Stone Barns Center
Pocantico Hills, N.Y.
Machado and Silvetti Associates (Agricultural Center) /
Asfour Guzy Architects (Blue Hill)

Machado and Silvetti’s renovation of a complex of barns and Asfour Guzy’s restaurant design rejuvenate fallow farmland

© Michael Moran

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

Over the past few decades, as more farmland around New York City has been grabbed up by developers building 10,000-(or more)-square-foot houses, the small farmer has often succumbed to the pressures of the buyers’ market. But ironically, aid for the farmer has come—at least in Pocantico Hills, New York—from the landed gentry. David Rockefeller and his daughter Peggy Dulany have turned a complex of stone barns designed for the Rockefeller family by Grosvernor Atterbury in the early 1930s into the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Here, a working farm for livestock, chickens, and vegetables, plus a learning facility and cultural center, now demonstrate to the public the advantages of local, community-based farming and environmentally sensitive agricultural practices.

As an extra draw to the rustic complex, the center also includes a restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, run by the owners of the much-acclaimed Blue Hill Restaurant in Greenwich Village. At Stone Barns, the produce and livestock from the farm are transformed into exceptional cuisine.

The fieldstone barns, which display the same craft, scale, and detail of Atterbury’s famed Tudor-style Forest Hill Gardens in Queens, New York, were built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to provide fresh milk for his large family (including his sons Nelson and David) at Kykuit, their weekend home. Kykuit is now a house-museum, and the barns long ago ceased to serve any function. Yet their stone walls and silos, arranged around large and small courtyards, coupled with their bucolic setting in Pocantico Hills, 20 miles from Manhattan, are unique. So Rockefeller turned 80 acres of the originally 4,000-acre family estate into a farmland preserve for the center, dedicated to his late wife, Peggy. With a $30 million investment, Rockefeller and Dulany put together an imaginative mix of nonprofit and for-profit uses, of which the first phase, some 40,000 square feet, opened last year.

Meanwhile, Dan, David, and Laureen Barber, the restaurateurs of the for-profit restaurant, brought in Asfour Guzy Architects, designers of Blue Hill in Greenwich Village. The country restaurant accommodates 125 guests in the former dairy barn, plus another 60 in private dining rooms, and 48 on outdoor dining terraces.

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Formal name of Project: Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture Location: Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Gross square footage: 60,000 sq. ft. Owner: Restoration Corperation Client Representative: Horne Rose, LLC Architect: Machado and Silvetti Associates, Inc. 560 Harrison Avenue Third Floor Boston, Massachusetts 02138 Tel 617.426.7070 Fax 617.426.3604 www.machado-silvetti.com

Formal name of Project: Stone Barns Center Location: Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Gross square footage: 14,000 sq. ft. Owner: David Rockefeller Dan and David Barber Architect: Asfour Guzy Architects 594 Broadway Suite 1204 New York, NY 10012 (212) 334-9350 (212) 334-9009 fax www.asfourguzy.com