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In summer, our living spaces expand to the great outdoors. For this issue of Nest, Seven Days’ quarterly guide to homes, design and real estate, we take a tour of the midcentury-modern STOCKMAYER HOUSE in Norwich. With architecture recalling that of Frank Lloyd Wright, it has a patio that melds outside and in; “the house gets twice as big in the summer,” owner Gregory Russo said. In Chittenden County, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT KEN MILLS flexes his professional skills in his home garden: He’s added a koi pond, Celtic labyrinth and meditation chamber, among other creative touches. If that inspires you to spruce up your own space, head to Burlington gift shop HOME & GARDEN VERMONT for nature-themed décor — and perhaps a bouquet of local blooms. Got lawn? You might want to try DAIRY DIRT, a soil-health ingredient made from dairy farm by-products. Read about that news and more — from WORKER HOUSING to CARPENTRY COURSES — in Last Quarter.
BY ANNE WALLACE ALLEN
BY KEN PICARD
Vermont Glove owner Sam Hooper employs 12 people to stitch goatskin at his factory in Randolph, but the workers often have trouble finding a place to live. Last year, Hooper decided to help and began to look for a building he could transform into apartments.
He settled on Windover House, a former inn that had been used as an assisted-living facility for 32 years before going on the market in 2021. The structure, built in 1807 as a private home, had 10,000 square feet of enclosed space and a huge porch.
“I had zero housing development experience,” said Hooper, 29, who paid $675,000 for the Randolph inn and four acres. “It was kind of daunting.”
But he did have some knowledge gleaned from renovating his renewable-energy-powered factory, also in an old building, and he had access to capital through family and the bank that was financing his business. Hooper saw potential in the inn to address his workers’ needs as well as the greater local housing supply.
“Vermont Glove needed housing, and the community needed housing,” said Hooper, who bought the centuryold glove company in 2018. It was also important to him that the construction be sustainable.
“Taking an existing building and bringing it up to
energy code and e ciency, from the climate activism side, felt good,” he said Hooper finished work on his nine new apartments in May. Rent starts at $1,000 per month for a studio. Most apartments have one or two bedrooms; there’s also a three-bedroom and a four-bedroom. Five Vermont Glove
upgrades, he said, the building would have cost $40,000 per year to heat. Last winter, it cost $6,500.
“This building had zero insulation in it,” Hooper said, “and it had a dinosaur of a boiler.”
He installed a wood-pellet system in the basement and spray-foamed the basement and attics. The work cost about $1 million, which Hooper borrowed from the bank and his parents.
In return for benefiting from weatherization rebates, he must rent the apartments at rates a ordable to local workers. The most he can charge for a studio, for example, is $1,067. Hooper noted that he had planned to keep rents low, anyway.
employees live in three of the apartments, and the others are rented to traveling nurses, students at Vermont Law & Graduate School, a teacher and others, Hooper said. He worked with public entities such as E ciency Vermont and 3E Thermal, which help property owners make energy-e ciency improvements, to learn how best to weatherize and heat the old inn. Without major
He’s learned a lot from renovating Windover House. Though he’s now deeply in debt, Hooper believes he’s created a road map of sorts for others who might want to undertake a similar project — and for himself if he decides to repurpose another building as apartments. Family money helps, he admitted, but public financing programs are available.
“You do have to be creative,” Hooper said.
To grow Vermont Glove — and be able to draw a salary — Hooper will eventually need to hire more employees. That will be easier if he can help them find a place to live.
“Now we’ll have a mechanism to do that,” he said.
I HAD ZERO HOUSING DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE
.
SAM HOOPER
A Randolph glove maker makes a detour into workforce housing
Large affordable housing developments are sprouting up in Vermont’s urban areas, but the pace of home building is much slower in small villages and towns.
To speed things up, Vermont officials have created a tool kit dubbed Homes for All. Its aim is to bring concepts such as design, planning, infrastructure and investment within reach of momand-pop developers who want to add a home or two to their town or village.
