Local Mansion

‘Poster Child’ for a Way to Solve Housing Shortage

By Caroline Tremblay

long-term goals then involved renovating an existing third-floor apartment that was only accessible through the main house. But after living on Summer Street for about a year and a half, a friend of a friend lost their job, which had included housing, and desperately needed a place to live. Vann and Beyer said yes.

“They paid us, you know, peppercorn rent. It was someone I knew, so I was okay with renting and rehabbing,” Vann says.

The apartment got a makeover while being leased and served as a safe landing for several other renters as time went on.

“In the meantime, I had gotten looped into the Congress for the New Urbanism and had started doing the work to get certified as a planner,” Vann says.

She became involved with the Incremental Development Alliance, a nonprofit that helps locals strengthen their neighborhoods through small-scale real estate projects.

“We talked a lot about naturally occurring affordable housing. And typically, that’s an existing building that you make into a multifamily. So that’s the ocean I was swimming in,” Vann says.

Suddenly the bigger picture was aligning.

“Our house is huge, and even with somebody living on the third floor, there was still way too much house for us,” she explains.

She started running the numbers, using the rule she teaches as a certified planner.

“For every $100 you put into a project, you need to be sure that you’re going to get $1 out in rent every month. So I worked backwards,” she says.

Vann knew that with renovation, she could provide two beautiful apartments, each with a new kitchen and entryway. She estimated that between the two apartments she could plan on a total of $3,000 per month in rent.

PICTURED: The Peterborough, New Hampshire mansion that has been transformed into not only a home for Ivy Vann (pictured) and her husband, but two additional charming apartments. They say that sharing the property enhances daily living.

“That meant I could invest $300,000 in doing the work … So I said to Hugh: ‘I think we should we should rebuild the house and turn it into a three-family,’” she says.

Early in their marriage, they had owned a duplex and had tenants on several other occasions, so it wasn’t a hard sell. Beyer agreed it was a great idea, and in 2020, they asked their local architect friend, Susan Phillips-Hungerford, to draw up plans. Their daughter, Lily Beyer, a licensed structural engineer practicing in Portsmouth, also played a significant role in the project.

The contractor began work in March 2020, with the renovation spanning 18 months before completion.

“I knew it was going to be at least a year because it was a lot of work,” Vann says.

In addition to the interior overhaul, a new stair tower was constructed outside, giving access to both the second and third-floor apartments; for structural soundness, it had to be supported straight down to the basement, requiring access holes to be cut at every level of the house. Though it took months of orchestrating plans and finances, living elsewhere, and maintaining a healthy dose of patience, the result was two charming apartments.

“One’s a two-bed, two-bath, and they both have brand new kitchens. The third floor is a three-bed, two-bath,” Vann says.

Both spaces were already spoken for before construction even wrapped up, and Vann and Beyer have been fortunate enough to cultivate strong relationships with the residents who now share their multifamily property.

While they enjoy the interaction and community of having tenants, she notes, “It’s not for you if you are intensely private.”

However, much of renting depends on how you set it up.

“You get to pick how cozy and comfy you want to be with your tenants,” she says, and adds, “We like our tenants. We have them down for dinner, and they have us up for dinner. I’ve played pickleball with them, and they have observed Hugh and me on our electric bicycles, and now they have their own,” she says.

For them, sharing the property enhances daily living.

In the fall of 2022, Vann spoke at the Radically Rural summit in Keene, calling on her personal experience with a multifamily conversion and her knowledge as an urban planner to address the region’s “missing middle” in terms of housing.

“The missing middle is duplexes, cottage courts, triple-deckers, fourplexes, dignified, small apartment buildings,” she notes. “All of those things are the missing middle, and we used to build them, and we used to create them out of existing buildings.”

But dating as far back as Herbert Hoover’s presidency, uniform zoning codes have emphasized single-family residences above other forms of housing, feeding into the housing crisis many communities are now experiencing.

“This is not a Peterborough problem. It’s probably everywhere,” Vann notes.

She has made it her mission to modernize zoning policies in New Hampshire to make it possible for a wider variety of practical housing types to be prioritized.

“My house is the poster child for why this goal is important,” she said.