Spring is a time for fresh growth, and plenty crops up in this issue of Days’ quarterly magazine on homes, design and real estate. Amid the challenges of the housing crisis, a NEW MIDDLEBURY DEVELOPMENT creative collaboration. In Burlington, the BLIND TIGER BOUTIQUE HOTEL historic mansion a daring design makeover and charming local flourishes. When it comes to making a clean start, CURB RESOURCE COLLECTION household waste services in Chittenden County. Of course, some new beginnings sprout from bittersweet endings. In a personal essay, Anne Wallace Allen shares her experience SELLING A HOME ON FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE.
ARCHITECT DAVE SELLERS memorializes his lasting legacy in the Mad River Valley.
Group Effort .............................. 6
A Middlebury housing project springs from a partnership among college, town and developer BY
ANNE WALLACE ALLEN
Changing Its Stripes 10 e Blind Tiger boutique hotel refreshes an 1881 Burlington mansion with bold design and local touches BY AMY
LILLY
‘Imagination and Expression Were Everything’ 14 Life Stories: David Edward Sellers, September 7, 1938-February 9, 2025 BY
KEN PICARD
Trash Talk 21
Meet Curb, the waste collection startup helping Vermonters think twice before they toss BY HANNAH
FEUER
Marketplace Report .............. 25 Essay: How I sold my house on Facebook Marketplace in three days BY ANNE
WALLACE ALLEN
Group Effort
A Middlebury housing project springs from a partnership among college, town and developer
BY ANNE WALLACE ALLEN
Summit Properties had had its eye on 35 acres near downtown Middlebury for years. The South Burlington company was looking for a place to build a housing development, but the cost of the land made the project too expensive.
Middlebury College had been on the lookout, too. The housing crisis was making it hard for the college to hire for open positions, and college o cials wanted to alleviate the housing shortage in a way that would help all local employers.
So, with a partnership in mind, the school approached Zeke Davisson, a Middlebury alum who is COO of Summit Properties. The college, which has an endowment of $1.5 billion, paid $1.5 million for the property Summit had been eyeing. The college sold a historic home on the property for $500,000 and in 2022 gave Summit permission to build on the remaining 35 acres. Summit will pay for the land over time, at a lower-than-
In May, the company will start work on the first phase of a multiyear housing project with plans to eventually create more than 250 homes and apartments. The first units will be ready for occupants this fall. Cooperation from the college and the town, and an array of public financing, will enable Summit to rent and sell the units for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than their market value, Davisson said, creating the kind of scarce middle-income housing that is in short supply, particularly outside market price. Chittenden County.
An artistic rendering of the Stonecrop Meadows townhomes
Zeke Davisson at the Stonecrop Meadows construction site in Middlebury
Increasingly, developers are saying construction of new worker housing isn’t feasible without a concerted e ort like the one in Middlebury — a complex project that has included the builder, housingfriendly town o cials who did the paperwork needed to ease construction, a local employer with deep pockets, and a complex stack of grants and tax credits to defray the costs of preparing the site and building the homes.
Town o cials in Middlebury, eager to promote housing, created a state “neighborhood development area” that exempts the project from Act 250, the Vermont land-use law, and makes it eligible for a number of funding incentives.
“It couldn’t have happened without the leadership of the college and without the town and developer getting on the same page about what was needed,” said Maura Collins, executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, which worked closely with the group to provide access to financing.
DEVELOPERS ARE SAYING CONSTRUCTION OF NEW WORKER HOUSING ISN’T FEASIBLE WITHOUT A CONCERTED EFFORT LIKE THE ONE IN MIDDLEBURY.
“They had a shared vision of homeownership and rentals that made it work,” Collins said of the many parties.
As the costs of construction have risen in recent years, housing advocates have increasingly asked employers to help find a way to build. Many are trying. Shawn Tester, CEO of the Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, is working with the Northern Forest Center to ease the path for a builder to construct homes on about 40 acres that the hospital owns in St. Johnsbury.
