Joe Farrell is a man of simple pleasures.
“I make a triangle every day from my house, to my office, to the Candy Kitchen,” says the developer, 51, who lives in Bridgehampton and lunches every day at the same coffee shop.
His life’s interruptions are to jet down to Florida, where he is also building some of the wildest mansions of this day and age, and his greatest pleasures are being home to tuck his kids in at night. “I said to my wife, ‘If I’m doing the same exact thing with you in 30 years, I’ll be a happy man.’ ”
But this happy man has been throwing real estate bombshells on the east end of Long Island for the past 19 years, selling his houses to the likes of Kelly Ripa, Rudy Giuliani, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Johnson and the various captains of industry whose names rarely make the papers.
Farrell has been interested in real estate since he was in the fourth grade and his parents moved from Hicksville to Huntington, Long Island.
“There was a builder named Frank who had five spec houses that he built across the street from us. He’d leave in a Cadillac every day. And in 1971 that made an impression on me. We lived near the woods, so I started building treehouses and stuff like that.”
Farrell originally planned to go to school for architecture. “Just before going to college to be an architect, my best friend’s father pulled me aside and he told me to go to school for finance, and he said, ‘If you really like finance hire the architect.’ ”
Farrell would take a job on Wall Street in the late 1980s (where he would rub elbows with the likes of “Wolf of Wall Street” himself, Jordan Belfort, among others) before landing on the Mercantile Exchange.
But in 1995 he finally realized that old dream of developing property — he bought a foreclosed piece of land in Brookville and built a house on the plot.
When he finally sold the place for $1.3 million, he cleared a $500,000 profit.
From this auspicious beginning, Joe Farrell’s numbers have tantalized ever since.
12: The number of feet the wall needs to be moved to convert the indoor regulation-sized squash court in Farrell’s house into a regulation racket ball court. (It also turns into a basketball court.)
$550,000: The rental price of Sandcastle for two weeks this summer — or $1 million for the month.
5: Number of summers in a row Sandcastle has rented for.
$59.5 million: The initial asking price of Sandcastle, his 17,000-square-foot estate that he wound up living in.
$43.5 million: The offer that Farrell got (and ultimately passed on) for the same house. “My kids said, ‘Dad, c’mon!”
6: Residents living in his house: himself, his wife, his two sons, his daughter and his golden retriever, Sonny.
$400,000: The figure Jay-Z and Beyoncé rented Farrell’s Sandcastle for back in 2012 for the summer.
$240 million: Total inventory of real estate Farrell currently has on the market.
$475,000: Amount Farrell sold his seat for on the Mercantile Exchange when he decided to build houses full-time. (He used the money to buy two plots of land in North Watermill and one in East Hampton.)
$65 million: The price of two houses ($32.5 million each) side by side that Farrell is building on spec in Manalapan, Fla.
360: Feet of shoreline at 1730 Lands End Road, the 7,600-square-foot spec house that Farrell currently has on the market in Manalapan, Fla., for $9.995 million.
170: The number of minutes in the movie “Patton,” which is his all-time favorite film. “It’s the only movie I can watch repeatedly,” Farrell says. “Although ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ wasn’t bad.”
$400: Farrell’s starting salary on Wall Street in the late 1980s.
80 to 100: Number of e-mails Farrell gets in a day.
1.5: Miles from home to work.