Photo courtesy of Sixteen Penny
John Holland
Owner, Sixteen Penny
Age: 60
Industry experience: 35 years
Former stables, monasteries and farmland presented opportunities for John Holland to launch a development business following decades in his family’s construction firm, the Holland Companies. A registered architect, John Holland helped establish a design-build division at Holland Companies before branching out into a development with Sixteen Penny, his Wellesley-based firm that’s proposing redevelopment of a former Jamaica Plain monastery as a 190,000 square-foot apartment and condominium building. Holland’s past work ranges from adaptive reuse of a South End stable building to reactivation of a Vermont farm that supplies ingredients to three affiliated restaurants.
Q: What’s the history of your Peace Field Farm project in Woodstock, Vermont?
A: I’m speaking to you from the farmhouse table right now. About 13 years ago, I bought a dormant farm, and originally it was put into Vermont Land Trust. I bought it from a family that had farmed this land for 100 years, thinking at the time that it had rights to break into three different lots. I’ll sell off the two sections of it, and I’ll keep maybe 60 acres, and build a house eventually.
So one day on a walk around the farm with Vermont Land Trust, I basically was saying, “It’s kind of sad because all this stuff is just going away.” And Donna Foster from Vermont Land Trust said, “John, we have a program where we help people find farmers that could reactivate stuff.” So that started a year working with them to put out requests for proposals for farmers.
Around 2018, the state of Vermont changed their laws, and they allowed for accessory on-farm businesses to be located on the farm, where you could do processing, or you could actually run restaurant or event spaces out of it.
So I ended up teaming up with a local farmer that also had culinary restaurant skills, and the two of us have basically brought this farm back to life. There’re 40 cows out in the backyard, and there’s 100 Mangalitsa heritage pigs on the other side of the hill. There’re 15 acres of plantings and 200 egg-laying hens, and basically all the products that are coming off this farm throughput through the barn, which can run events and restaurants. But we also bought a building in downtown Woodstock at 61 Central that we’ve redeveloped into a couple of restaurant spaces as well. So, all of the outputs from this farm go through three restaurants and one event space, basically. That’s sort of my little midlife crisis project.
We also built residential in the downtown when we bought 61 Central, and built in four townhouses. We’re going to keep those as rentals for our employees: 25 that work within the farm, the three restaurants and an event space.
Q: What are your plans for the 15 Mount Carmel St. former monastery in Danvers?
A: We are programming a project, with two [potential] development [options] underway. One is under the new YIGBY [Yes in God’s Back Yard] legislation that’s actually sitting in a House and Senate [conference] committee right now, and that very well could be a permit pathway for that project. And if the [starter home] ballot initiative passes in November, we have, like, 20 single-family homes that could be done on 5,000 square-foot house lots. If YIGBY passes, those 40 lots would be 80 duplexes.
Q: What’s the most unusual surprise you’ve found behind the walls in a reuse project?
A: What a great question. If I go back to the 50,000 square foot remodel of the Jordan Marsh Horse Stable at 477 Harrison Ave., there were 160 shower pans buried under the floor that were basically about an inch and a half deep, so each horse had its bathtub. So, if they had to use the bathroom, it would all wash into the city sewage system.
Q: There’s been some recent focus on updating building codes in Massachusetts to help increase smaller multifamily projects. What else should the state consider to remove impediments to housing production?
A: I would first fix our zoning and entitlements and basically clear out how difficult it is to actually permit in the state first before I would start changing 100 years of really good building code that’s out there. The IBC is a document that can always be improved upon, but I think it’s a good document. But all that being said, if a building is sprinklered, and a building is three stories or less, could you get away with one stair? Sure. Would that have a huge effect on it? I think it might, maybe on some 24-unit buildings where you did a grouping where you had a central stairwell that connected maybe six units on each side. You could build something along those lines.
But to me, to drive down the cost of housing, we’re going to have to build more modular: Solve the problem with different techniques of delivering housing. If we were going to put in single-family homes or duplexes up in Danvers, I’m building them all with modular. The average age of master plumbers in Massachusetts is 58 years old right now. So God help us to find the labor available to get what we need to get built, if the governor is talking about building 222,000 housing units.
Q: You redesigned the 920 Centre St. project in Jamaica Plain in response to critiques from the Arnold Arboretum. Will there be further revisions?
A: We’ve done our first [Boston Planning Department impact advisory group] meeting on that, and we had overwhelming support. We are heading to Boston Civic Design Commission, and we’re reintroducing a project right now that has some changes from the one that they saw a year ago. My expectations are that we’ll get through BCDC, and then we’re heading for a board vote.
Q: What’s the story behind the name Sixteen Penny?
A: It’s how we do nails. The 16-penny is commonly known as a “spike.” Way back in the day, you’d have if you were framing something, you’d have a pouch of sixteens and a pouch of eights, and you’d put a building together with it. So, it’s basically just a building element
Q: What else should people know about Sixteen Penny?
A: Part of the reason I’m starting this new business is I have my oldest son Seamus joined up with me. He’s a Rensselaer [Polytechnic Institute] graduate out of structural engineering. He just finished at MIT Center for Real Estate, and he has joined the company to help build this development business. And then we have staff architects that came with me from Holland: Paul Baccala and Tom Mullane, who are both instrumental in helping put all these projects together. There’s the core four of us right now.
Holland’s Five Favorite Recent Reads:
- “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari
- “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
- “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
- “Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari
- “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America” by Conor Dougherty