“Our hope is to get the site developer-ready, with permitting and site plans ready to go,” said Tester, who last year received $100,000 from the Town of St. Johnsbury and $400,000 from the U.S. Forest Service to pay for the site development.
In South Burlington, electric aviation manufacturer Beta Technologies and computer hardware company OnLogic have both discussed ways to provide more homes for employees.
The Champlain Valley School District is exploring the potential for building homes on 30 acres it owns in Shelburne, according to communications manager Tyler Cohen.
DEVELOPMENT
But high costs can make housing development prohibitive for employers, even ones that own land. And few relish the idea of branching into the home-building business. Jason Webster, copresident and owner of the modular housing company Huntington Homes in East Montpelier, said providing health insurance already feels like too much involvement in his workers’ lives.
“I want to avoid the entanglement,” he said.
Some are making it work. The University of Vermont and the Braverman Co. are both investors in a building complex in the new South Burlington City Center. The project started with two apartment buildings for graduate students. A third building scheduled to open in November will be open to faculty and sta , too.
As an investor, the builder has an incentive to keep the project costs down, said Richard Cate, UVM’s vice president for finance and administration. Nevertheless, rents are comparable to those in neighboring buildings, and “some of the graduate students would tell you it’s not a ordable,” he said. The apartments start at around $1,900 for a studio and $2,600 for a two-bedroom.
The University of Vermont Medical Center has built more than 180 South Burlington apartments for its faculty and sta in the past few years as part of a partnership with a private developer. In the building the UVM Medical Center opened in June, rent for some apartments is capped at 30 percent of the household’s income. The medical center belongs to a coalition launched last fall called Let’s Build Homes that aims to construct 30,000 new homes in Vermont by the end of 2029.
The cooperative e ort in Middlebury, Stonecrop Meadows, is planned to include 254 new homes, including an apartment building, townhouses and single-family homes. Summit, a family-owned company with a large portfolio of rental properties, is relying on a $5.7 million award from the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, $750,000 from the state’s Community Recovery and Revitalization Program, and another $1.2 million in federal money from the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development. The Vermont Housing Finance Agency is kicking in more than $22 million in low-interest loans and federal low-income housing tax credits. Davisson expects Middlebury College to recoup the cost of the land it bought but said the school won’t turn a profit on its decision to make it available to Summit.
Group Effort « P.7
“In that way, they’re subsidizing the cost of affordable housing,” he said.
With all those subsidies in play, the Stonecrop Meadows homes will be priced within reach of Vermonters — at least, the ones with good incomes. The cash infusion will shave about $200,000 off the purchase price of a home built in the first phase and $400 to $600 off monthly rents in the 35-unit apartment building, Davisson said — adding that it’s too early to know what the rents will be.
And the subsidies will enable the company to offer 37 of the first 45 townhomes and duplexes at lower prices for families with qualifying incomes.
For a buyer who qualifies, a threebedroom, three-bath townhome is listed at $358,000 by Signature Properties of Vermont, which has sold some of the homes while workers are still preparing the ground for construction. The same unit is listed at $545,000 for people who don’t qualify for subsidies.
The first homes at Stonecrop Meadows are expected to go up quickly, after they’re delivered in prefabricated sections from Huntington Homes on May 5 and 6. Whatever the weather on that day, Davisson said, 12 modular units will be dropped onto newly poured foundations, ready for the addition of porches and siding. Davisson expects to have certificates of occupancy in hand within two months.
There’s no timeline yet for the other phases, which Davisson would like to see include apartments, senior housing and more homes. The company is still looking for investors to help with the future phases.
Davisson knows his company is well positioned to do something most others cannot. His is the only private construction company in Vermont that regularly uses the federal low-income housing tax credit program to subsidize affordable housing. And Summit received a large share of the pandemicera American Rescue Plan Act relief money designated for housing.
With about 1,200 employees, Middlebury College is Addison County’s largest employer. Twenty percent of the college’s workers commute to and from New York State, at least half an hour away, where home prices are lower than in Vermont.
