MTN Life Design: Doyle & Sandy’s Vermont sanctuary

Photo: Shem Roose

What grows best on your land?
Well, there is zucchini, holy shit… we have so much zucchini! We also have beets, carrots, potatoes, sunflowers, all of Sandy’s flowers, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, pumpkins and beans. The garden was a legacy garden from Jen. She left us her asparagus, which is outstanding! Last year Sandy started out with just half the garden, but this year we tilled the whole thing to Jen’s old footprint and Sandy spent hours and hours in it. It’s her happy place and she made it amazing.

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Photo: Shem Roose

What renovations have you made to make the house exactly the way you wanted it?
One day we just started knocking down walls! We took the kitchen and opened the whole thing up. Then we realized that we wanted our room to be on the upper floor so we could overlook the pond. Upon Legh’s suggestion, we drew plans of a shed dormer. We drew it on the wall in the sugarhouse, as we were sugaring! So we put a shed dormer up and we built the bathroom. All of this work was done in conjunction with Will Stoler, a really talented designer/builder, who is a friend of Sandy’s family. We really liked his aesthetic and the quality of his work. Will became our designer, collaborator and guide throughout this whole thing and we hired Ryan and Kenny, local salt of the earth Waterbury guys, to do all the nail banging. Under Willy’s guidance they elevated their game and made us this amazing home. I worked with Willy on the design and mechanics of it, because I’m a mechanic, but I’ve never been a construction worker. So I really took his expertise and then put in my ideas. Sandy gave me a lot of rope saying right off the bat that she didn’t have the vision, but she liked where I was going with it. Sandy managed the project. She was the checkbook and made sure we stayed on point, and when things started to get a little crazy she reeled us back in.

So that’s how you opened things up!
That’s right, we did that on the original footprint of the house and we lived in that for almost a year. But we both have large families and a lot of friends, and we live in a place where they want to visit to go snowboarding and be in the mountains. We didn’t have enough room to take people in. Willy, Sandy and I got together and we drew up the plans for an extension onto the house that was inspired by the Stone Hut. We wanted a place you could pile a ton of people in comfortably and have a really rad time. So we built The Great Fun Room with a great bunkroom attached!

Photo: Shem Roose

There is a high attention to detail in your house, right down to the custom light covers inside your living room shelves. Where did this vision derive from?
My original dream in life was to be a professional photographer. I really love light and I love the way light hits things. I paid a lot of attention to what light affects what parts of the house at different times of the day and year. So light was a huge deal, it dictated what tones of wood we chose and what colors we put on the walls. I have a really good friend, Tabbatha Henry, who is a potter and ceramic maker down in Waterbury. She makes these beautiful ceramics that look like they are made out of carved grass with holes poked in them. I was down at her shop and saw one with a candle in it and I couldn’t believe it, it was a sconce! Tabbatha had never done anything like this, literally she just makes cylinders that you dropped a candle in, so I went out and bought a tile saw and worked with her to cut the end off and cut slots so we could mount them up as sconces. When we mounted them up and turned the lights on it completely blew our minds. It changed the whole house. We picked different designs and colors for different areas of the house. It was really fun to work with Tab. We’d bring her up to the house, drink scotch and figure out how to make sconces. I gave her all these measurements, she went back to her studio and she nailed it.

Photo: Shem Roose

What’s the story behind the light post in front of your house?
The light post was kind of fun. We have this State of Vermont surplus warehouse on Route 2, about 5 miles from the house and being a guy who just loves junk I cruise in there and I check things out from time to time. I found a City of Montpelier street lamp for $50 bucks. So, the light in front of our house is the same one that’s in front of the capital. It was an impulse buy.

Speaking of impulse buys, how about your Evel Knievel pinball machine?
Sandy is the CFO of the household and I am on acquisitions and fun generation. So all things must be run through the CFO. I’ve got to put in a budget proposal and sell it up through the chain of command. I wanted a mid-70s Bally Hugh Hefner Playboy machine and she nixed that… family house, no Playboy. I didn’t want anything like Adam’s Family, KISS, or Scooby Doo. Then one day I was looking on eBay, which should be called evilBay, and I found an Evel Knievel Bally pinball machine that had artwork by the same dude that drew the girls on the Playboy machine. And I was like “Honey, it’s Evel Knievel, it’s motorcycles, and it’s Playboy!” I sold it in and she said OK! We compromised.

Let’s talk about your favorite spot, the workshop!
I dreamed of having my own workshop where I could do my own thing for so long. I’ve never had my own garage. So to have this place is awesome. When Legh decided to build this place I was part of the crew that built it. He made some really unique features; the roof rafters in the workshop are harvested from trees that he planted when he was 11-years-old. He peeled off all of the bark and they are so straight, it’s astonishing. He scavenged a vent off an old barn in Wolcott that I put up on the main part of the shop, and we have an old windmill up on the other part of the shop. It powers a pump which aerates the pond to keep it alive. Legh built the inside to look like his old motorcycle shop. So all of my workbenches are out of the old shop, Cycle Works, and I have the old Cycle Works sign. So all of a sudden the old shop is now mine, which is so insane and so cool! I decorated it with everything that meant something to me. I have my snowboard-tuning zone, my motorcycle zone; I built Sandy a workbench so she has a zone. Cause this is not a “No Girls Zone”, girls are allowed and welcome! It’s heaven, it’s my favorite place, it’s where I’m happy. There is a big-ass apple tree out front and we made 17 quarts of applesauce just this year off of that one tree!

Photo: Shem Roose