The Daytons
They live in Waccabuc in a Modern Cotswold Cottage they call BUCLAND, which they designed in conjunction with Two Tall Trees Design and Gretchen Farrell Interiors, which has a clean, understated, and elegant aesthetic. They have a 6 year old son - who is Duncan’s mini-me, and a 1 ½ year old daughter - who is Renea’s spitting image. Renea recently sold HAYFIELDS Cafe & Florist, which she purchased in 2015, and developed into the go-to neighborhood stop for a bite, and the host of an impressive once-a-month classic car gathering, before selling the place for a handsome profit in 2024. Duncan is a real estate developer, retired but renowned race car driver, a respected exotic car collector, and a stalwart of the community. They love to travel, and all the pictures from their adventures are emblematic of their love for life. They’re always smiling, and have lots of friends. And, despite their 25-year difference in age, it’s Duncan who‘s more rambunctious.
Duncan Dayton grew up in Wayzata, Minnesota, the great grandson of the man who founded Dayton’s Daylight Store, which became Dayton’s and then merged with J. L. Hudson’s to become Dayton-Hudson, and which is now known as Target. “Following in the footsteps of the two generations before them, my dad and his four brothers started Target as a discounter in 1963 and took it public in 1967,” Duncan explains. “They built the first fully enclosed shopping mall in the United States, called Southdale, and went on to build seven or eight other regional malls in addition to their network of centralized downtown department stores. They owned the bookstore chain B. Dalton, and bought Marshall Fields which they sold to May Department Stores, who sold to Macy’s.”
“In the Great Depression, my grandfather refused to lay anyone off or to lower wages, and my family always ran Dayton’s with ‘the customer is always right’ attitude,” Duncan recounts. “There’s a favorite family story about a woman buying a fancy dress from my father, who saw her wearing the dress at an event that weekend, whereupon the woman came into the store the next day to return the dress - which was stained, saying it ‘didn’t fit’. …My dad accepted the return with a smile and assisted the woman in picking out something new. As a result of that kind of stewardship, when the Haft brothers attempted a hostile corporate takeover in the late ‘80s, the family was able to solicit the support of thousands of loyal customers who were small shareholders to thwart the attempt. …And, because my dad and my uncles were firm believers in the idea that, in order to be a world-class city, Minneapolis needed to have world-class culture, they started something called the Five Percent Club - getting together with many of the other business leaders in Minnesota and committing 5% of their corporate pre-tax profits to locally focused charities. That ‘Five Percent Club’ helped build the stadiums for the Vikings and the Twins and funded hundreds of local institutions!”
So it’s fair to say that Duncan grew up in a prominent family, but Duncan explains that, “From the time Target went public, it was clear that neither I nor any of my fifteen cousins were going to continue the family’s generational leadership of the business. …And although we did have many advantages - like enjoying the extended family’s ‘cabin’ in Northern Minnesota that my grandfather bought in the midst of the Great Depression - my dad, who was a Tank Commander in World War II, made sure that my brother and I learned the virtue of hard work and the value of a dollar! In the winters, my friends and I would restore old wooden boats, and then sell them for a profit the next summer at the marina where I pumped gas.”
“I went to Highcroft Country Day, then Blake, which merged with Northrop School, in Minneapolis, where I graduated from high school,” Duncan recounts. “Then I went to Connecticut College, following in my mother’s footsteps…and joining my brother, and graduated in 1981, with a Major in Government and a lot of courses in Art History and Architecture. Then I moved back to Minneapolis to take courses in Engineering at the University of Minnesota. And, at the same time, I bought a small building on the corner of Lake Street and Minnetonka Ave, in our home town, and formed a partnership with the neighboring drive-thru bank building’s owner and developed an award winning, boutique office building that served as the center of business in Wayzata. …I’ve been doing real estate development ever since.”
“I moved to Boston to get my Masters in Design Studies and Computer Aided Design from Harvard, and lived with my first wife in Dover,” Duncan continues. “Several years later, I went looking for a community closer to New York City and stumbled upon the property on Mills Road in North Salem which I purchased in 1995 - and where I lived until 2018, when Renea and I completed Bucland and moved-in here.”