Starting out in real estate investment can be scary, said Amy Tomasso, a planning coordinator at the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Mistakes are expensive, and many of the small developers for whom the tool kit was created are also homeowners who want to preserve the rural look of their neighborhoods.
at’s a goal of the state and of many rural residents, too; public concern about altering Vermont’s character put the kibosh on some legislative changes proposed earlier this year that would have made it easier for developers to build.
Homes for All is creating a workbook and other guidance to help would-be builders navigate the thicket of rules and incentives they’ll encounter in the process.
“ is will be really useful to someone who cares about the housing crisis but doesn’t know where to start,” Tomasso said.
Chemical lawn products have fallen sharply out of favor in recent years, and homeowners are looking for more sustainable ways to keeps their grass emerald green.
Yet lawns remain deeply loved as places to play, relax and gaze at the results of one’s gardening efforts. In an effort to make these foundational acres of green more sustainable, a group of entrepreneurs has created Dairy Dirt, a lawn product made from the fiber that’s separated in the manure-digesting process on dairy farms.
Finding a use for cow by-products is helpful to farmers, and it helps divert dairy farm waste from the water supply — an important goal in Vermont.
e four founders, who live in Connecticut and Vermont, say their odor-free lawn product also serves as a sustainable soil ingredient that helps lawns thrive.
“Lawns aren’t inherently bad, but if you’re dumping a ton of Miracle-Gro and spraying with herbicides and pesticides, how do you get away from that?” said cofounder Brendan O’Brien, an ecologist with a master’s degree in nutrient recycling. “We’re here to make the existing food system and landscape more sustainable.”
e product is sold at four garden stores in Connecticut, where O’Brien said lawn care is serious business.
“People display their lawns and get into growing really nice grass,” O’Brien said. “ ere are TikTok people who focus on lawns.”
e partners are planning to ramp up production in the coming year and hope to start selling Dairy Dirt in Vermont in summer 2024. Right now, they’re enrolled in LaunchVT, a Burlington-based incubator program designed to grow small, local businesses.
Want to start a home project with confidence and know-how?
Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield is offering a two-day course in carpentry fundamentals on July 29 and 30. Students will learn key vocabulary, get comfortable using basic hand tools and complete a small project, such as a chicken coop. Beginners are welcome. Learn more at yestermorrow.org.
This will be really useful to someone who cares about the housing crisis but doesn’t know where to start.
AMY TOMASSO
Follow the winding stone footpath into Ken Mills’ home garden — through the large wooden church doors, past the metallic steampunk crab perched on a boulder, and pausing at the Japanese teahouse before entering the Celtic labyrinth — and a visitor might think, I have no idea what’s coming next.
That’s exactly how Mills intended it. Around each bend is another unexpected discovery. During my recent visit, the landscape architect offered to either show me around or let me explore the grounds on my own. When I chose the former, he seemed crestfallen.
“Really? I kind of like people exploring,” he said. “Discovering on your own gives you a slightly different perspective — and that’s actually the perspective I’m interested in.”
Still, Mills was an amiable tour guide. For 25 years, the longtime gardener and owner of Burlington-area landscape architecture firm Terra Logic has been working on this plot in northern Chittenden County, which includes a 1770s house he shares with his life partner, artist Jenn Karson. Having come to landscape design after leaving corporate America and following other creative paths, Mills has packed a lot of sensory inputs into the dense, two-acre property.
“Literally everything you see I planted, built or brought in,” he said. What was once an open meadow is now a sun-dappled woodland resplendent with European beech, weeping larch and Japanese maples, the ground a carpet of pachysandra, vinca, mayapples and sweet woodruff.
Yet Mills’ garden, a passion project and perpetual work in progress, never feels crowded or overly manicured. It’s open and airy, even in enclosed areas. One can sit beside the koi pond and listen to a gurgling waterfall and never slap a mosquito; last year, Mills screened in the entire pond, both to keep out pests and to protect the fish from hawks and herons.
