Nest — Fall 2020

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FALL 2020

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An architecture firm’s creative nonprofit collabs

Stop and smell the “slow flowers” in Winooski

Hot tips from a home energy auditor

A family reclaims Jericho’s Fay Farm

Porch pumpkins spice up a Woodstock colonial

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As much as we might want this year to be over already, it’s hard to say goodbye to summer. But then fall comes along and mollifies us with spectacular foliage — and pumpkins. If you’re like one Woodstock family, that brings a good excuse to decorate the heck out of your front stoop. For an urban farmer in Winooski, this is flower-drying and bulb-planting time. Any season — for 35 years — has presented opportunities for Burlington firm Duncan Wisniewski Architecture to design buildings with a social mission. All these stories are within. And so is a convo with an energy auditor, who helps homeowners lower their bills while turning up the heat.

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Building Community ............... 6 After 35 years of civic-minded architecture, Duncan Wisniewski plans for the future

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BY A M Y L IL LY

In Season ...................................11 Kelsey Adams offers “slow flowers” from her Winooski urban garden

BY M A R G AR E T G R AY S O N

Getting Warmer ......................14

An energy auditor helps homeowners lower their bills as they raise the thermostat

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No Place Like Home................16 A Jericho family reclaims its ancestral farmhouse

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Falling for Squash ...................21 A porch full of pumpkins draws visitors to this Woodstock home

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16 ON THE COVER FALL 2020

6 An architecture firm’s creative nonprofit collabs

11 Stop and smell the “slow flowers” in Winooski

14 Hot tips from a home energy auditor

16 A family reclaims Jericho’s Fay Farm

21 Porch pumpkins spice up a Woodstock colonial

Nikki VanVoorhis and Matt Tashjian’s decorated front stoop on Central Street in Woodstock

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LUKE AWTRY

From left: Sam Beall, Phil Colteryahn, Michael Wisniewski, Dustin Fleming, Bob Duncan, Taryn Barrett and Arthur Chukhman

BuildingCommunity

BY A M Y L I L LY

The intersection of North Avenue and North Street in Burlington might as well be called Bob and Michael’s corner — that is, Bob Duncan and Michael Wisniewski, founding principals of Duncan Wisniewski Architecture. Three of the firm’s buildings are visible from the intersection: the new Sara Holbrook Community Center, with its playfully projecting window frames; Mermaid House, topped

by Leslie Fry’s sculpture of a mermaid at its prow-like corner; and the Committee on Temporary Shelter’s headquarters, a historic renovation and addition whose Daystation features a welcome panel in 10 languages that doubles as a gate.

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Elm Place in Milton

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After 35 years of civic-minded architecture, Duncan Wisniewski plans for the future

AR CHI T ECT UR E resident of the Wright House, a 36-unit senior housing building that DWA designed for Cathedral Square. By phone, the native of Burlington’s Old North End and former Shelburne Shipyard employee described the abundant natural light and roominess of his one-bedroom apartment.

Veronneau also described a building design that facilitates socializing among residents — though that luxury has been suspended during the pandemic.

“The common areas on the first floor I miss terribly right now,” he said. “In the Grand Room, there were movies once a month, tai chi, Sunday breakfast for whoever wanted it. Everyone kinda got together for a nice Sunday social.”

A hospice nurse who was given a tour of Memory Care at Allen Brook com-

architect Arthur Chukhman and designer Dustin Fleming. During a tour, the white-haired architect reveled in pointing out the building’s low-budget, environmentally responsible materials: colorful, nontoxic Marmoleum floor tiles; plywood lining the gym walls for durability; recycled-cotton ceiling panels for sound absorption; and triple-glazed windows — “a nice feature to have on a low-budget job,” Duncan said. Upstairs, those windows that project on the outside became cubic window seats with views of Lake Champlain.

Wisniewski, the philosophical voice of the pair, noted, “As affordable-housing architects, we can get too narrowminded: ‘Oh, we can’t afford that.’ It can stifle your imagination, but it also forces creativity.”

