Rachel Pierce and John Lazenby
MONTPELIER — A farm, a home, a community, and a challenge to the status quo. That’s the vision behind Threshold Village, an intentional community putting down roots in Montpelier.
The colonial-style mansion at 100 East State Street sits on 3.6 secluded acres on a hill overlooking Montpelier. It was built in 1907 as a private home but has spent the last decade as private offices. Cover crops of peas, oats, and tillage radishes now grow where there was once a 30-car parking lot. Inside, carpenters retrofit the century-old building with 13 private bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and 3,000 square feet of common areas, including a spa and a movement space. When construction wraps in the coming weeks, it will open its doors as Threshold Village, a residential community striving for “collective and individual liberation.”
Founder Tom Stearns knows what it takes to grow something from seed. He started High Mowing Organic Seeds in 1996 and has been an organic farmer for over 25 years. Geraldine Vatan is one of several collaborators — the “Birth Team” — who helped shape the project. As a consultant and activist, she sees her role as “making sure there’s no rot in the seed.” Stearns and Vatan have looked hard at intentional communities around the world to determine what allows them to take root — and what causes them to fail.
“We have not figured out how to live with each other and how to live on the planet,” says Stearns. “I think we need laboratories to experiment and learn new ways of being.” To ground that vision, the community has named a set of core values, including shared power, radical care and abundance, reimagining belonging, and experimenting and play.
Shared Power
The classic model for decision-making in intentional communities is consensus, in which everyone weighs in, whether or not they have a stake in the outcome. Threshold Village leans more heavily on sociocracy, and members are encouraged to join circles that align with their interests: Land and Farm, Support and Care, Food, Finances, Membership, and Stewardship. The circles function semi-autonomously but stay connected through a central Core.
“The people who are closest to the decisions, closest to the work, have the most power in making those decisions,” Stearns says.
With the help of credit union loans and community solidarity financing, Stearns purchased the property for $2 million in 2025 through a mission-based low-profit limited liability company L3C. The goal is to transition to a co-ownership model, more in keeping with the community’s belief that “owning land is a limited colonial-minded concept.” Stearns acknowledges that his privilege as a white middle-aged man with a business background opened doors that would have been closed to others.
He says he aims to build “radical honesty” into the project’s DNA from the start, looking to Vatan and the rest of the community to hold him accountable for his blind spots. “Moving toward co-ownership is the goal,” says Vatan, “and we are starting here.”
Radical Care and Abundance
Threshold Village residents are called members rather than renters. Monthly fees are on a sliding scale from $1,250 to $1,750, which includes all utilities, a stocked pantry, produce from the farm, and access to an electric smart car. By pooling resources, Threshold Village aims to “de-couple the transactional nature of paying for housing and food.” Five percent of membership fees go to an emergency fund to help residents pay for sudden expenses such as a car repair, job loss, or health crisis. According to the community newsletter, the hope is that this system will “create a feeling of abundance for all and re-wire the oppressive class dynamics, scarcity, and financial insecurity that have existed for many of us.”
Reimagining Belonging
At a recent open house, visitors ranged in age from their twenties to their seventies. Some assumed that Threshold Village was only for young people or that its openness to queer, trans, and polyamorous residents meant other identities and lifestyles were excluded. “We want everybody at the table,” says Vatan. “And yes, it’s going to be a safer place for people who are different. But the idea is not to create a clique.”
This openness resonates with Kelsey Poli. During the pandemic, Poli upended her structured life as a banker in New York, leaving her career and her marriage behind. “I always felt like a fish out of water,” she says. She has moved nomadically through retreat centers and intentional communities ever since, teaching yoga in exchange for room and board. She will arrive in Montpelier in early August for a month-long stay. “I’ve realized that I’m nourished in spaces where I can fully, freely be myself,” she says.
Experimenting and Play
That nourishment arrives on what Stearns calls “a chariot of play.” He describes himself in the community newsletter as “a dancer, a trickster.” Open houses have spilled into dance parties. “Dance is part of the nourishment of our bodies, our connection,” says Vatan, who is also a dancer. “These activities are a form of resistance and transformation.”
How long residents stay is one of many unresolved questions. Stearns expects more short-term residents like Poli initially, as people get a feel for the place. He sees value in having a certain amount of turnover energy.
Vatan has a different take: “I’m asking the universe … send us lifers, please.”
Open questions are part of the point. Threshold Village is “really a laboratory — a social experiment,” Stearns says.
A stately reminder of Montpelier’s past, 100 E. State Street is set to become a window into its future.
Open houses at Threshold Village are scheduled for Friday, July 24, 6 to 10 p.m., and Saturday, July 25, 12 to 4 p.m.