The pond is one of several enclosures, along with the 12-by-20-foot screened-in teahouse and a smaller meditation chamber, that allow visitors to be simultaneously indoors and bathed in nature.
But it’s not all meant for quiet meditation beside a pool of frogs on lily pads. You can shoot hoops on Mills’ bluepainted basketball court or ascend the
Ken Mills’ garden integrates spaces for meditation, illusion, art and whimsyAn enclosed koi pond in Ken Mills’ garden
bridge above the labyrinth and take in a bird’s-eye view of the entire garden.
Mills built the labyrinth in the 1990s, before he had his landscaping firm or any heavy machinery. He hauled all the rocks from the road himself in a wheelbarrow, which took months. Unlike a maze, which is a puzzle to solve, the labyrinth is designed for ruminating on an idea or question, he explained. After following the path to its center, one hopefully arrives at some deeper insight.
“Once you have that clarity, then you should ascend to the heavens,” he said, raising his arms in a gesture of the structure’s metaphorical significance. In earlier years, Mills had a ladder that rose straight into the air, but it was unclimbable. So he replaced it with a fabricated steel bridge with wavelike railings, a spiral staircase at the entrance and a straight ladder at the exit. Mills initially envisioned having visitors leave the bridge via a playground slide, but there wasn’t enough room to make it work.
Instead, he attached a slide to the second floor of the house. “Why walk down stairs when you can slide?” he asked rhetorically.
That sense of whimsy and playfulness is evident throughout the garden. Tucked in a shady nook is a tombstone with two bowling shoes, a bowling ball and a pin protruding from the soil. A sign on the iron fence behind them reads, “Out of service.”
In other spots, Mills uses his knowledge of physics and engineering to create impressive illusions. One, a large metal sculpture titled “Unchained Desire,” is composed of two steel rings that appear to be drifting into space, tethered to the Earth by chains. Mills based the sculpture on a much larger, award-winning design he created for Burlington’s South End Arts + Business Association, which was supposed to cover the Pine Street silos outside Dealer.com. However, after the company was sold twice in two years, the new corporate owners nixed the project.
Another sculpture, which Mills designed and built in his “meditation corner,” received an award last year from the Vermont Nursery and Landscape Association/Green Works. Visitors approach the meditation corner via rectangular stone steps that seem to float on a sea of pachysandra. In the middle of this is a pool with a large white boulder at its center. Until a few months ago, a pump shot a fountain of water from beneath the stone, creating the illusion that the rock was held aloft on the spring.
Unfortunately, some workers in the garden accidentally toppled the 1,500pound boulder. Mills has since righted it, but the fountain no longer works.
“It was very cool,” he lamented. “Now I’m starting from scratch.”
Mills, who’s old enough to collect Social Security but doesn’t look his age, discovered his passion for landscape architecture relatively late in life. When he was a child, his parents had a one-acre property in Virginia Beach, Va., that was extensively landscaped.
“The truth is, I had to do all the work, and I absolutely hated it,” Mills said. “I swore that if I ever had a house, it would
have a big asphalt lawn. I wanted nothing to do with landscaping.”
Instead, he spent years chasing other careers. After earning an undergraduate degree in chemistry, he built custom furniture, then owned several restaurants in Virginia. On the recommendation of a friend, Mills moved to Vermont in 1985 and bought the house the following year. Through much of the 1980s and
’90s, he worked in biotechnology and information technology, designing instrumentation that screened for infectious diseases.
“That was pretty cool,” he said. “All of these things were intellectually interesting but not a passion.”
To satisfy his creative urges, Mills volunteered for projects involving film, theater and music, organizing events such as concerts and movie screenings at the Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington. In March 2003, he produced a concert with Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed in Ira Allen Chapel at the University of Vermont.
By then, Mills was doing landscape work professionally in Vermont. He
had his own company, with a truck, equipment, and crew of three or four.
“Out of all the things I was doing, it was really all about … spatial arrangement,” he said. Whether he was designing the ambience of a restaurant or the appearance of a theatrical set, Mills explained, the unifying theme was creating impressions.