David Provost, the college’s executive vice president of finance and administration, said the college has been searching for years for ways to help its employees find a place to live. It offers a second-mortgage program for its tenuretrack faculty, but that’s not enough, he said, and faculty have been forced to live farther and farther afield. He added that Stonecrop Meadows will be open to anyone, no matter where they work.
“This isn’t a Middlebury College neighborhood,” he said of the development, which is half a mile from campus. “We were adamant about that.”
“There was a special sauce here, and yes, it included ARPA funding and a large employer,” he said. “But it would have meant nothing if the town hadn’t recognized their issue: empty schools, no grand list growth, no way for employers to grow.”
He said he’s gotten calls from housing task force members in other towns asking, “‘What will it take?’”
For Davisson, the most important ingredient is the creation of neighborhood development areas. It’s that state designation, which is obtained by the town, that exempts the site from Act 250 environmental review.
“And it takes zoning administrators who work on policies that attract development,” Davisson said. “Developers will go where the [development review boards] are reasonable.” ➆
Changing Its Stripes
The Blind Tiger boutique hotel refreshes an 1881 Burlington mansion with bold design and local touches
BY AMY LILLY • lilly@sevendaysvt.com
Until recently, the inn on Willard Street in Burlington was called the Willard Street Inn — rather like the circular church in Richmond is the Old Round Church and the massive museum in Shelburne is, wait for it, the Shelburne Museum.
When Lark Hotels, based in Portsmouth, N.H., bought the inn, it promptly dropped that plodding Vermont habit and renamed the place Blind Tiger. The name comes from a slang term for Prohibition-era speakeasies that dodged the law by charging for an animal attraction and then serving a free alcoholic beverage.
The DIY bar in the parlor
The Gather two-bedroom suite
Blind Tiger’s west-facing exterior double staircase and polygonal tower
When it opened in May 2023, Blind Tiger Burlington offered a different attraction as a boutique, aesthetic-forward hotel. It aims to provide “an elevated, artful experience,” said Grace Bevelheimer, who comanages the place with Paige Mooradian.
The same goes for its fellow Blind Tigers: The Lark brand includes two in Portland, Maine, and one in Asheville, N.C., all launched in the past five years. Since founding Lark in 2012, Robert Blood has established more than 50 hotels around the country, including four in Stowe: the Tälta, Cady Hill and Field Guide lodges and AWOL.
All four Blind Tigers won a single Michelin Key in 2024, a new rating for the world’s best hotels that the prestigious Michelin Guide added that year to its long-standing star ratings for restaurants.
On a recent sunny morning, Bevelheimer and Mooradian gave Nest a tour of the 1881 mansion’s fully redecorated interior. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the grand former home of a bank executive was designed to show off his wealth, particularly with its giant west-facing exterior double staircase, polygonal tower and 12-foot-high wood-paneled interior ceilings.
We took a seat in the spacious parlor to the right of the entry. The room encapsulates the design aesthetic of Elder & Ash, a firm cofounded by Blood that designs all the Blind Tigers. The palette is neutral, with beiges, browns and blacks in bold patterns and solids. Comfy leather couches and contemporary accent chairs mix with antiques. The ceiling light fixtures are dramatic sculptural statements. Wall art is generous — Bevelheimer described the place as “almost a gallery experience” — and ranges widely from traditional landscapes to contemporary abstracts.
The bar sits where the Willard Street Inn’s front desk used to be: Blind Tiger has none, nor room service. The former breakfast room is a solarium, its checkerboard green-and-white marble floor now populated with living-room furniture groupings in a mix of energetic colors and patterns (a rare departure from the earthy palette). Blind Tiger breakfasts are served buffetstyle at a long table in a mostly white and beige room off the solarium.
THE PATTERN THAT EMERGED WAS THAT THERE IS NONE: EACH ARTWORK IS UNIQUE, NO PIECE OF FURNITURE IS REPEATED.
