EAST HILL FARM 764 East Hill Road, New Marlborough, Massachusetts
227 acres in the southern Berkshires, rare in prime Southern Berkshire county at any price: a complete estate and working farm with its restoration already done, a guest complex that works now and could be adapted in multi-faceted ways, open pastures, water, and a boundary that touches state forest to the north and conservation land along part of the south.
THE LAND
The scale here is unusual and so is the privacy. Lawns and gardens with majestic old growth trees and gardens with fifty years of intention in them, stone and hedge and bed arranged by someone thinking about the view from the house. A spring fed pond of roughly four acres. Pastures and paddocks served by hydrants engineered against freezing. Meadow, hayfield, and forest. Private roads and trails running through all of it.
Closer to the house: a gunite pool below a fieldstone waterfall, a pool house, a fully resurfaced tennis court, a greenhouse, and a garden shed handsome enough that people stop at it to imagine themselves making it their own personal space and gazing out the doors and windows.
The acreage is enrolled in Chapter 61A.
EQUINE
The property was built around horses and still reads that way. The Arabian barn, the paddock structure, the water hydrants, the open pasture, the woodland trails and the possibility for a network across 227 contiguous acres. Boarding, training, therapeutic riding, and rescue operations have each been raised by parties who have walked it. Riding stables are among the uses specifically enumerated in the New Marlborough bylaw as available by special permit.
GATHERINGS
Enough distance in every direction that sound and parking are absorbed on site rather than pushed onto a neighbor. Weddings, family gatherings, corporate retreats, and wellness or workshop programming and a myriad of other possibilities could unfold. The guest barn's ten bedrooms over 6,668 square feet mean people can stay, which is the part most properties in this category cannot solve.
HOSPITALITY
New Marlborough has a real history here, which is worth knowing before anyone assumes a town this small would be unfamiliar with the idea.
Gedney Farm, roughly six minutes from this door, has operated for decades as an inn, restaurant, and high end wedding venue. The Old Inn on the Green sits just down the road. Mepal Manor, also in New Marlborough, ran for years as an inn and spa and wedding venue before being converted into a high end residential substance treatment facility, which it remains.
None of that guarantees an outcome here. It does mean this is not an idea the town has never encountered.
THE MAIN HOUSE
The Thomas Shepard House was built in 1798. Individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1984, when the restoration was completed after taking the home down to the ground and rebuilding it not as it had evolved randomly over 200 years as old houses do, but how it was built in a combination of Georgian and Federal styles. The listing in the registry does not confer restrictions on what changes a new owner wishes to make, subject to the town's bylaws and building codes.
The core has been restored to museum standard. Hand blown glass in the windows. Wide board original floors with a patina that can not be replicated. Five fireplaces that draw wonderfully. Eight foot ceilings on the first floor, which was ambitious for a farmhouse in 1798 and still reads that way when you walk in. Gracious, elegant living space that still is at its core a farmhouse and is one with the land - dogs, muddy boots, flowers cut from the garden and vegetables harvested that you grew. Five bedrooms, five and a half baths and about five thousand square feet.
The structural work is finished. Cedar shake roof largely replaced in 2021. Viessmann boiler, ductwork and two air handlers in place, which an HVAC professional can evaluate for cooling. Private well. Backup generator. Fiber to the property, which matters more than it sounds like it should for anyone planning to work or host here.
Kitchens and baths are an opportunity for the next owner to shape. Nothing about them is structural and nothing about them was deferred out of neglect. The hard money went into the parts of an eighteenth century house that are expensive to save and impossible to fake.
THE BARNS
Two, and they do different work. Each with soaring interiors.
The first is an eighteenth century barn, found in the Pioneer Valley near Amherst, taken down, moved here, and rebuilt post by post and beam by beam. It is the kind of structure that no longer gets built and increasingly does not get saved.
The second was raised in the 1930s to breed Arabian horses and has since been reimagined into four self contained duplex residences. Ten bedrooms and nine baths in total across 6,668 square feet, with the potential for three additional bedrooms based on the current layouts. Each residence has its own full kitchen, its own fireplace, and a large open plan living area under a roofline that climbs to twenty feet at the peak. Three share a new combination oil and wood boiler. The fourth runs on a propane system.
The kitchens and baths exist and they function. This is not a shell awaiting conversion. It is four complete dwellings, lettable in their current condition, which is an unusual position for a property of this kind and a meaningful one for anyone underwriting a use that depends on beds.
LOCATION
Five minutes to the Southfield Store. Six to Gedney Farm and the Old Inn on the Green. Eighteen to Great Barrington. Two and a half hours to New York City and about the same to Boston. The property feels considerably further from all of it than the drive time suggests, which is the point.
USE AND PERMITTING
The property is offered as a residence and a working farm. Any commercial, non-agricultural use, including equine operations, event or venue use, lodging, and hospitality, is subject to the application for and issuance of a special permit by the Town of New Marlborough. Prospective buyers should conduct their own due diligence with the Town regarding any intended use.
OFFERED AT $3,998,000