Committee on Temporary Shelter building entrance in Burlington

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These types of projects — respectively, a daycare and gathering place for low-income and refugee communities; affordable housing above a bank; and transitional housing for the homeless — are hallmarks of the 35-year-old firm.

So, too, is the creativity evident in their details and, less visible, their energy efficiency.

Since 1985, when Duncan and Wisniewski formed their Burlington practice, DWA has devoted part of its work to collaborating with nonprofit clients, such as the Champlain Housing Trust and Cathedral Square, to produce affordable housing, local health centers and other community improvement projects around Vermont. Many of these projects have won awards; several went to Elm Place, a senior housing project in Milton that was the first certified passive-house multifamily building in the state.

DWA’s projects do much more than fill a basic need; they create a sense of community for users and passersby alike.

They are invariably unpretentious yet manage to have curbside appeal despite limited budgets. Through details, scale and massing, the buildings knit together visually and enhance their economically underprivileged surroundings.

It’s often difficult to tell that DWA’s housing facilities are “affordable” — that is, for individuals who earn less than 60 percent of area median wage.

Affordable housing is not the sort of work architects typically go after, according to Joel Page, a principal at Scott + Partners Architecture in Essex Junction and immediate past board president of the Vermont chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

His firm and DWA are among just a handful in Vermont that compete for the affordable-housing and other projects that nonprofits put out for bid.

“Most of us who do multifamily housing — you don’t really make money doing it, [but] you understand the importance to people,” said Page. “[DWA] are principled and have a high regard for doing the right thing environmentally, and they have the right social bent.”

“They’re just very civic-minded,” agreed Cindy Reid, director of development at Cathedral Square. The nonprofit has worked with DWA on a number of affordable-housing projects for seniors and others, including Wright House at Harrington Village in Shelburne and Memory Care at Allen Brook in Williston. The latter is Vermont’s first memory care facility that is affordable for households on Medicaid.

“They bring a practical and artistic eye to help create beautiful homes for people of modest means,” Reid said.

Dana Veronneau, 60, is one pleased

mented, in a letter to Reid, “It was obvious how each of [the residents] felt this was their home rather than an institution.”

Duncan and Wisniewski met with a reporter at the new Sara Holbrook Community Center, a $3.2 million renovation and expansion project. Easygoing, intelligent men in their sixties, they’re as unpretentious as their buildings. They were quick to point out that the firm employs seven architects and designers and that they wanted two of them, architects Taryn Barrett and Sam Beall, to receive equal billing. In the course of reporting this story, the two founders secured their firm’s transition plan by naming Barrett and Beall principals and co-owners.

Typically at DWA, one older and one younger architect take each job together; Duncan designed Sara Holbrook with

Wisniewski’s creative interests range from literature to Argentine tango dancing to photography. Leading a reporter from Sara Holbrook to Mermaid House, which he designed, he described the historical markers represented in the building’s figurehead, which faces Lake Champlain: Her hair is formed of fish, her hat and coffeepot represent artifacts from the War of 1812 that were recovered from the building site, and the shell she emerges from references the Shell gas station that was formerly on the site.

Both men attributed their interest in social responsibility to their workingclass upbringings and early building experiences. Duncan, who is from Barre, became a bricklayer after his junior year of high school and soon joined the masons’ union like his father. He went on

to study architecture as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University.

Wisniewski, from Buffalo, N.Y., was the son of a factory worker and a printer.

A leave of absence halfway through his undergraduate career at Cornell University led to a nine-month stint as a framing carpenter. He continued that work during summers to pay for his architecture degree.

That knowledge of how things fit together from a builder’s point of view has helped make an admiring partner of Jeanne Morrissey, founding owner of general contracting company J.A. Morrissey.

“I have immense respect for them.

There’s no one better than them in terms of their comprehension of the [building] code,” Morrissey said. Her company has built a number of DWA’s projects, from the health center in Georgia in 1993 to its most recent, Black Flannel Brewing in Essex Junction.