“How do you move through space?” he asked. “How does that space a ect you, consciously and unconsciously? And how do you design space with all of that in mind?”
In 2008, eager to earn a name for himself, Mills decided to pursue a master’s degree in landscape architecture at the University of Arizona — “which is about as opposite from Vermont as you can get,” he acknowledged. Though other landscape architects told him that academic study would be a waste of his time — unlike most of his fellow students, he’d spent years working in the field — Mills wanted to gain a deeper understanding of environments, plants and ecologies, especially where water was involved.
“The future is all about water,” he said, “pollutions, droughts, floods [and] the whole changing climate.”
Ultimately, Mills sees his creative pursuits in his own garden as being less about the plants and biology than about design and synthesis. “How do you make something really di erent here and really di erent there, but make it feel like they belong together?” he mused. “How do you integrate things?”
Now, Mills would like to find ways for others to enjoy his creation and utilize the space, such as with small meditation retreats, painting classes or intimate musical events. As he put it, “This place is not for me. It isn’t. I just work here.” ➆
Learn more at terralogicvt.com.
LITERALLYEVERYTHING YOU SEE I PLANTED, BUILT OR BROUGHT IN.
KEN MILLS
When Tammy Heesakker and Gregory Russo’s real estate agent first brought them to see a modest, low-slung house on a hill in Norwich in 2015, the renter was practically camping in the living room and the place was falling apart.
“It was in a mad state of disrepair,” Russo recalled. Nevertheless, he recognized the look of the 1961 house: pouredconcrete floors, built-ins, narrow hallways that opened to a lofty living space with high clerestory windows. It looked like a house designed by celebrated 20th-century architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
“I was a fanboy,” Russo explained. Now a radiation oncologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, he grew up with a poster of Wright’s Fallingwater in his bedroom. Years later, he and Heesakker visited that iconic western Pennsylvania residence while living in Philadelphia. The couple were living in Boston when they saw the
Norwich house. Suspecting that the real estate agent had misidentified its architect — she had named someone they’d never heard of — they searched online and discovered it was designed by Allan J. Gelbin. A Wright acolyte, Gelbin apprenticed at Wright’s home studio at Taliesin East in Wisconsin from 1949 to 1953; he subsequently oversaw the construction of several Wright-designed homes and opened his own practice in Connecticut in 1957. (Wright died in 1959; Gelbin, in 1994.)
An address cross-check with the Gelbin archives at the Art Institute of Chicago confirmed that Gelbin designed the 2,100-square-foot, three-bedroom Norwich house for Walter and Sylvia Stockmayer and their two teenage sons. The Stockmayers had engaged Gelbin on the recommendation of their friend Lucille Zimmerman, whose 1951 Wright-designed house in Manchester, N.H., they admired.
Faced with such historical importance, Heesakker and Russo decided to take on the Stockmayer home’s rehabilitation. White River Junction architect Daniel Johnson guided the multiyear project, and Heesakker, who works in technology licensing at Dartmouth College and was then running her own consulting business, became the general contractor. She and Russo flew to Chicago to study the Gelbin archive’s correspondence, plans and documents in person before launching their project.
Their efforts won a 2022 Modernism in America Award of Excellence from Docomomo US, a nonprofit dedicated to the documentation and conservation of the modern movement. The house is
now listed in the national and Vermont registers of historic places.
In early June, the house was filmed for inclusion in the forthcoming 2023 documentary New England Modernism: Revolutionary Architecture in the 20th Century by filmmaker Jake Gorst. His films have examined the midcentury architecture of Long Island and Southern California, as well as period architects such as Albert Frey and Andrew Geller.
Vermont state architectural historian Devin Colman, who wrote the award
nomination, noted in it that the Stockmayer house is “architecturally significant as a very rare and wellpreserved example of Usonian design in Vermont.” Usonian houses were Wright’s compact and affordable version of his Prairie style and the progenitor of ranchstyle houses in the U.S. The name comes from the acronym for United States of North America.