“I’ve always been into cars,” Duncan exclaims. “I distinctly remember that my father took me to the premier of the movie Grand Prix, with James Garner, in 1966, when I was seven…and there was a scene at the start of the Grand Prix of Monaco…and I was hooked! By the time I was ten, I was racing a go kart. Before I could legally drive, I used to race an old Ford Grenada around on frozen lakes in Minnesota seeing just how far I could drift the car. And my brother and I were always restoring cars, so by the time I was driving I knew a thing or two about engines and making a car go fast. In 1978, when I was 19, I went to the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen and one of my dad’s friends, who worked for STP, got us tickets. We hopped a few fences and stood on the grid with Mario Andretti and his 1978 Lotus79, the ‘John Player Special’ Formula 1 car, also known as the ‘Black Beauty’, in which he’d won the 1978 World Championship. …Some years later, I bought it! …I raced that car and many other vintage automobiles, for about 35 years. I’ve raced all over the world and at all the great tracks in America, Europe, Australia and South Africa.” In fact, Duncan is the winningest driver in the history of Monaco - with 11 historic race wins! He turned professional in 1994, and finished 3rd in the F-2000 National Championship in 1995. He’s raced in long-distance events at the 24 Hours of LeMans, in France, and at Daytona, Sebring, and other fabled tracks.
Duncan continues, “In 2000, when I was 41, I decided I was too old to be driving open-wheel formula cars, and so I refocused my team at ‘Highcroft Racing’ on winning the International Motor Sports Association Championship. I built a race shop at the Danbury Airport to house the operation. I was still racing sports cars, but started to really focus on the sport as a business. I bought a car from Rob Dyson, and we campaigned that car as an independent team, but knew that in order to be really successful, we needed to be what’s known as a ‘Factory Team’. …Honda had put out an RFP looking for teams to develop and manage their new sports car program. They’d already heard from several experienced teams when I got in touch with them. I put together a proposal to send them… and at the last second realized that what I’d come up with was total BS…and instead sent a photograph of my Highcroft facility with a letter asking for a meeting. I flew to Torrance, California and met with the top brass, thanks to an introduction from Danny Sullivan. When we walked out of the meeting, I didn’t think there was a hope in hell of getting the deal, but they agreed to a site visit in Danbury. At the time I only had four or five guys working in the shop, so before they showed up, I hired about twenty young professionals from the local temp agency to come walk around with clipboards and file folders, and call each other, so the phones were ringing off the hook. …It looked like we were a huge well oiled machine! When they called me a couple of days later and said we’d won the bid I was shocked. …We ended up running the Honda Prototype Team from 2007 to 2010, and we won back-to-back Championships in 2009 and 2010.” “I’ve always been into automobile design, and have a special place in my heart for cars which I’ve restored,” Duncan discloses.
“I’ve pared down my collection, but I still own the Black Beauty, and I guess the two favorite sports cars I own today are my 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 and the 1960 Maserati 3500 GT. The businessman in me is proud to report that almost every car I’ve ever owned has appreciated in value.”
He’s also been the Chairman of the Board of his alma mater Connecticut College, and of NOLS, The National Outdoor Leadership School, about which Duncan comments, “I had the chance to spend a month living in the wilds of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, on a NOLS excursion between my freshman and sophomore years of college - and it changed my life! I think the lessons of independence and interdependence, self-confidence, and respect for nature were invaluable for me, and that every kid should get to experience being in the wilderness.” At 40, Duncan climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and he’s also been to the Mt. Everest Base Camp with Scott Fisher, who died in the ‘Into Thin Air’ tragedy.
Renea is from Houston, Texas, where her father was a landman and stepmom’s family founded SYSCO Foods, and her mother was a construction manager and her stepdad was a Vietnam veteran and a Partner at a prominent insurance firm. Renea went to Belaire High School, an inner-city public school, and then to Trinity University in San Antonio, with a scholarship to play Division III basketball. While in college, she got a job with the San Antonio Spurs and ran the Gamecrew that entertained the fans during time-outs and half-time.