Morrissey gained a lasting trust in the firm during that first job.

She recalled, “Bob noticed something he had done was just simply a mistake: The way he drew a detail wasn’t going to work. And — this is very rare — but he wanted to pay us to fix it. When he stepped up to personally correct a mistake, that’s when you know that someone is secure enough not to say, ‘It’s the contractor.’ I’ll never forget it.

They’re very quick to own their work; they’re very honorable.”

Uncharacteristically, Duncan and Wisniewski started out as architects together by designing, among other projects, second homes in Stowe for the wealthy.

Those experiences “crystallized the desire to also work for the less fortunate,” Wisniewski wrote in an email. DWA’s first nonprofit project was renovating the Wilson Hotel in Burlington for COTS. While affordable housing and the like accounts for 30 to 40 percent of its work, the firm designs plenty of higher-end projects, too. A recent one is Cambrian Rise, developer Eric Farrell’s housing development on North Avenue that is permitted for more than 700 units in nine buildings (300 have been built).

Anchoring the development is the former St. Joseph’s Catholic orphanage, now a high-rent historic renovation.

Two Cambrian Rise buildings are affordable housing — Juniper House, developed by Cathedral Square, and Laurentide, by Champlain Housing Trust.

But because DWA designed them all, as well as provided input on the master plan, the two blend visually with the others. Certain details reappear on all the buildings, including sections of metal siding among the fiber-cement clapboard BUILDING COMMUNITY NEST FALL 2020

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Laurentide was closed to nonresidents because of COVID-19 during our tour, but a glimpse through a large window revealed a common room and kitchen with a striking ceiling.

Its panels are punctured by variously sized holes in a pattern that replicates the molecular structure of ice, water and steam — three common presences in kitchens. The idea was Beall’s, who worked on the building with Wisniewski.

Beall and Barrett — the current AIA Vermont president — met with a reporter on the patio of Bright Street Co-op, an affordable-housing project designed by Barrett and Wisniewski in Burlington’s Old North End, not far from Feeding Chittenden (another DWA project).

The two new DWA partners had already committed to designing pleasant quarters for vulnerable community members when they joined the firm in 2015 and 2008, respectively. Beall had done a three-year fellowship with Cathedral Square on aging-in-place designs a few years after graduating from the University of Virginia’s master of architecture program. Barrett had designed a home for a young girl with quadriplegic mixed cerebral palsy

during her master’s program at Miami University; the project later won awards.

Bright Street contains 40 multifamily affordable units, but passersby wouldn’t know it: The two front buildings echo the modest scale and rooflines of the gabled homes and row house buildings that line the street. A walkway between them leads to a much bigger building with underground parking, set far enough back from the street that its three floors look no higher than the two-story homes framing it. Each building’s fiber-cement siding has a section of extra-wide, red-orange boards — Barrett’s idea — and an oversize house number, eye-grabbing details that also unify the group of structures.

Both architects emphasized the collaborative nature of DWA — not just between members but also with nonprofit clients, financing partners such as Evernorth (formerly Housing Vermont) and contractors.

“In architectural pedagogy, there’s this notion of the hero architect — one person who can solve it all,” Beall said.

“Bob and Michael, they are not the hero architects, nor are we. It’s a more collaborative, equitable practice. That’s the overarching philosophy. It takes so many people to make this,” he added, gesturing at the housing co-op. “It’s a small miracle that it happens at all.”

With the pandemic in full swing, DWA isn’t celebrating its 35th year with

an office party. In fact, all seven employees now work remotely, which Barrett and Beall deem a “critical loss” because they can no longer pick up pointers from overheard phone conversations and through “osmosis.”

But the firm did get a Paycheck Protection Program loan. While it lasted, from mid-April to mid-June, they used it to pay their salaries while working without charging clients or, in some cases, charging them the same rate as they did in 1985: $25 per hour.

“It was our way of giving back when others were doing things like making PPE,” Duncan explained. The plan resulted in a substantial workload, with the principals toiling 50 to 60 hours a week, according to Wisniewski.