The nomination continued, “It easily
could have been considered a tear-down, given its poor condition, small size, and valuable property, but fortunately the current owners … saw its potential.”
Heesakker and Johnson, principal and founder of Watershed Studio Architecture, recently gave Nest a tour of the house. Approached from the side via a carport, the long, low structure is built into the hill with the rear length sunk into a four-foot bank and the south-facing front side overlooking a stunning view of the Connecticut River Valley. On leafless days, Mount Ascutney is visible.
Rescue efforts started with the unique roof, which is flat with an asymmetrical central gabled portion — that is, one angle of the gable is longer and lower than the other. The couple replaced the asphaltand-pebbles construction with a rubber membrane edged with metal.
Inside, the “compression and expansion” typical of Usonian houses, Heesakker noted, is expressed in the way the narrow hallway paths lead from the front door to the open-plan dining and living areas and an office beyond a partial wall. Wright’s organic architecture favored natural materials, so the walls are made of dark golden-hued cypress wood in wide boards punctuated with narrow battens, all horizontally oriented to emphasize the shape of the house.
Other walls in the living area are made of red brick manufactured in a nearby Vermont town, according to Gelbin’s papers. He designed the decorative arrangement of cypress boards spanning the space between the top of the kitchen wall and the peaked ceiling — an eyecatching construction that Heesakker described as sculpture.
A light sand-colored, pebbly plaster completes the indoor wall materials — except for glass, which is everywhere: a wall of plate-glass panels stretching across the front façade; windowed gable ends; an office corner, where two windows meet à la Fallingwater. More light filters through two skylights.
Asked whether it was accurate to call the house Wrightian when Gelbin was the architect, Johnson opined, “You wouldn’t recognize how Gelbin’s style is different from Frank Lloyd Wright’s. Even Wright’s designs weren’t entirely done by him; his apprentices did them.”
Johnson’s own work is influenced by the organic architects, particularly Finnish midcentury master Alvar Aalto; his interest in “light, landscape and materials,” he said, echoes theirs.
In the Stockmayer house, Gelbin’s original elements, restored by Heesakker and Russo, are all around, including the built-in cypress couch with new, custom-made cushions; the
hanging Wrightian wood dining lamp and wall sconces with new fiberglasspaper shades; the original red Micarta kitchen countertops; and cypress cabinet boxes with new cypress doors stained to an exact match.
The couple’s biggest intervention is invisible. The house’s main source of heat, aside from a substantial brick fireplace, is radiant copper piping buried in a terracotta-colored concrete floor that’s scored in a four-foot-square grid. The heated floors had failed in the primary bedroom and bath, so Johnson supervised the floors’ dismantling and the installation of new pipes that travel from the central boiler room over the top of the kitchen and down through the walls.
“It was either that or having to dig a hole underneath the house to run them through,” Russo said, noting the house’s slab construction. New interior floors were poured using Wright’s favored technique — applied color hardener rather than integral color with as close a match as possible.
“They were very rigorous and passionate about the house,” Johnson said of his clients, adding that only one part of the project, the primary bath, went beyond restoration to renovation. Describing the bathroom as dark and outfitted with a tub that wasn’t original, the architect came up with the idea of
THEY WERE VERY RIGOROUS AND PASSIONATE ABOUT THE HOUSE.
DANIEL JOHNSON
expanding the floor plan to include an attached, Gelbin-designed brick planter outside the bathroom window. The house’s footprint thus remained unchanged while enough interior space was gained to install a shower.
Now that it’s summer, the Stockmayer house owners can enjoy its most Wrightian feature: the way outside and in meld through the continuation of the concrete floors to a wide outdoor patio edged with gravel. (Heesakker and Russo actually spent a summer with a wheelbarrow and sieve, rescuing the original gravel from the weeds rather than having it dug out and replaced.) Heesakker’s gardens expand down the hill, and Russo’s poured-concrete benches — a pandemic hobby — dot the yard.
“The house gets twice as big in the summer,” Russo declared.
