By Lauren Mechling
Photographs by Eric Korenman

“Okay, it’s a bit like a Hallmark movie,” Carrie Holland concedes with a big-hearted laugh. We’ve been strolling around the grounds of Hancock Shaker Village, the idyllic little world that she has had the very good fortune of calling her office for the past three years and change.

It’s a sweet-smelling June afternoon, and the Pittsfield campus is so charming it’s almost disorienting. We find a spot of shade under a majestic apple tree and watch the crouched figures across the field tending to tidy rows of vegetables. We amble on, past a patch of lavender and a studio where a friendly blacksmith named Bob is working on a Shaker-style spoon, and into the Round Stone Barn, the village’s 200-year-old crown jewel. The Shakers who founded the settlement, the third Shaker community in the country, arranged their animals in giant feeding circles inside. Today it is quiet, save for the occasional cluck coming from the direction of the barn’s chicken coop.

Holland reaches into the cage and tickles a few chickens on the head, then brings me into the adjoining barn to meet Luna and her two kids, Lentil and Lettuce. “They were born in April, so I guess that makes them teenagers now,” Holland says of the young goats. Luna stretches out her forelegs and bleats.

An offshoot branch of Quaker Christianity, the Shakers built self-sufficient villages across the Northeast during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Shaker women were seen as spiritual and political equals to men, and the community owned all property collectively. Living apart from regular society, the Shakers became great artisans and inventors, and are perhaps best remembered for their sleek, minimalist furniture.

Holland, who has served as the village’s director and CEO since 2023, has announced she will step down at the end of the 2026 season. In her relatively short tenure, she learned the lay of the land and established herself as a master of the arts of both fundraising and barn-raising. In addition to doubling the cultural institution’s endowment, she collaborated closely with the cast and crew of “The Testament of Ann Lee,” which filmed at the village, and launched a Shaker dinner series featuring A-list chefs. In September, David Israelow of Four Corners will oversee the menu. Guests will gather at long tables outside the Round Stone Barn, dressed in limited-edition table linens created exclusively for Hancock Shaker Village, by design-world darlings Hopie and Lily Stockman, the Los Angeles sisters behind Block Shop Textiles. But Holland’s presence here is perhaps most obvious in the way people light up around her. Everybody’s in—docents, gift shop cashiers, farmhands, and even a visitor who drifts over to tell Holland how good her breakfast was the other day (no more context is given, but Holland seems to know exactly what this woman is talking about).

Holland with Hancock Shaker Village icon Charlie Dutelle, who has been a volunteer at the farm for decades.

Our loop around the campus terminates at a building wrapped in Tyvek. One by one, construction workers drift outside to get a moment with Holland, who is not like other CEOs. Before she came to Hancock Shaker Village, Holland was not from the world of museums and development, so she knows how to simultaneously tease and talk turkey with a construction crew. She ribs herself for having “soft computer hands.” The contractor, Keith, laughs and chats a little longer.

The exchange feels less like boss and employee than two lifelong neighbors catching up over a fence.

There’s no way the new Visitors Center & Center for Shaker Studies won’t be ready in time. The building is Holland’s swan song—and nobody involved wants to be the one who lets her down.

You could call the new structure at Hancock Shaker Village a “visitors center,” but you could also call Versailles a “house.” Located in the building that previously served as the main portal on and off the campus, the new iteration of the multi-purpose hub will brim with sunlight, a Shaker-coded muted color palette, and historical curiosities. The elegantly plain design includes a two-story atrium, Shaker-style angled window casings, and cabinetry-style display cases that sweep to the ceilings. There are multiple gallery rooms, some set up with little more than tables, chairs, and extraordinary views of the Round Stone Barn.

The community room’s simple design lets the spectacular view do the talking. A suite of galleries will host temporary exhibitions. A sky-high custom cabinet of curiosities was designed around a selection of permanent objects on view.

This summer also sees the 200th anniversary of the Round Stone Barn. At the celebratory events planned around the milestone, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform throughout the grounds and indie-folk musician Ida Mae will give a concert in the round. The barn’s circular design allowed ox-drawn wagons to enter, unload hay, and exit without needing to back up. “There’s a reason every design student studies them. The Shakers were obsessed with figuring out the most efficient way of doing everything,” Holland says. “They had such a precise vision.”

During her tenure, Holland oversaw historic restoration projects on the Meetinghouse, Garden Tool Shed, Sisters’ Dairy, and Ministry Wash House. She saved the trickiest for last: delivering the visitor center of visitors’ centers. “It just couldn’t get traction,” she says of the long-discussed plan to give the village’s communal area the refresh it deserves. “A lot of the pieces were coming together, but it needed that little push,” Holland says.

The original $10 million budget accordion-folded to $8 million, which didn’t faze Yugon Kim, the Boston-based architect behind the rebuild. A former furnituremaker with a lifelong devotion to Shaker design, Kim speaks of the project not as a work assignment but a logic puzzle and valentine in one. “I was a furnituremaker when I was younger, so I always carried the Shaker tradition with me,” he says. “We always say, what would the Shakers do? That was especially true here, where budgetary constraints kept arising.”

When a tight budget forced the team to leave an existing pipe in place rather than relocating it as they’d planned, Kim took it in stride. “If you walk through one of those Shaker dwellings, you’ll see all these mirrored pipes for stoves everywhere,” he says. “So it made it actually more Shaker by leaving it.”

Kim had already worked with two other executive directors when Holland came on board. She prioritized the wants and needs of the local community, and added spaces intended for gathering and lingering. “Carrie has such a talent for bringing people together and holding community at the front of her mind,” says Michael Crotty, who works alongside Holland as the village’s director of marketing and communications. A former CMO with stints at Neiman Marcus and Hudson Bay Company, Crotty adds, “In some ways, both of us came uniquely unqualified for these jobs.”

If anything, Holland has proven that unique and unexpected are forces for good when paired with a genuine passion for the community you are serving. She loves the Berkshires so much that she’s leaving behind a bounty of parting gifts: a new center for the community, healthier coffers for the institution, and the opportunity to live the Hallmark Shaker fantasy for one lucky job applicant. Godspeed to all.