The future leaders of DWA are sanguine about riding out the pandemic.

“Bob and Mike made it through 2008,” Barrett said, referring to the Great Recession. “A lot of firms [in Vermont] had to stop or close that year. It reassures me, moving through COVID, that our small firm will survive [because of ] the work we do, and the diverse portfolio of work, and the relationships with our clients.

“We’re nothing without those people,” she added.

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In Season

LUKE AWTRY

Flower arrangements by Kelsey Adams of West Lane

Kelsey Adams in her Winooski backyard

Kelsey Adams offers “slow flowers” from her Winooski urban garden B Y M A R G A R ET G R AY S O N

Kelsey Adams didn’t grow up gardening.

Before she and her partner bought a house in Winooski, she hadn’t done much of it at all. But that first summer, in 2015, she installed raised beds and grew vegetables.

Two years later, Adams dug out the entire lawn, transforming her backyard into an urban oasis of flowers and shrubs with a chicken coop in one corner. Countless plant varieties line a maze of gravel paths: zinnias in pink, cream and red; fluffy hydrangeas; towering millet and wheat; vining hops; and a single apple tree that grows six varieties.

Adams, 31, describes herself as a person who can’t do anything halfway. If something catches her interest, she’s going down the rabbit hole. In 2017, planning her wedding, she decided she wanted to do all the flowers herself.

“I got talked out of that, which was good,” she said.

Just three years later, though, Adams officially became a full-time flower farmer and florist. Her business, West Lane — named after her street in Winooski — sells bouquets and arrangements for weddings and other events. (The bouquets on her website sell for $20 to $95.) She’s even started growing flowers in two friends’ Winooski yards, bringing her total garden space to about 3,000 square feet.

During the pandemic, she’s been getting business from out-of-staters ordering flowers for friends or relatives in Vermont; Adams and a helper deliver them to doorsteps. She said she’s enjoyed hearing from both senders and recipients about how happy it makes them.

“It’s just an emotional time, so to bring a little bit of joy is very rewarding,” she said.

Adams’ arrangements are unique; she often wraps them in paper and incorporates different textures and materials. A bouquet from West Lane might include bunches of tiny currant tomatoes, apple foliage or herbs.

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consider the environmental costs of moving all those blossoms around the world, usually refrigerating them along the way.

Adams puts a lot of thought into her environmental impact, not just in using organic practices but in choosing eco-friendly plastic to wrap her stems in and quality vases that customers will want to keep and reuse. This year, she will source fresh flowers and houseplants in the winter, but she aims to ship them all from greenhouses in the eastern U.S., within New England if she can.

September might seem like the tail end of Vermont’s flower season, but

Adams said there’s still time to make the most of the bounty.

“Now is a great time to try and dry some things for winter,” she said. “It’s not too late to be cutting flowers.” She plans to fill her basement with flowers hanging upside down to dry, which she’ll sell during the winter months.

Fall is also a good time to plant perennials and, of course, bulbs for next spring. Adams said she’s planning to plant “thousands” of tulip bulbs in preparation for Mother’s Day. She advises buying bulbs now to put in the ground after the first frost.

Every gardening season brings opportunities to learn new skills, Adams said,

from picking the right perennials for your space to keeping rabbits and woodchucks from munching all the greenery. She does not miss having a lawn. Bees and butterflies now frequent her garden, as well as crickets, which the neighbor kids catch along the edge of her fence.

“Monoculture isn’t good for our ecosystem,” Adams said. “I definitely feel like I’ve created a haven for insects that wasn’t here before.”

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LUKE AWTRY

If the flowers don’t have a scent, she adds flowering oregano, mint or lemon balm to the mix.

“I also really like adding brown to things,” Adams said. “I’ve definitely been growing more weird brown textures.”

She recently handled the flowers for a small wedding in Waitsfield. Rachel Adams (no relation) picked West Lane because she’d met Kelsey and watched her business grow for a few years. The original plan was for a wedding with 150 guests, but in the face of the pandemic, Rachel and her partner scaled back to just 12 people.

