La Bonne Vie Condos for Sale

Living in La Bonne Vie

La Bonne Vie is a gated condominium community in Gloucester Township, built in 1983 on three courts — Berwyck, Brighton and Shelby — off Sicklerville Road. The lattice sign wall at the entrance says "A Private Community," and that is a fair description of how the place is laid out: the buildings sit back off the road behind their own drive, with a parking lot rather than street parking and woods along the back edge. It is one of the smaller-footprint options in the township's attached market, and it holds a set of amenities that communities twice its size often do not.

The buildings are garden-style, two floors, with units on both levels. The floor plans run from a single bedroom at the compact end up to two bedrooms, one to two full baths, with the larger plans including a loft — a bedroom and full bathroom upstairs over an open main floor. Cathedral ceilings and skylights come with that layout, and several units carry a wood-burning fireplace. Kitchens have been updated unit by unit over the years rather than all at once, so what you find inside varies more than the exteriors suggest. Washer and dryer are in the unit, not in a shared laundry, which is not a given in buildings of this vintage.

There are no basements and no garages here. Parking is an assigned space in the lot, and the mechanicals are straightforward — natural gas forced air, central air conditioning, public water and public sewer, vinyl siding under a pitched roof. Several of the units look out at trees and woods rather than at the next building, and the listings that mention it tend to lead with it.

The association is what separates La Bonne Vie from the township's cheaper attached stock. The monthly fee covers the grounds and lawn care, exterior building maintenance, parking, snow removal and trash, along with the amenities — clubhouse, swimming pool, tennis courts and a health club. There is also a capital contribution collected from the buyer at settlement, which is separate from the monthly fee and worth knowing about in advance. Management is handled by an outside company rather than by the owners themselves.

Set it against the alternatives and the trade becomes clear. Valleybrook over in Blackwood is the township's big attached community, a thousand-plus homes wrapped around a golf course, with the scale and the variety that comes with that. Stonebridge Run mixes condominiums with detached homes. La Bonne Vie is neither — it is small, finite and fully amenitized, which means inventory is limited and a unit that fits what you want may not be sitting there when you start looking. The wider field is on the Gloucester Township condos and townhomes page.

On the address and the schools: mail goes out as Sicklerville 08081, and Sicklerville is a post office, not a municipality — La Bonne Vie is in Gloucester Township, on Gloucester Township taxes and services. Records on these units name the school district inconsistently, which reads like a split and is not; the elementary and middle years run through Gloucester Township Public Schools and the high school through Black Horse Pike Regional, and the specific school is worth confirming on the individual unit. See Gloucester Township 08081 for the rest of this end of the township, and recently sold homes for where these have been landing.