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Yankee Candle founder’s resort-like mansion could be transformed into 55+ and affordable housing
Redevelopment “makes more sense than trying to find one person to take over this property, which is like owning Disneyland pretty much,” said development manager Joshua Wallack.
After two years on the market, the late Yankee Candle founder’s sprawling Western Massachusetts estate is getting a whiff of new hope as developers forge ahead on a plan to build hundreds of homes there for people 55 and over.
Tentatively dubbed “Pioneer Pointe,” the $200 million redevelopment plan proposes an active lifestyle community formed around the luxurious amenities at Michael J. Kittredge II‘s Juggler Meadow compound.
According to development manager Joshua Wallack, the resort-like perks — an indoor water park, movie theater, spa, bowling alley, arcade, and even a concert venue — make it a perfect fit for active older adults. He noted developers often approach projects like this with lofty goals, only to backtrack when they realize the amenities put them over budget.
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“But with this situation, all the amenities are already built, and they’re beyond the Four Seasons, or any amazing country club atmosphere you can possibly imagine,” Wallack pointed out. As a result, he said, “you can focus your budget on maximizing the housing quality.”
‘Like owning Disneyland’
Straddling Leverett and Amherst, the Juggler Meadow property was originally listed for $23 million in 2022. Wallack visited the estate later that year after meeting Kittredge’s son, Michael “Mick” Kittredge III, through the younger Kittredge’s Bernardston-based Kringle Candle Company.
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“We stayed in this beautiful guest house and we toured the property, and I was just — my mind was blown,” said Wallack, who is based in Florida but whose mother and stepfather were longtime Berkshires residents. “I wasn’t thinking about candles anymore.”
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He recalls telling Mick Kittredge, “Your dad was one of one.”
As Wallack saw it, “the buying pool for someone who wants to buy an estate this grand, in this location — you know, I don’t know that there’s another sort of renaissance billionaire that would want to buy this incredible place as a single-family home.”
His mind jumped to adaptive reuse, and he suggested Kittredge consider a lifestyle community built around the estate’s 16-bedroom main mansion and plentiful amenities.
“That makes more sense than trying to find one person to take over this property, which is like owning Disneyland pretty much,” Wallack said.
A solution to the housing shortage?
Flash forward two years, and Wallack said the development team is now in the final stages of preparing an application to MassHousing, a quasi-public agency that provides financing for affordable housing. The plans stipulate that a quarter of the units at Pioneer Pointe be affordable under Chapter 40B, the state’s affordable housing law. According to Wallack, a household earning about $84,000 a year would end up paying around $1,875 a month for an affordable unit when all is said and done.
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The development team also includes Callahan Construction, Needham-based 40B consultant SEB Housing, and Chris Ritter of Brookline’s Ritter Design Studio. An early iteration of their plan featured 700 total units for all ages, but Wallack said the team cut back and focused on adults 55 and older after community members voiced concerns about increased traffic.
“With this demographic, it’s a lot less trips on the road, a lot less traffic” than families with school-aged children, he explained. “The community was right, and so we pivoted to that, and we’re very happy that we received such great feedback from the communities and from staff.”
Wallack outlined two revised plans in a memo to the Leverett Selectboard earlier this month, each calling for 400 units. One plan would build 48 units on the Leverett side and 352 on the Amherst side, while the other calls for 150 units in Leverett and 250 in Amherst.
“We’re probably going to end up decreasing the amount of units again, because we want a project to start rolling,” he told Boston.com. “We’re not interested in talking and talking and talking and never doing anything with this. We’re interested in creating housing, and affordable housing.”
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He envisions Pioneer Pointe as part of the solution to Massachusetts’s housing shortage and said he hopes it will create new opportunities for older adults to downsize and free up homes for young families.
“These things are really necessary to move forward and to take some of the heat out of the supply and demand issue, because there’s no supply and the demand is so intense that it just throws everything off,” Wallack said. “The rents are too high, there’s not enough inventory, and people are looking and they can’t find anything.”
As a result, he added, “When you do a project like Juggler Meadow, it really throws some movement into the system there, and it loosens it up in kind of a wonderful way.”
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