Adams can offer such small-scale services because she grows the flowers herself, she said. Wedding florists who buy flowers wholesale wouldn’t be able to make just a handful of arrangements profitable.

“I was not one of those people that had a Pinterest [board] or a vision. I had no idea what I was looking for,” Rachel said of her wedding plans. Adams proposed a palette and an array of options for her approval. The arrangements focused on white and peach tones, with foliage mixed in and little seed pods in the boutonnieres.

“I love her stuff, because it always feels a little wild but still elegant,” Rachel said.

Akin to the slow food movement, there’s a “slow flower” movement that advocates for picking local plants in season. The cut-flower industry is huge, representing more than $9 billion in global trade, according to online data source the Observatory of Economic Complexity. The U.S. alone imported some $1.8 billion worth of cut flowers in 2018. In 2019, UPS shipped 89 million flowers from Latin America to the U.S. just for Valentine’s Day. Slow flower advocates recommend purchasing local flowers as a more ethical approach, especially when you

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Getting Warmer An energy auditor helps homeowners lower their bills as they raise the thermostat B Y KEN PICAR D

After two decades in the energy efficiency business, Wayne Thompson doesn’t necessarily have to walk inside a house to know where it’s losing heat. Sometimes he can spot the problem from outside, whether it’s icicles hanging from the gutters or a bare patch on an otherwise snowcovered roof. © VISUAL GENERATION | DREAMSTIME.COM

“I love that, because it makes my job easy,” he said.

Still, a thorough home inspection is always part of the job. Thompson works for Vermont Gas Systems as a building analyst and energy auditor, helping customers make their homes more comfortable and their bills more affordable.

Heading into the winter months, Thompson’s schedule fills up with Vermonters who want to seal up their leaky old — and sometimes not-soold — houses, save money, and reduce their natural gas consumption.

What’s unique about the program, Thompson explained, is that it provides soup-to-nuts assistance.

“We kind of hold the customer’s hand through the whole process,” he said. That process includes an initial home inspection to identify problem spots, finding the right contractor and setting up financing, if needed, for making improvements.

It all begins with the homeowner. Any of VGS’ 53,000 customers are eligible to sign up, through the company’s website, for either an energy efficiency snapshot or a comprehensive audit. (The home’s average energy usage determines which program 14

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the customer receives.) Both services are free to VGS account holders.

Thompson starts his audit with an external inspection of the house, during which he checks for potential safety issues, especially gas leaks. In the process, he measures the house, notes the number and size of the windows, and determines how much of the living space is above ground level.

Next, Thompson walks inside with a carbon monoxide detector to check for the colorless, odorless gas. He said he’s been surprised by how often he’s visited homes with dangerously high levels of the deadly gas due to a burning kerosene heater or an improperly vented stove.

After his initial conversation with the customer and “warming up to each other,” Thompson said, he begins his inspection in the basement, again checking for gas leaks. While there, he evaluates the water heater, the heating system and its ventilation, and the foundation to see if it’s properly insulated or needs upgrades. If he discovers any safety concerns, he asks a service tech to fix them immediately.

If the kitchen has a gas range, Thompson checks

ENERGY-EFFICIENCY TIPS FOR YOUR HOME • Using a programmable thermostat and turning down the heat 7 to 12 degrees during hours when you’re at work or school can save you up to 10 percent on your annual heating bill.

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• On sunny days, open curtains and blinds to let the sun warm the room.

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the vents, then he moves on to bathabout as much air as a one-square-foot room fans and other mechanical ventila- hole would in an exterior wall. Leakier tion. In the winter, Thompson uses an houses, especially those more than 50 infrared camera to scan the ceilings and years old, can get readings of 10,000 to walls for inadequate or missing insula20,000 CFM. tion. He walks through every room in Thompson’s home inspection and the house to identify problem spots, testing typically takes about three hours. including the problems that are easiest Afterward, he writes up a comprehento fix: open windows. sive report that includes “the good, the “The customer always tells me that bad and the ugly,” as well as recomthey’re closed, but they’re not,” he said. mendations for tightening the building “I had a college kid who was wondering envelope. why he had so many flies. I told him Which home improvements provide to close the window and it’ll fix his fly the biggest bang for the energy buck? problem.”

