publish an address, which for a network morning presenter with a large public profile would be inappropriate regardless.
Connecticut has kept many television figures who could easily have relocated, including the subject of the account of Wayne Carini’s Connecticut home, for broadly the same reasons: proximity to New York, and a working life rooted in the state itself.
The useful takeaway
If you came here looking for a figure, there is not one, and the absence is honest rather than evasive.
What can be said is that Lara Spencer has lived in Connecticut for a quarter of a century, has moved between a carriage house, a farmhouse, and a midcentury property in that time, spent three years in Beverly Hills and came back, and has furnished all of it out of flea markets and yard sales on camera. For a house article, that is a more complete picture than a price would give.
Sources
- Closer Weekly on her Old Greenwich home, its layout and grounds, her time in California and her return to Connecticut.
- HGTV for her own filmed tour of her midcentury home.
- City Lifestyle on her second-hand and antiques work in Connecticut and the houses she has lived in.
- SheKnows on Flea Market Flip, her books, and her approach to decorating.
