‘Disney World’ for Boomers: Late Yankee Candle Founder’s Luxury Estate Could Be Turned Into Affordable Housing

The sprawling estate of the late Yankee Candle Co. founder could soon become affordable housing for older adults after lingering on the market for two years. 

The spectacular spread in Leverett, MA, first hit the market in 2022—two years after Michael Kittredge II’s death—for a jaw-dropping $23 million.

The price has since been slashed to $14,900,000—and now, the Kittredge family has enlisted Orlando-based developer Josh Wallack who has a vision for turning it into “Pioneer Point at Juggler Meadow: A 55+ Active Adult Community.” 

Wallack tells Realtor.com® that he became interested in the property after he and his wife visited the Yankee Candle founder’s son, Michael Kittredge III, at the estate in 2022 to learn more about scaling a candle business. Wallack’s wife owns her own line of candles. 

“The house blew me away,” he recalls. 

The plans for adult living on an estate ‘like Disneyland’

Located two hours west of Boston, the 60-acre property known as Juggler Meadow features 120,000 square feet of luxe living space across eight structures. There are 16 bedrooms, including five in the main 25,000-square-foot, Colonial-style home.

Selling the luxurious estate as a single-family home would be nearly impossible because the late founder was “really one of one,” says Wallack. 

So he pitched Kittredge III about turning the property into a multiunit community. 

“I said, ‘It’s going to be hard to find someone like your dad, a renaissance billionaire kind of guy who wants to pay millions of dollars to buy this and then pay millions of dollars a year to maintain it.’ I was like, ‘This place should become a lifestyle community,'” he tells Realtor.com.

In an interview with Boston.com, Wallack said that it makes “more sense than trying to find one person to take over this property, which is like owning Disneyland pretty much.”

Wallack tells Realtor.com he envisions turning the existing buildings into an “on-site restaurant, an on-site general store” and would turn the mansion into the community’s social club.

There is no shortage of amenities at the resortlike estate, which features an indoor water park, movie theater, spa, bowling alley, arcade, and music venue. 

Working with architect Chris Ritter, Wallack drew up plans for a 400-unit community.

A household earning about $84,000 a year would end up paying about $1,875 a month for an affordable unit, he told Boston.com.

Solving the Massachusetts housing crisis

If approved, the project would help reduce the overall housing shortage in Massachusetts, which currently stands at a deficit of around 200,000 homes.

It’s a particularly dire situation in nearby Amherst, where the University of Massachusetts has its flagship campus. As the housing market has shrunk, the area’s population has increased by 8.6% since 2000. Yet the total number of homes increased by just 1.1% between 2000 and 2010. Around 48.1% of local households qualify for income-based affordable housing programs.

“That area has a senior housing shortage, a family housing shortage, a student housing shortage,” Wallack says. “UMass Amherst, I think, had the biggest housing shortage issue in the entire country of any major university. So that area is dying for housing.”

The Amherst campus houses around 14,000 students in its residence halls, but the rest of its 22,800 students live off campus. To accommodate students, many homeowners have turned their properties into multiunit dormlike apartments, which has limited the number of single-family housing options in the area.

The history of Juggler Meadow

Kittredge II built his wealth selling candles in scents ranging from Soft Blanket to London Christmas Tea.

He began renovating the 60-acre estate in the early 1980s, intending to create a compound that would give his family everything they needed at their fingertips. The candle mogul refined the space over the next 30 years and outfitted it with practical—and not-so-practical—amenities.

That includes a fully staffed 55,000-square-foot spa, a bowling alley, two wine cellars, a clubhouse, an indoor water park, a nine-hole golf course, two tennis courts, and two climate-controlled car barns.

The billionaire also built a massive “concert-quality” stage where he invited Hall & Oates, The Doobie Brothers, and KC and the Sunshine Band to perform private shows.

With such an incredible array of activities and entertainment at a resident’s fingertips, Juggler Meadow has been rightly described as “compound meets country club meets Disney World.”

Why the home passed out of the family

While Kittredge II built this incredible retreat for his family to enjoy, it hasn’t been easy to maintain it since his passing. His daughter Kylie told Business Insider in 2022 that the home required a huge staff.

“Our employees had a family feel, and it was special,” Kylie said. “Those were the people that also raised me. There were a lot of people involved in my childhood, and I wouldn’t trade it.”

While the estate has remained on the market, it has cost a reported $1.5 million annually to maintain

After Kittredge II died in 2019, his family put the property—which sits between Amherst and Leverett—on the market as a single-family home.

But finding a buyer for the one-of-a-kind listing has been difficult, and the price has dropped precipitously over the past two years by $8.1 million.

“There were only a handful of homes listed in the city in October, which means the $14.9 million Yankee Candle mansion skewed the area’s price significantly higher,” says Realtor.com senior economic research analyst Hannah Jones.

“For comparison, a nearby four-bedroom, two-bath home on roughly an acre of land cost roughly $500,000, perhaps more indicative of the area’s real estate values,” adds Jones.

The fate of Juggler Meadow

Earlier this year, Wallack applied for a 40B permit, which allows developers to streamline the permit and zoning process in exchange for designing 20% to 25% of their builds for affordable housing.

If he passes the lengthy approval process, Wallack estimates that they’ll break ground by the end of 2025 and that the project will cost around $200 million.

He’s held several local meetings about his plans and has gotten a mixed response.

“We’ll always have people—they call them NIMBYs—that are critical of anything, but the moderate people, the progressive people, know that housing is needed,” he says.