Attic insulation and hatch sealing, When Thompson conducts a comThompson said. He compared this to prehensive energy audit, he puts the “putting a lid on a pot when you’re house into “winter mode” by closing all trying to boil water.” doors and windows and does a blower Among the improvements that offer door test, usually in the the least cost savings, front door. This begins he noted, is window with an attic inspection replacement. Many to make sure there’s no homeowners assume vermiculite, or asbestosthey will recoup the full based, insulation, which cost of new windows can pose a health hazard through lower energy bills. to the residents.

Though new windows While checking may have a better R value, the attic, Thompson or insulating properties, might spot one of most in Thompson’s experience common culprits for heat the savings usually aren’t loss: under-insulated dramatic. or non-insulated attic Though he works for hatches. Often the hatch Vermont Gas, Thompson is nothing more than a insists that his recommenpiece of thin Sheetrock. dations aren’t motivated “When I show that by a desire to sell more WAYN E THOMPSON to the customer I’ll ask, natural gas products. If ‘Would you have this it makes more economic piece of Sheetrock as an exterior door?’” sense to the homeowner to replace a gas he said. “That turns the light on for heating system with higher-efficiency them.” electric heat pumps, he’ll suggest that.

Next, Thompson sets up the blower In fact, he has electric heat pumps in his door test, which is essentially a large fan own home. inserted into the doorframe to create Thompson said that helping customnegative pressure inside the house. ers be more dollar wise and energy Thompson slowly brings the house efficient is the best part of his job. to a test pressure of 50 pascals, which “When a customer calls me and says essentially draws air in through cracks that the promises I made them about and crevices, to see how much the doing the work — that they’ve seen it, house leaks. He likened it to a 20-milefelt it and experienced it in their bills,” per-hour wind blowing through the he added, “that makes my day.” house.

Contact: ken@sevendaysvt.com Thompson runs the blower door test for about five minutes to gauge how many cubic feet of air per minute the house loses. A typical house, he said, INFO with a reading of 1,000 CFM, leaks Learn more at vermontgas.com.

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I KNEW IT WOULD SELL, SO I LOOKED UP THE REALTOR AND SAID,

“I NEED TO COME SEE IT TODAY.” E R IK J O H N S O N

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R EA L ES TAT E Erik and Kelly Johnson with their daugters, Greta and Cecilia, and the family dogs on the farmhouse porch

No Place Like Home

The 200-year-old Fay family farmhouse in Jericho

A Jericho family reclaims its ancestral farmhouse

BY J O R D AN AD AMS

Most 19th-century homes have changed hands many times over the years; once an estate is out of the family, the descendants rarely have a chance to reclaim their erstwhile property. Yet a Jericho brood recently did just that, buying a stout farmhouse that their ancestors occupied from the 1870s to the early 2000s. And they couldn’t be happier about it.

PHOTOS: JAMES BUCK

“Everything you can see … was once part of the Fay Farm,” said Erik Johnson, 46, gazing at the verdant view from his front yard. He was referring to the land within a one-square-mile radius of 254 Barber Farm Road. Today, its acreage is a fraction of the original lot, extending just a short way

around the house and adjacent barns. Since the Johnsons aren’t farmers, that suits them fine.

The house was built almost entirely of wood cut on the Fay property. In 1976, when the rest of the country was celebrating its bicentennial, the NO PLACE LIKE HOME

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The kitchen

PHOTOS: JAMES BUCK

Stairwell to the second floor

No Place Like Home « P.17 Fays were celebrating their centennial in the house.