“It’s more like a guesthouse than a corporate hotel experience. We tell people it’s like an Airbnb,” Bevelheimer said. She and Mooradian lead a staff of three innkeepers, two housekeepers, a maintenance guy and a groundskeeper — a neighbor who stopped by one day and offered to take care of the extensive gardens. The staff leave at 7 p.m., though guests can reach a manager if necessary by calling a dispatching service.
The open-plan first floor leads from the parlor past a dark-wood DIY bar stocked with Champagne buckets, glasses of all types, corkscrews — basically, everything you need minus the alcohol — as well as complimentary nonalcoholic drinks. In the pantry opposite the bar, guests can help themselves to canisters of trail mix and chips, pastries baked in-house, and Russell Stover chocolates. (Locally made chocolates are “too expensive,” but frequent Lark visitors do get a Burlington-made NU Chocolat treat, Mooradian said.)
But Blind Tiger guests are not entirely left on their own. Each room comes with a list of recommendations from an in-the-know Burlingtonian about what to do and where to go in town. Former general manager Shay Langley, now the GM at Tälta, chose these “local hosts” and invited each to stay one night, name the room they stayed in and plan out future guests’ best chances for a fun stay in the city.
The solarium
Mini Bar is the name Kate Wise, an experienced bartender at Hotel Vermont’s Juniper Bar & Restaurant, gave a spacious below-stairs bedroom and adjacent lounge opening to the west lawn. Her recommendations are a list of seven restaurants and bars in town. Jasmine Parsia, an instructor at Iskra Print Collective, named her east-facing room Current, after her then-new body of work, “Currents.” In addition to restaurants, she recommends people visit BCA Center and Soapbox Gallery.
Painter Katharine Montstream named hers Coloring Room, after her studio nickname, and handwrote her list, which includes a “best-kept secret”: the hiking trails at Rock Point. Ryan Miller, the lead singer of Guster, wrote an extensively annotated, foldout “All Access Pass” listing museums, shopping and more. He named his room Mr. Sun after one of his songs.
Some host recommendations need updating — Dedalus, the former wine bar and restaurant, was on more than a few lists — but guests can always check with the managers.
“They’ll read that Frankie’s is good [and ask me], ‘Is it?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes, absolutely,’” Bevelheimer said.
The hotel was about a third full during the tour. Spring is a low season,
when the smallest of Blind Tiger’s 14 rooms can go for $200 per night. During high season, which launches with graduation weekends, the largest rooms cost $800 per night. Most have king-size beds, and four have working fireplaces.
The pattern that emerged after touring many of the rooms was that there is none: Each artwork is unique; no piece of furniture is repeated from room to room; each bath is fitted perfectly to its quirky space. In one, a claw-foot tub clears three surrounding walls by barely an inch. In another,
a black bedside table appears to drip dollops of lava. Busy wallpaper patterns are often successfully paired with plaid couches or checked bedspreads, none of them the same.
If guests can’t decide on a room while booking by phone, Mooradian said she asks them a general décor question: “Are you looking for darker or lighter?” Guests have got it made, whatever the shade. ➆
Blind Tiger, 329 S. Willard St., Burlington, 547-3172, larkhotels.com
David Edward Sellers, September 7, 1938-February 9, 2025
BY KEN PICARD • ken@sevendaysvt.com
‘Imagination and Expression Were Everything ’
Dave Sellers often said, “If you’re not having fun, it’s not worth doing.” That ethos defined his personal life and career as a convention-busting architect, designer, builder and inventor. For Dave, building houses was less about the science of home construction than it was about vision, experimentation and creativity.
Drive up Prickly Mountain Road in Warren, through the steep, wooded hills overlooking Blueberry Lake, and you can spot some of Dave’s whimsical creations. There’s his Pyramid House, built in 1968, which former Seven Days writer Mike Ives once described as “a wooden mass of triangles that suggests a Cape Cod rental whose water pipes have been laced with LSD.”
