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for the New York couple (they prefer their last name not be used), who have spent the past two years building and getting to know their Vermont ski house.
The end product is everything they wanted-a carefully crafted, four-bedroom timber-frame house tucked into a spectacular 50-acre parcel just 10 minutes from Smugglers’ Notch and 45 minutes from their old college stomping grounds in Burlington. The home’s red, barn-style garage, its towering fieldstone fireplace and exposed timbers in the great room, and its hand-loomed wool rugs and wood-cuts by renowned printmaker Sabra Field add up to a place that’s nothing like the couple’s Colonial back in Westchester Country. “This house has so much more character,” says Joe. Stowe architect Sam Scofield, who designed the home, describes it as a cross between a farmhouse and a mountain cabin.
Dressed in cords and a chocolate-brown cable knit sweater, Jennifer is pretty but not showy, much like her mountain home. Her husband, Joe, who has been outside tinkering with a set of white lights on an uncooperative conifer, walks into the great room and sits down across from his wife. He wears jeans, a button-down shirt and an energetic expression.
As they sit by the fire, they explain that the house occasionally speaks up. Literally. It makes the loud creaks typical of timber-frame construction as the wood settles. The old architectural style employs no nails, only pegs pounded in with a wooden mallet. Local companies North Woods Joinery and Peregrine Contracting spent a year building the house, finishing in late 2004.
The great room’s frosty windows look out on Mt. Mansfield and the top of the Madonna chair at Smuggs. Two circular chandeliers with beeswax housings custom-made to look like candles hang from the 27-foot vaulted ceiling. A 16-seat Vermont farm table near the windows and a thick Oriental rug by the fire invite guests to stay a while, so long as they follow the house rule stated on a sign near the mantel: “Be nice or leave.” The great room is the heart of the house, with the kitchen opening off to one side and a hallway to the master suite on the other.
Stairs lead to three cozy bedrooms upstairs, where Scofield deliberately |
