THE CLIFFS AT GLASSY
Where are you both from?
Phil: I grew up outside of Pittsburgh.
Brigid: I am from Northern Virginia, just outside of DC.
How did you two meet?
Brigid: In high school, my family moved to Boca Raton, Florida. I lived there for most of my adult life. Phil and I met in 2012. I was a regional vice president for Prudential at the time, and Phil was looking to buy our company.
Phil: I was EVP of global development for a company called Realogy, and we were acquiring real estate companies. I got the girl, not the deal.
Brigid: We got married two years later in Italy.
How did you find The Cliffs?
Phil: Brigid’s good friends, Jeff and Jill Tompkins, live here. We came up to visit and fell in love.
Brigid: We were living in Tampa at the time. Phil’s a huge golfer, and we knew we wanted to be in the mountains. When we visited, we were like, Here it is! This is where we’re meant to be.
What do you think makes it so special?
Phil: It’s the people and the staff. I think the staff goes out of its way to provide service and treat you like you’ve been friends forever. And everyone we’ve met at Glassy has been gracious and accommodating, welcoming you to their homes and just really making you feel part of the family.
Why did you choose Glassy?
Phil: It fit our personalities and it was the elevation and just the private feeling that you have when you’re on top of Glassy Mountain.
Brigid: At the time, we had a house in Tampa, and we wanted to escape to a mountain region. So we didn’t want to come up during the summer and still have a warm area. It’s beautiful—as beautiful as some of the other communities are. We wanted the elevation, like Phil said, the nice cooler temperatures during the summer months, and we always wanted to have a mountain home.
And you’re building a house?
Phil: We’re here full-time now. Our house is scheduled to be complete in May of this year. We broke ground in July, and we’ll be moving in this May. Our builder keeps the heat on us to make sure we’re making the decisions on a timely basis, and the Architectural Review Board has been very supportive. It has been a very efficient process.
What are you looking forward to about the new house?
Phil: Settling in and entertaining. We love to entertain and haven’t been able to do that for over a year!
Brigid: We love having parties—cooking and games and all of that.
How would you describe the community here?
Phil: The people that live here are just down-to-earth and fantastic individuals. Everyone seems to get along very well. It’s just a very comfortable and inviting community.
Brigid: I suppose there are a lot of members of The Cliffs, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a very intimate, very personalized club here when everybody knows you by name—the whole staff knows us by name when we walk in. They’ve just been wonderful.
What do you like to do here?
Phil: We love to golf. And we spend a lot of time with our puppies, Maggie and Puppy.
Brigid: We have a big eighty-pound doodle and a fivepound shih tzu-poodle mix. They take a lot of our time! And I love cooking.
Phil: We also train with Austin at the Glassy Wellness Center. He’s fantastic. And I go to Valley four or five times a week to swim in the indoor pool.
What is it like to be surrounded by so much natural beauty?
Phil: Brigid loves the bears. One spent the summer in the backyard, and we named it Kevin.
Brigid: He would show up in the morning, climb our tree, eat the berries, and then leave. Then, he would be back for cocktail hour. And we could almost set our watches to his visits! We loved it.
This story was featured in Cliffs Living magazine. To see more stories like this one and learn more about The Cliffs, subscribe here.