Nearby is the Tack House, which
Dave built in 1966, then added to repeatedly. Named for the horse barn it replaced, it’s reminiscent of a Pablo Picasso painting, with semicircular windows, cascading arcs, trapezoidal protrusions and steep, angular rooflines. An exhibition guide to the Fleming Museum of Art’s 2008 retrospective of the work of Vermont architects in the 1960s and ’70s likened it to “a strange piece of machinery parked temporarily in a field.”
“Life Stories” is a series profiling Vermonters who have recently died. Know of someone we should write about? Email us at lifestories@ sevendaysvt.com.
e Archie Bunker in Warren
e Dacha at the Gesundheit! Institute in Hillsboro, W.Va.
“His houses are literally expressions of being outside the box, pushing this way, that way, any way to get a little more excitement going,” said Louis Mackall, one of the architects Dave attracted to Warren in the mid-1960s. “Imagination and expression were everything.”
Dave, who died on February 9 at age 86 after a brief illness, was a maverick who encouraged other architects to step away from the drafting table, pick up some tools and build the structures they design. His hands-on, improvisational approach was a radical departure from the methods of the day and was instrumental in launching Vermont’s design-build movement. Architectural
a printing company executive. Dave was an Eagle Scout, accomplished athlete and math genius who attended Yale University. There, he set a goal of whacking a golf ball over every building on campus, a feat he accomplished before graduating in 1960.
“He squeezed out the fun every day,” his daughter, Trillium Rose, said.
After college, he used a $1,000 gift from an aunt to buy a motorcycle in France, he told an interviewer in 2022. He wrecked the bike in Avignon but while waiting on repairs met a young French architecture student with whom he traveled the country. As Dave watched his companion sketch buildings, he thought he could do better.
HIS
LOUIS MACKALL
Digest once named Dave among the top 100 architects in the world.
A teacher, visionary and serial entrepreneur who friends and family said never seemed to get tired, bored or angry, Dave didn’t limit himself to architecture. Fascinated by intriguing antiques and mechanical objects, he helped launch alternative energy firms, stove manufacturers, a sled company, a museum of everyday objects and a radio show, “Sprawl Talk,” that he hosted for years. His magnetic personality drew to Vermont other smart innovators, many of whom never left.
Said Lucy O’Brien, Dave’s companion for 29 years: “I can’t imagine what this valley would be like if it weren’t for Dave Sellers.”
Life Outside the Lines
Dave grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill., the second of three sons of Georgiana and Frederick Sellers,
Upon returning to the U.S., Dave began attending classes at the Yale School of Architecture before he had even applied, then convinced the professor to admit him.
In 1964, Dave and four Yale friends were skiing at Sugarbush Resort when they decided to move to the Mad River Valley and build vacation homes. They rented a local farmer’s house and, with a $1,000 down payment, bought 425 acres in Warren. Dave designated land for a small neighborhood that they called Prickly Mountain. Then they got busy erecting houses, often based on little more than rough sketches and solving problems on the fly.
The young architects were neither back-to-the-landers nor hippies, though they embodied both groups’ values of nonconformity and experimentation.
“There were almost no booze or
The Pyramid House in Warren
drugs,” said Mackall, 85. “The ‘drug’ was a sheet of plywood, a stack of two-byfours and the sense that you could do anything.”
In those years, Vermont had no statewide building codes, housing inspectors or permit requirements. Act 250, the state’s land-use and development law, wouldn’t be passed until 1970.
Just as well. Most of the young architects had never built a house before; one didn’t even own a hammer. But they threw themselves into the work with abandon, erecting quirky, eyecatching structures. Dave’s houses were “somewhat outrageous and frequently impractical,” Mackall said, “because the expression was more important than making sure there weren’t air leaks or it wasn’t chilly in the wintertime.”
“Drawings were just a very loose idea of what the project should be,” said Jim Sanford, who partnered with Dave in the firm Sanford, Sellers, Maclay, in Warren’s former Odd Fellows Hall. “When Dave got involved in the supervision of the job, only then did the real brilliance come out.”
