When he was just 15 years old, Ron Merigold bought his first piece of land. While biking to the bank to deposit the $50 a month he was paid for working at his family’s hardware store he noticed an elderly neighbor installing a “For Sale” sign on a lot. The man wanted $500 for the land, and young Merigold offered his $50 as a deposit on the spot. By the time he graduated from high school, Merigold (with his father, who bankrolled the additional $450) had pulled all the permits and built a house on the property.
Twenty-four years and a career in commercial construction later, Merigold again purchased property to build on, but this time the stakes, the challenges, and his ambitions were bigger. He bought 23 acres of environmentally sensitive land that others had shunned because they considered it a “conservation nightmare.” Where they had seen wetlands regulations and building restrictions, Merigold, an ardent conservationist, saw an opportunity to create Robin’s Nest, a community that would be in harmony with its site.
Merigold laid out Robin’s Nest using an aerial photograph of the land. As he worked the streets in between and around the wetlands, he noticed four pockets of open fields nestled among the mature trees and vernal pools. This is where he located “four little neighborhoods with trees left between them.” The land plan protects a fragile 400,000 square feet of the property with buffer zones and covenants. The houses sit on acre sites, but there is only a 15-foot cleared area around each one; a split-rail fence marks the boundary of the natural area. Merigold included a restriction on cutting trees and using chemical fertilizers in the deeds and gives homeowners a pamphlet on how to preserve wetlands. He also diverted all roof runoff into subsurface dry-wells and designed paved areas that exceed the impervious calculation by 25 percent.
Developing the land this way was more expensive, Merigold admits, but it has also attracted buyers to his $500,000 to $700,000 custom homes who care about the environment as much as he does. “I didn’t want to just build a subdivision,” Merigold says, “I wanted to build a community.” The Robin’s Nest community embraces not only the new homeowners, but it also includes the wild inhabitants of the woods and the wetlands.
Merigold Corp., Plainville, Mass.
www.merigoldcorp.com
Type of business: design/build custom builder/developer
Years in business: 5
Employees: 4
2004 volume: $1.5 million
2004 starts: 8
