Countryside Homes for Sale

Living in Countryside

Countryside occupies the east side of Clayton, and it was laid out to be nothing like the rest of the borough. West of it, Clayton is a tight nineteenth-century glassmaking grid — Vine, Linden, New Street, all right angles. Countryside is the opposite: Moore Boulevard runs as a long curve through the middle of it, with Clevenger Drive, Sun Haven Drive, Sugar Hill Drive and a set of cul-de-sacs like Hawthorn Way branching off it into the trees. There are ponds inside the neighborhood and a large wooded tract along its southern edge, so a good number of these lots back to something other than another house.

The housing here is consistent in a way that makes it easy to shop. Everything is detached and everything is a real family house: four bedrooms is the floor and five is common, with two full baths and a powder room, an attached garage, and a full basement under nearly every one of them — a number of which have been finished into a second living floor. Square footage generally runs from around eighteen hundred up past twenty-four hundred, laid out with a formal living and dining room at the front and a family room off the kitchen. If bedroom count is what's driving your search, the borough-wide four-bedroom listings will show you how much of Clayton's larger inventory sits right here.

The lots are the other half of the appeal. They are wide enough for in-ground pools, sheds, lawn sprinkler systems and fully fenced yards, and enough owners have added them that Countryside shows up disproportionately in Clayton's pool homes. It also has infrastructure that a lot of this end of Gloucester County does not: public water, public sewer, natural gas, sidewalks, street lights and underground electric service throughout. Fifteen minutes east of here you are on wells and septic. That difference shapes what a house costs to run, and it is worth understanding before you compare Clayton against the Pinelands townships next door.

Clayton runs its own school district rather than sending its students out to a regional, which is unusual for a borough this compact and is one of the reasons families stay put here instead of moving up and out. Scotland Run Park and Wilson Lake are minutes away for trails, fishing and kayaking. Route 47 runs straight through the middle of town toward Glassboro and Rowan University in one direction and Vineland in the other, with Route 55 close enough to make the Philadelphia commute workable. Countryside was Clayton's new construction a generation ago and turnover is steady rather than heavy, so if nothing here fits today it is worth watching where Clayton values are heading and checking back.