The Stockmayers provided the impetus for Gelbin to come to Vermont; he subsequently designed and built four more homes in the Green Mountains between 1961 and 1975 — including his own, a short drive down the hill from the Stockmayers’. That one, the Allan Gelbin House (1973), is on the Norwich Historical Society’s popular midcentury walking tour.
The twice-a-summer offering (exteriors only) began in 2017, when
director Sarah Rooker researched and mounted a Norwich midcentury modern architecture exhibition at the society. (The Stockmayer House is not on the tour because it’s not within walking distance.)
Colman recalled seeing the Stockmayer house shortly after Heesakker and Russo had completed their project. “After restoring the underslab hot-water heating system — like, who does that? — and seeing everything they’d done, I thought, Amazing,” he recalled.
“I didn’t get the sense they were necessarily looking for an iconic house to restore,” Colman continued, “but I think they’re the type of people who take the time to understand and learn about things, and once they realized they had something special, they were able to switch their thinking from Here’s a rundown house that we’re going to renovate to Here’s an important work of architecture that we need to restore
“They’re the accidental preservationists,” he added. ➆
One day in late May, Jana Qualey stepped back to survey her vibrant arrangement of pink, spiky larkspur, white snapdragons, sprigs of violet columbine and yellow clusters of cottage yarrow, looking for a missing color or shape. She plucked a bulbous, pale green cabbage rose from a nearby flower bucket and inserted it among the other stems in a shallow, rectangular vase. It would soon embellish the food table at a Burlington engagement party.
“It’s supposed to look like a garden,” Jana said of the arrangement, which a longtime customer had ordered from her downtown Burlington gift shop, Home & Garden Vermont. “It’s going to take me a while. It’s going to be a lot of layering.”
Most days at the College Street shop, Jana plants herself at the small florist counter in the back, buried in blooms. Home & Garden abounds with color, texture and variety — and not just from the flowers. Most of the products, from pillows to ceramics to wall décor, fit the theme of the store’s name, evoking nature and the outdoors.
Jana’s husband, Jack Qualey, manages the front counter and takes flower orders by phone. Their dog, Camper, a diminutive white bichon, often joins them in the store and likes to perch on that counter. Jack hands notes to his wife with instructions for arrangements.
“Two bouquets, honey, for tomorrow morning,” he said as he put down the phone. One would go to a graduation party and another to a patient at the University of Vermont Medical Center. “She saw the flowers we did for the ICU,” he added of the customer.
Every two weeks, Jana designs an arrangement for the Church Street lululemon athletic-wear store, which requires all white flowers. For Zabby & Elf’s Stone Soup café across College Street, she asks co-owner Avery Rifkin what he wants. He always replies, “What you do,” she said.
In addition to custom orders, Jana sells fresh bouquets, for $20 to $40 apiece, to walk-in customers. Or she’ll customdesign a bunch on the spot.
This time of year, 75 percent of the shop’s blossoms come from nearby flower growers, including June Farm in Burlington’s Intervale and Sparrowhawk Farm in Charlotte.
Each week, the growers call to tell Jana what’s available, from the recent lilacs to peonies to June Farm’s snapdragons — a particular favorite.
“When she dropped these the other day, I was just giddy,” Jana said, fondling sprigs of white and apricot-colored buds that looked like pursed lips. “I mean, they’re beautiful.”
When local options wither in winter, Home & Garden relies on shipments from Green Mountain Florist Supply, a wholesale dealer in South Burlington with a year-round supply of imported varieties, including roses from Holland. During Vermont’s growing season, imports account for only about a quarter of Home & Garden’s mix.
Jana paused her garden-style floral arranging to help a customer with a bouquet of tulips. They were the last of the store’s seasonal selection from von Trapp Flowers in Waitsfield.
“It was out of my way,” customer Allie Dousevicz admitted. After seeing a von Trapp post on Instagram, she drove from Essex to snag a bunch of the fringe-tipped pink tulips for $20.
