Chapter 1: It was all a dream
How a recurring dream and a lucky find in southwest Michigan kick-started Petite Acres.
If you’ve heard any start-up pitch, the founder story is a bit of myth. It’s not the founders’ fault. Gradually, the distance from the actual events grows further, and the retelling of the story smooths the truth like a stone tumbled in waves day after day. The ugly bits wash away and the story that remains is a tight three minutes.
I’ll get the ugly bits out of the way, so they’re not lost in time.
When we started to really think about Petite Acres, we weren’t actually thinking about Petite Acres at all. It was somewhere in the throes of the pandemic lockdowns. All of the puzzles had been puzzled. We’d watched the Queen’s Gambit and learned the game of chess. We’d made ketchup from scratch when the stores were out of Heinz. We were utterly trapped, bored and looking for space to stretch in our city legs.
The truth of this part is fuzzy, but I know for certain that I did have a recurring dream of me on a small farm in the year 2020. The part that I know is a little polished is me spinning around like Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music” on said small farm. Regardless, that dream, and my refusal to let it go, was the seed of the Petite Acres idea that embedded itself deep in my brain.
Meanwhile, my partner in nearly everything, (except for reading, we have very different tastes in books) Justin, was searching for space for his own reasons. His father - my father-in-law - was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and travel was growing more challenging as it progressed.
We set out to find a place to get away, with a little extra land to garden (dare I say, a small farm).
Both of our dreams came together when we heard the phrase “the land is deeded for commercial use,” fall out of our real estate agent’s mouth while we toured 1109 E. Buffalo.
That’s the moment when we truly started to bring to life what will become Petite Acres, a place to stay, play, host and move.
We got to work to understand the health of the land, the city’s interest in the project, and we assembled a team. By the time we purchased the land in December of 2023, we were confident that Petite Acres would be a welcome and fruitful addition to New Buffalo.
