Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1325707
N icknamed the Green Mountain State for obvious reasons, Vermont is also a state of mind. Dotted with fields, woods, trails, and ponds, much of Vermont is catnip for lovers of the outdoors who seek a relaxed pace of life that follows the rhythm of the seasons. "My stress level [there] instantly goes from high to low," says one owner of a second home in the pastoral town of Pomfret. With a primary residence on the North Shore, the avid cyclist and skier heads to Vermont whenever he can, often with his wife and two school-age children. Before building his house here, family ties and decades of happy memories were incentives for the two-hour- plus road trip. Now, there's more: a place of his own. It all started with the purchase of an antique barn frame and visions of a modest house, perhaps within that frame itself. A rather seismic shift in the home- owner's mindset recast that plan. "I reached a point where I wanted to build something that my wife and I could eventually move into," he says. "My new focus was on the quality of life long-term." The homeowner reached out to architect Tobin Shulman, principal at SV Design, for a scheme that would incorporate the barn frame as part of the homestead but not be the Greek Revival trim detail on the front door of the main house contrasts with the farm detail on the barn. Below, Between the very traditional Greek Revival main house and the rustic barn, a board-and-batten connector, stylistically different from both, is where most of the day-to-day family activity takes place. 54