A Big Dig titan planted his family in North Reading. Their estate is for sale.

Every May, the pear trees bloom in Ridgeway Estates.

Lelio “Les” Marino planted them himself, lining the streets of the North Reading development he began first carving out of the woods in the late 1970s. May 6 was his birthday, and more than two decades after his death, the trees still mark it.

“Every May 6, they bloom, and it’s the most beautiful thing you would ever want to see,” said his daughter, Laura Marino. “Every time I see those pear trees, I think of him.”

Marino, the founder of Modern Continental — the Cambridge construction giant best known for its work on the Big Dig — died in 2004 at age 69.

During his career, Boston knew Marino as a builder of tunnels and the owner of a farm in Natick, a restaurant in Cambridge, and an integrative health center. Ridgeway Estates was something more personal: his first big development in North Reading, and the place he decided his family would stay. When he laid out Ridgeway, he set aside three lots for his children.

Now, his daughter Laura’s house, a nearly 11,300-square-foot house at the center of the development, 4 Wren Circle, is on the market for $3.85 million through Marina Tramontozzi and Kristine Pecora of True North Realty. The Marino family designed the house with Modern Continental’s architect. Between the main house and an addition, there are five bedrooms, six full bathrooms, and three half-bathrooms on 10.6 acres.

“As Italian families do, they always end up moving in close to each other,” Laura said. “He wanted his kids close to him.” Her father was born in Chieti, Italy, and her mother is from Rome.

Laura filled much of the home with her design eye in 1998. A salmon-colored dining room is reminiscent of a palette she fell in love with in Italy, there’s Italian artwork throughout, and the kitchen was designed for family feasts of all sizes.

“I wanted the kids to have a warm home to bring their friends home to,” she said. “As it turns out, that’s exactly what this house represented.”

That is evident over the family’s 28 years in the home. Grandbabies bathed in the island sink, two daughters descended the main staircase in their wedding gowns, and there were graduation parties, retirement parties, and Christmas parties. The party spills outside, too; the grounds include a heated pool, a cabana, a stone patio, and a fire pit.

“You can put 75 to 100 people in this house, and you won’t even know it,” Laura said. “It’s cozy when there’s two, but yet it can handle 75 people, and I still don’t know how that’s possible.”

The night Marino died at his own house two minutes away, the family compound gained its final wing.

“The next day, [my mother] said, ‘Do you mind if I build just something small next to you?’” Laura said.

The something small became a 4,000-square-foot addition with its own entrance, kitchen, and bedroom suite, where Anna Maria Marino has lived for more than two decades — close enough to help keep the traditions, and to watch four generations pass through the house. No longer in need of so much space, Laura is moving to a town house.

“It’s going to give me a chance to decorate, which I love,” she said. “That’s the part of my father that I have, and my mother says it all the time.”

She hopes whoever buys the house uses it the way her family did — at full capacity. She also remembers the line her father left her with after one visit. “He said, ‘Baby, this is a beautiful house. I’m happy for you. But never forget where you came from.’”