“Nothing fussy, just nice,” repeats Michelle. “We were hoping it would be tasteful.”

“I wanted something that didn’t look like some McMansion,” says Jacobs.

Despite Jacobs’s best intentions, some people in Greenwich view his new house as just that: an unsightly McMansion. Last December, at a public hearing before Greenwich’s Planning and Zoning Commission, a lawyer representing Conyers Farm had this to say about the house: “It is too large, it is too in-your-face, it is too visible.”

Next to offer her view of the matter was Regina “Gigi” Mahon-Theobald, a former journalist who heads the Planning and Architectural-Review Committee at Conyers Farm. “I’ve been on the parc for I believe it’s six years,” she said, “and there’s never in my experience been a project that aroused anywhere near the depth of passion, really, that this one has. It’s really kind of an uproar.”

One month later, when I meet Mahon-Theobald, she gets right to the point: “Jacobs is building a monster manse,” she declares. “In the past few years, there has been teardown after teardown. All these old, interesting houses are torn down every day, and they put up these massive things that are overwhelming the properties, overwhelming the roads. With the Jacobs house you finally get to the point where you say, ‘Enough is enough.’” Apparently there are limits, even in Greenwich.

As I stand in Mahon-Theobald’s kitchen while she searches for the keys to her Mercedes, it occurs to me that her kitchen may be one of the biggest I’ve ever been in. In fact, her whole house is big—very big. And it’s brand-new. She and her husband, Thomas Theobald, former vice-chairman of Citicorp, built it from scratch just a few years ago. Coincidentally, their architect, Boris Baranovich, is the architect who designed Steven Cohen’s mansion.

Mahon-Theobald has found her car keys. “The whole problem,” she says as we step outside, “is you have these men with a billion dollars and they’ve never been said ‘no’ to.”

On March 13, Joseph Jacobs was awakened from his dream. That morning, a little before seven, he heard the telephone ring. His wife rolled over in bed, reached for the receiver, and handed it to him; Jacobs heard an unfamiliar voice on the other end. It was a reporter from the financial network CNBC: “Mr. Jacobs? Do you have any response to the article in today’s Times?”

There it was, for all to see, on the front page of *The New York Times’*s Metro section: an article about Jacobs’s house. The headline: land of the big puts “too big” to the test.

By the time Jacobs got to his office, a camera crew was waiting for him in the lobby. That day, hanging in the sky above Jacobs’s bucolic 11 acres were television news helicopters, droning, greedy for substance. Covering the big story about the big house were reporters from CNN, CBS, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show, News 12 Connecticut, and Hartford’s WTIC NewsTalk 1080 talk-radio station. Even Jon Stewart called and invited Jacobs to go on The Daily Show.

The next morning, Matt Lauer introduced Jacobs’s home on the Today show. “Katie,” he began, turning to his co-host, “Americans are getting bigger and bigger these days. I’m not talking about our waistlines.” You’d have thought that Jacobs was the first man in Greenwich to have built a big house.

Having just hired a spokesperson, Jacobs released a statement. “In light of the publicity,” it read, “I no longer have any plans to build this house.”

I spoke with Jacobs a few weeks ago; he called me having just come out of a corporate board meeting in Washington, D.C. Between the architectural fees and the engineering fees, he’d spent more than $1 million planning his dream house. But he’d moved on, he told me. He’d already bought another house in Greenwich, a house built in 2003 that he described as “a Cape Cod Robert Stern–style shingle house.” It’s only 11,500 square feet.

“It has no squash court,” Jacobs said good-naturedly, “but listen, it’s perfectly O.K.”

Additional reporting by John Ortved.

Nina Munk is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.