“We had a big family — there were nine kids,” said Erik’s mother, Jo Ann Johnson (née Fay), 71, recalling her life in the house. Some of her favorite memories include playing softball in the yard and riding horses to visit neighbors.

She and Erik both noted that hideand-seek was a family pastime across the generations. With close to a dozen rooms and 4,200 square feet of livable space, the house offered plenty of nooks and crannies for hiding spots.

The somewhat labyrinthine downstairs features a sizable modern kitchen, a suite of three adjacent living spaces, a bedroom and a full bathroom. The “seed room” is an airtight space that the Fays once used to keep their crops safe from vermin.

Other vintage details include a servants’ staircase, a massive ice shed and an indoor privy in what’s now an attached garage. Upstairs, six large bedrooms take up most of the space.

In Erik’s youth, when his grandparents owned the property, he and his immediate family lived in a smaller house a stone’s throw away. Fay Farm changed hands within the family in the mid-’80s, and the Fay/Johnson clan officially let it go in the early 2000s. Jo Ann now lives just out of view of the property, about a five-minute walk down the road.

“At first, it was pretty sad when my mother left,” she said, referring to Erik’s grandmother’s sale of the main Fay Farm house. “But it was the best move for her, because it was this huge house, and she couldn’t keep it up.”

Erik; his wife, Kelly; and their elementary-school-age daughters, Cecilia and Greta, were living in a much smaller home on the other side of Jericho when Fay Farm came on the market in summer 2020. (Seven Days designer Kirsten Thompson and her family were the most recent occupants.) The Johnsons had 18

SEVEN DAYS FALL 2020

The gazebo at the farmhouse

The dining room

been casually looking for a change, but they hadn’t seriously considered any other homes until the opportunity to reclaim the farm presented itself.

“I knew it would sell, so I looked up the Realtor and said, ‘I need to come see it today,’” Erik said.

Because of the pandemic, only one person could view the house at a time.

“Erik was like, ‘I don’t need to see it; I know I want it,’” Kelly said. “I had never seen [inside] it because it had been out of the family before we were together.”

Upon viewing the place, Kelly said, she knew instantly that she and her family would be happy there. “[Later] I got to walk through it with Erik, watching him go through and reminisce about all of the stories that I’ve heard,” she said, noting a mark on one of the doors that young Erik made with a BB gun.

Though higher offers came in during the first and only weekend of showings, the Johnsons’ family connection won over the sellers.

The house has had nips and tucks over the years, as well as some larger changes, such as the removal of pocket doors, demolition and construction of a ground-floor bathroom, and replacement of the traditional oak flooring with bamboo in part of the downstairs. A side door, which used to open obtrusively into the kitchen, was shifted along the side of the house to its de facto mudroom. But Erik said that the butler’s pantry, a small space off the kitchen, remains exactly as he remembers it.

The Johnsons plan to make more changes to suit their family: They’ll add a bathroom to turn one of the upstairs bedrooms into a master suite and install a kitchen island to increase counter space. Even so, they consider the house to be in the best shape of its long life — a “showplace,” Jo Ann called it.

The house is undeniably attractive. The Johnsons said passersby are drawn to it, stopping to ask about local sights and landmarks, or to comment on and inquire about the various outbuildings and landscaping. (Even while conducting an interview with this publication, the family was interrupted by a stranger offering roofing services.)

For now, the Johnsons are settling in and feeling lucky they were able to return home.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Kelly said.

Contact: jordan@sevendaysvt.com

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1) The Fay Farm, circa mid-1900s 2) Don, Mary, Jon and Louise Fay 3) Mary, Don, Jon and Don Fay 4) Aunt Betty with her car on the farm 5) The kids on the porch of the farmhouse

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DÉCO R

2017 pumpkin décor on Central Street in Woodstock

Falling for

Squash A porch full of pumpkins draws visitors to this Woodstock home B Y PAME L A POLSTON

Nikki VanVoorhis is all in for pumpkins. As decorative items, that is. And not just a few artfully arranged squash on a tabletop; VanVoorhis and her husband, Matt Tashjian, go for a veritable cascade of them on the front stoop of their Woodstock home.