Dousevicz made the trip to Home & Garden “because then I can also find other trinkets and stuff that I love,” she said. Past treasures have included elegant journals and a mushroomembellished sweatshirt that her 10-year-old daughter wears on repeat. “It’s always stuff that you can’t find anywhere else,” Dousevicz said.
Next to Jana’s florist counter is a selection of Geometry recycled-plastic microfiber dish towels ($16), which are
among the store’s bestsellers. Along the upper walls, an array of vintagestyle posters ($20 each) features flora, honeybees, woodland foraging and owls.
The shop offers at least half a dozen brands of candles, including the popular orange-scented Volcano collection from Capri Blue and Linnea’s floral fragrances with double wicks for $40 each. Baby gifts in the back corner include a surplus of impossibly soft Jellycat stuffed animals.
Home & Garden also carries Beekman 1802 body soaps and lotions from upstate New York, Erin Flettdesigned cotton canvas bucket hats and bags from Maine, and Grace and Liliko’i jewelry made by a Williston mother and daughter.
A smattering of books includes flower-focused titles on dahlias and ranunculus along with signed copies of Homegrown: Cooking From My New England Roots, written by renowned chef Matt Jennings of Charlotte. Racks of ceramic vases and pitchers, felt flowers, and floral pillows dominate the center of the store.
Another of Home & Garden’s bestsellers is a $52 poster titled “ABCs of Life” that suggests an alphabetic philosophy: “Build something” for B, “Ignore the skeptics” for I, “Plant a seed” for P and so on.
The Qualeys raised their two children on Hilton Head Island, S.C., where Jack, now 71, had a thriving law practice. Jana, 62, was his office manager and dabbled
in flower arranging. She took a workshop in North Carolina from a floral design expert who became a friend; in 2016, Jana opened a gift and florist shop near her South Carolina home.
In April 2018 the couple moved to Vermont “to get away from hurricanes and be near our grandchildren,” Jack said. Their daughter, Megan, lives in Burlington and works part time at the shop during busy seasons. Her yard was the source of spirea sprays in the engagement party design.
The Qualeys meant to retire when they settled into their condo in the College and Battery building. They would stroll downtown on College Street and pass the little stand-alone brick building that then housed a Vermont Farm Table showroom. Jana figured she was merely fantasizing when she suggested opening a store there if the space ever became available.
In September that year, it did. Jack called the landlord the day they saw the rental sign and had a lease within a week. After some sprucing, Home & Garden opened in November 2018, just in time for the holidays.
Jana realized Home & Garden wouldn’t do well selling the nauticalthemed merchandise that dominated her store shelves in South Carolina. “I used to do oysters and shrimp,” she said. “It was very coastal.”
There, she also sold a ton of paper goods, monogrammed items and plaques with Bible quotes that didn’t fly in Vermont. For locals and tourists alike, she needed “moose and cows and mushrooms,” she said, and learned through trial and error.
Jana views Home & Garden’s niche among other downtown Burlington shops, including Slate and Common Deer, as a source of gifts for any budget. “I just want to find nice things at affordable prices,” she said. “And that’s why people come from Essex.”
Sales have climbed slightly but steadily every year, with retail items accounting for about 80 percent of them, Jack said. “You have to have all of this,” Jana said, gesturing around the store and then pointing to her florist counter, “to do this.”
“We rely so much on foot traffic,” Jack added. “Most people who walk by aren’t looking for flowers. They’re looking for gifts.”
When the shop closed for nearly two months during the COVID-19 lockdown, the owners set up their first e-commerce site and continued to take flower orders, offering free regional delivery. In a single day, Jack said, he drove from North Hero to Basin Harbor in Vergennes. Bloom stems covered the floor of Home & Garden, Jana recalled.
She credited loyal customers for Home & Garden’s survival: “They stayed with us.”
It was one of those early supporters who had placed the engagement party order. As Jana added the finishing touches, tucking branches of her daughter’s spirea around the cabbage rose, she deemed the arrangement satisfactory, “like you’re taking a walk through an English garden.”
