What Vermont Does to You

I am writing this from southern Vermont, as I make my 28th trip around the sun. Zack and I drove up yesterday to spend the weekend in the mountains, and I have barely looked at my phone since we arrived. That is the thing about Vermont. It does not ask much of you, and that's what makes her so special.

I have been coming to Vermont since I was a child, and it does the same thing to me every time. Two hours from the Hudson Valley and it feels like I have gone somewhere much further. I am never quite sure if it is the mountains, the quiet, or the particular smell of the air up here: crisp and clean with pine and wood smoke in the breeze. Whatever it is, Vermont has a way of making you exhale the minute you cross into her borders.

The Feeling of the Buildings

The architecture here does something I find genuinely hard to explain but impossible to stop thinking about. There is a feeling of inevitability to the buildings in Vermont that I do not encounter very often. The steep roofs, the deep overhangs, the heavy timber, the mudrooms that actually work, none of it feels decorative. It feels like a direct conversation between the people who built these structures and the landscape they were building within. The mountain told them what to do, and they listened.

That is the thing I find myself chasing on every project. Not a look, but a logic. The feeling that a space belongs exactly where it is and could not have been made any other way. Vermont buildings have that. The best homes I have ever been in have it too. It is not something you can style into a room. It has to be thought in from the beginning.

The house we are staying in has it. The fireplace is in the room where people actually sit, not in the room that photographs best. The mudroom is built to hold the never ending supply of outdoor gear. The windows face south, soaking up as much sun as possible before it disappears behind the trees. Nothing is trying to impress you. And somehow that is more beautiful than most things I see that are trying very hard to be beautiful.

Another Year

Twenty-eight. I do not have a lot to say about it except that I am grateful. For the work, which I love even when it is hard. For the place I have chosen to build a life, which keeps teaching me things I did not know I needed to learn. For the people, who make every year better than the one before it and remind me every day what love really looks like.

For the mountains outside this window, which have been here longer than any of us and will be here long after, and which have a way of putting things back in their right proportion just by existing.

The older I get, the more I think that the work I do and the life I am building are not two different things. They are the same project. A home that holds you. A life that holds you. The same question, asked in different materials.

Vermont reminds me of that every time. I come up here, and something settles. I remember what I am working toward.

That is exactly what a good home should do.

Love, Sav