Country Oaks Homes for Sale

Living in Country Oaks

Country Oaks is a detached neighborhood in Gloucester Township, built between 1988 and 1991 along Breckenridge Drive and the streets that branch off it, in the western end of the township near New Brooklyn–Erial Road. It went up in a tight window, which is why the community reads as consistent from the street in a way the older sections nearby do not.

The street names are the signature and they are not random. Lake Placid, Innsbruck and St Moritz have all hosted the Winter Olympics. Vail, Stowe, Aspen and Breckenridge are the American ski towns everyone can name. This community was platted at the end of the eighties, a few years after Sarajevo and Calgary, and whoever drew it up committed to the theme completely rather than picking a name and moving on. Practically, an address here is unmistakable — nothing else in this part of Camden County reads remotely like it, and once you know the pattern the neighborhood is easy to hold in your head.

The houses are consistent and they are family-sized. These are colonials and contemporaries with four bedrooms — two and a half baths, a one- or two-car attached garage with driveway parking, and a traditional layout that separates the formal rooms from the everyday ones. You get a formal living room and a separate dining room at the front, then an eat-in kitchen with room for a real table opening into the family room, with a powder room and main-floor laundry completing that level. Upstairs the owner's suite carries a walk-in closet and its own bath, with three more bedrooms and a hall bath. Sliding glass to the yard, covered front porches and fenced rear yards are common. It is a plan that works, and it repeats with enough variation that the streetscape does not feel stamped out.

The community was built with sidewalks and street lights from the start, which is not standard for South Jersey and is one of those things that gets appreciated every day rather than noticed at a showing. Lots have real backyard room, and the layout runs on drives and courts rather than a grid, so through traffic has nowhere to go. On the western edge the neighborhood backs into wooded ground.

Thirty-five years in, what has been updated is what separates two otherwise identical houses. Heating and air, roofs, kitchens, baths and flooring have all been replaced on their own schedules across this neighborhood, and homes here do not come up for sale often — for a community of this size very little of it trades in a given stretch, which usually means people bought and stayed. That is good news if you own here and a timing problem if you want in.

On the address: this end of the township carries a Sicklerville 08081 mailing address, which is a post office rather than a municipality. Country Oaks is in Gloucester Township, on Gloucester Township taxes and in Gloucester Township schools, with Black Horse Pike Regional for high school. For more of this end of the township, see Gloucester Township 08081. The nearest comparisons are Cobblestone Farms, the township's lake community and the top of its detached market, and Country Aire, the smaller cul-de-sac neighborhood off Sicklerville Road. Buyers who want new rather than established should see Emerson Square. The recently sold homes across Gloucester Township are the clearest read on where these are landing.