In the early 1990s, Steve McMenamin was doing the reverse commute from Manhattan to his job as a portfolio manager with Gabelli in Rye, New York, when he decided enough was enough.
“I wanted to eliminate the commute,” he says, and so, together with his wife, Ingrid, found a one-acre plot of land in nearby Greenwich, Connecticut (“Greenwich had lower taxes,” in comparison to Westchester he explains), which over time he expanded by acquiring an adjacent property. The couple became so integrated with the community that eventually they purchased a well-known restaurant in town and then developed an even better known farm, which they’ve worked on nearly full time for over a decade.
But at 66, McMenamin finds himself slowing down. “Doing this by ourselves is like climbing Mount Everest every year,” he says. “People say ‘this must be your passion’ and I say ‘no, my passion is actually skiing in Switzerland. This is hard work.’”
And so they’re putting the entire six acre property–house and farm together–on the market for $4 million with Joann Erb of Brown Harris Stevens. “Our commitment is that we’ll still be here in Greenwich, and I’ll spend one year with whoever takes over the property. I want someone to carry on the tradition of growing nutrient-dense food for the community.”
Banker to Farmer
McMenamin was not initially an obvious candidate for farming.
By the mid ’90s he was an executive in Cantor Fitzgerald’s equities division (he worked in the World Trade Center). “One day I looked down, and I said, ‘There’s no rope that goes down 1,000 feet,’” he recalls, and duly opened a Cantor Fitzgerald office in Stamford, Connecticut, with about 40 employees in 1997. The year before he set up the Stamford office, he also created the Greenwich Roundtable, an organization devoted, McMenamin says, “to educate sophisticated investors and create code of best practices for the investor community around the world.”
He started his own company, Indian Harbor LLC, in 1999. “I helped start the hedge fund industry,” McMenamin says. “So I was running around the world basically creating a code of best practices, but also opening up sovereign wealth funds to all this new alternative investment.”
In 2008, as he was sitting with a friend in the Versailles Restaurant in downtown Greenwich, he learned its owner had suddenly died. After looking into the restaurant’s books, he realized “they’re doing $250,000 in revenue and their costs were $140,000,” he said. “That’s a profit.” After buying the restaurant for what he recalls was about $130,000, he and his wife moved it to a nearby space, brought in a new chef, and, in McMenamin’s telling, grew its business but only managed a two to three percent profit margin.
In running the restaurant, though, the couple noticed that “there are no growers here or anywhere–people are getting food from Salinas, California,” McMenamin says. And so in 2012 they bought the property adjacent to their house, “knocked the house down, and built a crop field.”
They sold the restaurant in 2013. McMenamin shut down Indian Harbor in 2015 (“pricing became efficient—these people were still charging 2-and-20 for subpar returns, and I didn’t want to be a part of it”) and then devoted himself full time to growing several dozen crops, which he and Ingrid then sold, first through a farm stand and then via a wholesale business, catering to, among others, a handful of the area’s country clubs.
The Property
At the time the couple bought it, the original land only had a small cottage. “It’s an eminently historical area,” McMenamin says, “and I looked at the land and said what kind of house should we build here?” The logical conclusion, he continues, was a colonial house.
After finding an architect in Castine, Maine, who created designs for colonial-era houses, they purchased the plans for a center-hall colonial. “It has all the earmarks of an authentic house built in the era,” he says. The house, completed in 1997, covers just over 3,000 square feet. The ground floor has a large kitchen, living room, dining room and library. Upstairs are three bedrooms and two baths. The basement level has a massage room, Moroccan hammam and sauna.
Next to the house is a barn with a three-bay garage, a vegetable washing and packing facility and a workshop; on the barn’s second floor is an office, bedroom and bath. With its eight inch-thick concrete walls, the basement of the garage qualifies as a nuclear blast shelter. And so McMenamin installed a radiation Hepa filter classified for the use of 24 people, and connected it to what the home’s marketing materials say are “military grade security and emergency communications.” “I’m not a prepper or anything like that,” McMenamin says. “We were just seizing the opportunity.”
The Farm
Versailles Farms, as the farm came to be known, is a small operation. “I didn’t hire anybody,” McMenamin says. Instead, he continues, “there’s this wonderful thing called YouTube, and I learned absolutely everything from it.” The couple supplemented their digital education with trips around the world; they acquired mushroom spawn in Japan, small tools in South Korea, and, in the process, became versed in various growing practices.
The farm, which uses regenerative growing methods in which crops are cultivated in biologically active soil and spaced tightly together, quickly took off. “I had a list of the chefs at the country clubs, and I started a wholesale business selling to them,” McMenamin says. “Demand went through the roof–it exceeded supply, and we were selling everything we were growing.”
Among the 52 crops he grows, McMenamin says the farm is the largest grower of shitake mushrooms in Connecticut; it also has a fresh cut-flower business. “There are too many people who have farms for aesthetic or cocktail party reasons,” he says. “But this isn’t about that–this is an economically viable enterprise.”
The couple might be done with this farm, but they’re not quite ready to walk away from growing altogether. “At the risk of sounding like a masochist, I’ve just bought nine-and-a-half acres right next door,” McMenamin says. “We’re building an orchard.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