“I had a boyfriend from college who lived in New York, so when I graduated I wanted to move to the Northeast - and I applied for any job that had to do with marketing and communications in the sports industry,” Renea explains. “In 2006, I got the job as Marketing and Public Relations Manager at the historic Lime Rock Park race track in Lakeville, Connecticut. I immersed myself in everything Lime Rock and everything having to do with racing cars - and I made up for whatever I didn’t know with some dedication, hard work, moxie, and intuition. When the executives from Coca-Cola met with our team to decide whether or not to buy Lime Rock’s sponsorship package and surprised me, in front of Skip Barber - the famous race driving instructor and then-owner of Lime Rock, and my CEO, with the pop question ‘What’s your favorite Coke product?’ - I answered ‘Jack and Coke’...and it carried the day. I was good at my job and, in 2009, I became the CMO.”
“Part of my responsibility at Lime Rock right from the start was to get to know every race team owner - as they were the track’s key customers, and I met Duncan in that context,” Renea tells the story of how the two got together. “I wrote him an email that started with ‘Dear Mr. Dayton’, but it wasn’t long before we started flirting over email.” “Yeah,” Duncan interjects, “...It took a while with those emails, but before all that, when I first met Renea in a meeting at Lime Rock, I turned to a friend and said and said “I’m going to marry that woman!”
“Those emails started in the summer of 2007,” Renea recalls with a smile, “...and, on January 20, 2008, we finally went to dinner at the Mayflower Inn on our real first date…and we’ve gone to the Mayflower to celebrate the anniversary of that date every year since. I moved into the house on Mills Road in North Salem with Duncan not long thereafter, and we were married in 2012. We had our rehearsal dinner at Farmer & The Fish and the ceremony was at the Mead Chapel in Waccabuc.
…After a few years of commuting over an hour back and forth every day to work at Lime Rock, I decided to shift gears…and started to focus on the flower gardens at Mills Road, and the commercial viability of a local flower business. The local garden center in town needed a new caretaker and the property was sitting perfectly on the corner of Bloomer Road and 121. I knew I could turn that garden center - and former gas station - into a much more charming farmstand-style florist, farmers market, and coffee shop…all rolled into one. Every morning for weeks I’d stand out on the corner with a clicker counting cars to assess the commercial viability of the location…and then I went for it! Naturally, Hayfields had an automotive theme - we hung some of Duncan’s classic prints on the walls to decorate the store - and we hosted what became a big neighborhood gathering - called Cars & Coffee - held on the first Sunday of each month, bringing together like-minded car enthusiasts from all over the region.”
“Renea is extremely creative, knows how to produce an event, and sets a great vibe wherever she goes and whatever she does,” Duncan proclaims.
“She’s a thoughtful mom, the best friend anyone could have, and makes every day fun.” To which Renea responds, “...And Duncan is a petal-to-the-metal life-extremist in everything he does - not just car racing! He’s a great skier…he lived in Sun Valley for a year after college, when he was 22, and talks about how he skied 137 days that year, and always boasts about how many vertical feet he’s skied on his CMH Heliskiing trips. He approaches our current ski trips - and most of our excursions - with similar intensity and he has the calm of an older, wiser parent with the kids, and of course they have him wrapped around his finger. Duncan is already enraptured by how well our son handles the corners in his go kart, and is already saying that, as a six-year-old ‘he has the car control of some of the greatest drivers I’ve known’.”
The couple recently participated in the 1000 Miglia Experience Road Rally - driving up and down and across Florida, campaigning their 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 in the esteemed and refined, but very congenial competition. “We were First overall on day one, but on the second day it started raining cats and dogs…and the windshield wiper motor seized up… and the fuel pump shorted-out. We had to wait for a couple of hours before we got a flatbed to that night’s hotel. You have to expect trouble with cars, but this one was a bit more grueling than one would hope.
…Though we did manage to finish,” Duncan says with a wry smile. To which Renea, with her usual cup-is-totally-full outlook, adds, “It was a perfect weekend!”