Stuart Minton, Jr. spent his career working in advertising and, in the early 2000s, he was living happily in a New York City apartment building with his wife, Deborah.
Deborah Minton was walking through the building's lobby one day and happened across a glossy real estate magazine. One of the pages showed a property for sale at 199 Eichybush Road — roughly three hours north of the Big Apple in Kinderhook, New York. In 2008, she convinced Stuart to buy the property, now on the market for $14.5 million.
The Mintons spent the following decade turning the house into what it is today — a Greek Revival manor with a covered porch, four bedrooms, and five and a half bathrooms.
One evening, as the day was winding down, Stuart and Deborah took a seat on the porch and stared out to the open fields surrounding their home. Stuart Minton suddenly turned to his wife and said something she remembers to this day.
"He said, 'I found paradise here, and you created it for me,'" Deborah Minton said in an interview while fighting back tears. "That meant a lot to me. This became a paradise for both of us."
Stuart's paradise is now looking for a new owner, and potential buyers who have seen it so far have been blown away by the "sheer beauty and completeness of this property," said Michael Stasi, the home's listing agent.
"It's, by every standard, like an English country manor estate because of the size, number one, and the outer buildings that support the manor home," said Stasi, an agent with Corcoran Country Living
The outer buildings Stasi is referring to are a two-story guest house, a three-car garage with a second floor currently outfitted as a home office, a barn, a pool house and a greenhouse that Deborah Minton had constructed because she wanted to grow fresh vegetables.
The three-story main house, built in 1858, features eight fireplaces, an elevator and a library that Deborah Minton called her favorite room of the house.
"It's the room my husband and I gravitated to," she said. "When it got cold here, we'd have the fireplace burning and it just felt a little less formal than the other rooms."
During the couple's ownership, Deborah oversaw several changes to the property, including the removal of a former tennis court, demolishing an old pool and installing a new one elsewhere on the property and adding the covered porch and the greenhouse. The additions were "a great joy and a labor of love," she said.
The home — known as "Deep Acres" — sits in New York's Hudson Valley region. One of Kinderhook's biggest brags is that it gives residents immediate walking trail access to the Catskills Mountains, a chain of peaks connected to the larger Appalachian Mountains. Kinderhook is perhaps most famously known as the birthplace of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States.
"It's the quintessential upstate, Hudson Valley town," Stasi said while describing Kinderhook. "It's got a small, main commercial district centered around a town green. The town green has a farmers' market every week."
Stasi said he has watched potential buyers walk through the estate and they tend to make the same remarks.
"When they’re in the house, what strikes them is the first floor," he said. "For an 1850s house, it has 12-foot ceilings, [and] the second floor has 10-foot ceilings. When they walk out to the back covered porch and the uninterrupted views of the Catskills are there, it’s just another amazing point."
Deborah Minton said her husband passed away last year after 47 years of marriage, and upkeep on the estate has been more than she's willing to continue. She said she's looking forward to launching a new chapter in her life, knowing fully that the setting will not be at the Kinderhook home.
"It'll be a little bittersweet," she said. "But I hope that the people who come here appreciate what we’ve done and get as much joy as we had here."
