On a crowded afternoon at Full Circle in Gardiner, children zigzag across the lawn while adults cluster at picnic tables beneath the trees. People drift between Gardiner Bakehouse and Benton Beer Garden, pausing along garden paths or under the deep porch of the campus’s main building. A musician holds a hand drum amid the crowd. The Shawangunk Ridge rises behind it all.
The activity looks spontaneous, but the conditions that produced it were carefully planned.
Christina and Mike Benevento purchased the empty lot on Bruynswick Road about four years ago with the idea of creating a home for Hudson Valley Trailworks, the trail-building company Mike co-owns. From there, the project expanded into a collection of locally owned businesses organized around shared green space, alongside a nonprofit charged with turning that space over to the community.
Today, Full Circle includes Gardiner Bakehouse, Benton Beer Garden, Daisy’s Ice Cream, Hudson Valley Trailworks, the Living Room performance and gathering space, and Full Circle Commons, the nonprofit Christina leads as executive director. Each business operates independently, but together they form what the Beneventos describe as an ecosystem—one designed to create repeated opportunities for people to cross paths.
The idea had a long gestation. When the couple moved to Gardiner from Brooklyn 14 years ago, they hoped to open an indoor climbing gym. “We just really wanted a community spot where people could gather and be active together,” Christina says. “When we moved here from Brooklyn, we realized we didn’t have the community—we didn’t understand the community and what it needed.”
After several false starts, they abandoned the gym. Years later, as Hudson Valley Trailworks began looking for a physical headquarters, the Beneventos encountered the empty lot. It sat in an area zoned as a hamlet, which aligned neatly with their emerging idea for a compact center of commerce and social activity.
At the same time, one of Christina’s closest friends was operating a microbakery from her kitchen. The Beneventos had also become friends with Greg and Melissa Gagne, the owners of New Paltz gourmet sop and sandwich joint The Grazery. Instead of filling storefronts with whoever might sign a lease, they invited friends whose businesses could complement one another and attract people at different hours of the day. “It started organically,” Christina says. “We were responding to the relationships that we built along the way.” The Gagnes now run Benton Beer Garden at Full Circle.
A Language for Gathering
The physical plan took much of its inspiration from A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, the influential 1977 architectural handbook by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel.
The book identifies 253 recurring “patterns” associated with places that support satisfying human activity. Its scale ranges from the organization of regions and towns down to gardens, rooms, windows, alcoves, and building materials. Each entry defines a common design problem, discusses the relationships involved, and proposes a flexible response that can be adapted to local circumstances. The authors intended the system to be useful to ordinary residents working with their neighbors as well as to architects and planners.
“It’s almost like a way of life,” Mike says. Alexander and his collaborators, he explains, studied places where they found “vibrancy, connection, people engaged with each other and with their surroundings,” then identified qualities that appeared repeatedly.
The Beneventos selected approximately 40 of the book’s patterns for Full Circle. They influenced the placement of the buildings, the width of the overhangs, the central green, the paths through the property, and design decisions extending down to individual materials.
The effect is visible from almost any point on the campus. The businesses face common outdoor areas, while curving paths carry visitors past gardens, porches, play areas, and seating arranged in varying degrees of proximity. Parents can sit with food or drinks while watching children roam. Someone visiting one business inevitably sees activity at the others.
Full Circle’s version of community-building demands no pledge of participation. A person can still arrive solely for a sourdough loaf or a burger and a beer.
“The place meets that person where they’re at,” Mike says. “They don’t have to hear about reneighboring or community or Taoist philosophy or building structures. They just want to come for a beer and a burger, and that’s perfect.”
Room for the Unplanned
The Gardiner Bakehouse established Full Circle’s morning constituency, while Benton Beer Garden brought in afternoon and evening customers. Families came for the lawn and the freedom it gave their children. Music introduced another circle through concerts, the Nest Sessions, and a free Monday-night community jam.
Those populations began to overlap. Christina recalls a group of thirtysomethings who initially came for beer, then joined the music jam, started playing Uno in the Living Room, and eventually volunteered. One regular, an Accenture employee, noticed that Full Circle needed better Wi-Fi and offered to overhaul the network himself.
Such small acts represent what the Beneventos call “reneighboring”: rebuilding the habits of familiarity, reciprocity, and shared responsibility that once developed through town squares, houses of worship, neighborhood bars, and other common meeting grounds. The Living Room provides a flexible headquarters for that effort. Full Circle Commons doesn’t charge rent for its use, allowing community needs to shape the calendar.
One regular visitor, a caregiver for her mother, told Christina how difficult it was to find meaningful activities for older adults experiencing memory loss. Together, they created a monthly memory cafe featuring singing, art, and movement. When Stone Wave Yoga closed its Gardiner studio, Full Circle became a temporary home for its classes. Local bands began using the Living Room as rehearsal space. A couple moved a backyard wedding celebration there when smoke and rain threatened their plans.
The campus has also hosted makers’ markets, food-pantry fundraising, art workshops, and a 22-foot community loom built by Mike and local woodworker Matt Rogers, with artist Paula Kucera and local fashion teachers helping to lead the project. A gathering for new mothers is also taking shape. “I can’t do these things by myself,” Christina says. “They have to be rooted in somebody else coming in.”
That distinction is central to her job. She sees herself as a steward who establishes support for ideas emerging from the community, with the eventual goal of making Full Circle Commons more broadly community-run.
Full Circle is still an early experiment; its programming has been underway for about two years. The businesses bring people to the property and help support shared space that might not survive on event rentals alone. The nonprofit then gives those visitors ways to become participants, volunteers, collaborators, and, sometimes, neighbors.
The Beneventos resist defining what Full Circle should become in five or 10 years. Its future, Mike says, depends upon what Gardiner needs at that point. Too much prescription could cause the project to “become calcified” and lose its ability to respond.
For now, success occurs at human scale: a caregiver proposes a program, musicians find one another, a customer fixes the Wi-Fi, or two people who arrived for unrelated reasons begin talking beneath the porch. “Can we remember what it means to be a good neighbor?” Mike asks. “That’s what we’re pointing to when we say reneighbor.”