In this historic town that could hardly be more picture-perfect New England, the thirtysomething couple has rocked the boat. Neighbors took notice when they bought an 1826 colonial house on Central Street five years ago and began renovating. That included adding a yoga studio — VanVoorhis is a teacher, Tashjian a practitioner. After they painted the exterior brick walls white, “it was the talk of the town for about a month,” VanVoorhis said with a chuckle.

All seemed forgiven, though, when the pumpkins arrived.

A big fan of holidays, VanVoorhis said she especially loves decorating for Halloween. Tashjian, by contrast, is a minimalist — the house’s serene, blackand-white, clutter-free interior is all him, his wife said. But, she noted, “We have this beautiful stoop, and I said, ‘We have to decorate it’ — a few pumpkins, a hay bale, that sort of thing.

“Matt is not really into holidays,” VanVoorhis continued. “But the second year, he decided to get on board. We put

a bunch of [pumpkins] on the porch, and he said, ‘Let’s get more.’”

VanVoorhis recalled that they had to go to “five or six” nurseries for the desired quantity — like, 50 of them.

That first year, she said, they went with orange pumpkins; the second year, squash varieties in white and grayish blue; and the third year, shades of green.

A few pots of mums or other seasonal plants completed the look.

“It quickly became a thing in Woodstock,” VanVoorhis said. And it wasn’t just locals admiring the displays.

Because so many people took selfies in front of her house, VanVoorhis said, she put up a placard with her Instagram handle and asked people to tag her in their photos. “We’ve gotten tagged hundreds of times!” she marveled.

“People come from all over the world to see our pumpkins.”

National brands such as Anthropologie and Martha Stewart have reposted the images on social media, too.

Of course, now there’s a little FALLING FOR SQUASH NEST FALL 2020

» P.22 21

DÉCO R Pumpkin décor

Falling for Squash « P.21

Contact: pamela@sevendaysvt.com

INFO

See more images on Instagram: @houseanddog.

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NEST FALL 2020

I THINK THEY MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY. NIK K I VANVO O R H IS

COURTESY OF JESSICA NOTARGIACOMO

pressure to come up with something different every year — and there are only so many colors in the squash family. VanVoorhis wouldn’t reveal her ideas for the 2020 theme.

Not surprisingly, she likes Christmas decorations, too, though they’re less visible to the public.

“Our house is 2,200 square feet, and I have five trees,” VanVoorhis said.

She and Tashjian are the doting parents of two large dogs, Veda and Raja, who, VanVoorhis said, “come with us wherever we go.” Since the pandemic began, they’ve all pretty much stayed put; Tashjian is a financial adviser who can work from his home office. VanVoorhis’ studio, YogaMari Vermont, is closed for now.

Finding their home involved a bit of serendipity. When the two met, VanVoorhis was living in her hometown of Burlington after some years working in the music business in New York City and on the West Coast. Tashjian was vacationing in Vermont from Connecticut. That made for a long commute to visit VanVoorhis. It was easier to convene in central Vermont, she said, and Woodstock “became our little spot before we drove back [home].”

After VanVoorhis and Tashjian got married, they were looking to buy a house outside of Burlington.

“On a whim, we decided to come to Woodstock, and we saw this house,” she said. “We made an offer and got it.”

Once they began to renovate, VanVoorhis said, “It kind of grew into this whole other thing.” Her husband, she observed, “is a designer at heart.

He sits at the computer and researches ideas all over the world. He loves living in a beautifully curated house.”

Tashjian’s streamlined aesthetic has won her over, mostly. “I’m neat and orderly and clean, but I like things. Being in a partnership with an extreme minimalist has been really good for me,” VanVoorhis said.

“Now I can’t imagine living with all that stuff.”

The one exception, of course, is pumpkins. “They’re the best,” she said. “I think they make people happy. To be known for your pumpkins — that’s probably the coolest way to be known.”

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