After Glaceau was purchased by Coca-Cola in 2007, Carol Dollard, the company's chief operating officer, stayed on as a consultant, then retired in 2010. Shortly before leaving the company, she purchased a 12-acre property in Greenwich, Conn., and began to build her dream home. The homebuilding process lasted four years; her retirement, five. “I tried it and went crazy after a year or two,” Dollard said, and so launched a beverage company called Agua in 2013.
Today, Agua products are sold across the country and Dollard is selling the house, listing it for $21 million with Sally Slater at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “We spend six months a year in Florida and then travel around,” she said. “We’re just not there enough.”
When Dollard and her husband, William, a retired bond trader, purchased the property for what she says was about $7 million, it was in bad shape. “The land had a house that was falling down and a few outbuildings that were condemned,” she said. “It was an opportunity.” She hired Paul Stephan Marchese, a Greenwich architect, and Conte & Conte, a local landscape architecture firm, and set about designing an equestrian compound. “I sat with the architect and designed every single room,” she said. (This was, let’s remember, during the early, doomed days of her retirement.) The house covers more than 10,000 square feet and has six bedrooms, seven baths, and three half-baths on three floors. “I wanted to be able to walk in the front door and have an entry foyer so large that I could look from the front straight to the back of the house and see the horse paddocks,” she said.
Dollard also eschewed a formal living room. “I’ve lived in so many houses where I’ve had a beautiful living room that I’ve never, ever used,” she said. Instead, she built seating and entertainment areas in the kitchen and dining rooms. The ground floor also houses a massive master-bedroom suite, which is connected to an office on the second floor, where there are another four bedrooms with en suite baths. The lower level, which opens out onto the pool, has a rec room, kitchen, full bath, sauna, gym, storage rooms, and a thousand-bottle wine cellar. The house also has a four-car garage.
The real star of the property might not even be the house: Dollard built what she said might be the only approved indoor horse-riding ring in Greenwich alongside stables for eight horses. In the same horse-riding area, there’s a three-bay garage and tool shed, above which there’s a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment for staff.
The grounds, which were landscaped (they moved an 80-foot-tall maple tree 15 feet rather than cut it down), include eight individual paddocks for the horses, a trail that runs the circumference of the property which Dollard estimates is around a half-mile long, perennial gardens, and mature shrubs and bushes.
The property has been on the market for more than a year—Greenwich’s real estate slump is well-documented—but Dollard is confident it will sell. “It’s definitely unique,” she said. “It’s one of a kind in Greenwich, and beyond.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