Dave was teaching design at Goddard College in Plainfield in the early 1970s when he turned his attention to alternative energy, believing that houses needed to be eco-friendly as well as fun to live in.
Today, clean and attractive woodstoves are ubiquitous in Vermont. But in the early ’70s, most were ugly, dirty and inefficient. After Dave discovered a 1940s government research paper on the science of woodstoves, he and two friends, Duncan Syme and Dick Travers, held a competition to see which of them could build the best one. Travers, the winner, went on to found Vermont Iron Stove Works, while Syme cofounded Vermont Castings.
Dave also dabbled in wind energy. He and Don Mayer, now owner of Small Dog Electronics, won a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration to develop modern turbines. The pair rounded up defunct windmills from farms on the Great Plains, brought them back to Vermont, refurbished them and launched North Wind Power, now known as Northern Power Systems.
With Canadian biologist and academic John Todd, Dave designed a solar-aquatic sewage treatment system known as an “eco machine.” They cofounded a company called Four Elements. Todd, a University of Vermont professor emeritus, would go on to found John Todd Ecological Design.
Dave’s projects weren’t all business ventures. The Prickly Mountain group was legendary for its prize-winning floats in Warren’s Fourth of July parades.
Constructed from scrap lumber, the floats featured elaborate movable parts, such as flapping eagle’s wings and a Statue of Liberty who raised her torch.
Among the participants in Warren’s 1976 bicentennial parade was artist Candy Barr, who soon started dating Dave. They married on New Year’s Eve 1977. The couple lived in the Tack House and had their daughter, Trillium, in 1978 and their son, Parker, in 1981.
What was life like on Prickly Mountain?
“As fun as you can imagine,” Candy, 73, recalled. Famous for their “soirées,” the couple threw elaborate, often impromptu bashes for guests as eclectic as their home. Many slept over, then woke the next morning to play ice hockey, Candy said.
Indeed, Dave did little inside the lines. He would mow the lawn in a spiral pattern rather than in straight rows. He loved classic cars but didn’t bother keeping them pristine or even clean.
Nor did he stress over day-to-day responsibilities such as cooking dinner, paying bills, organizing his clutter — he was an inveterate pack rat — or doing basic home repairs.
I CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT THIS VALLEY WOULD BE LIKE IF IT WEREN’T FOR DAVE SELLERS.
LUCY O’BRIEN
“The energy level was always high,” Trillium recalled. “We had a rule in our house that if someone was singing or making music, you couldn’t stop them.”
With its fanciful design, the Tack House was also popular with kids.
“A lot of effort was put into the children’s play zone,” Parker remembered. With its curved ceilings and labyrinthine design, the Tack House has a balcony with ladders, a slide and a small passageway through which kids can crawl onto a carpeted catwalk encircling a large bedroom below. As Trillium put it, “Coloring books were not part of my growing up.”
“If there was a leak in the house, he would say, ‘It’s only water,’” Candy said. “He wasn’t interested in chores. He was interested in creating stuff.”
But Dave’s tendency to be, as one friend put it, “impervious to norms,” finally landed him in trouble.
In 1987 he pled guilty to having sex with an underage teen and agreed to a one- to three-year suspended sentence. The conviction alienated many in the Mad River Valley, ended his marriage and haunted Dave for the rest of his life.
Full Speed Ahead
In the 1990s, Dave’s unconventional architecture drew the attention of another iconoclast: Patch Adams, a physician and clown famous for preaching the healing power of laughter. Adams invited Dave to design buildings at his nonprofit Gesundheit! Institute in Hillsboro, W.Va. Among them is the Dacha, which looks like it was lifted from a Dr. Seuss book, with wooden minarets and onion domes.
Dave also spent decades working with Adams to build sustainable villages, hospitals and clinics for the poor in Latin America.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Dave also worked on high-end hotels, including the Pitcher Inn in Warren, which burned down in 1993. Dave convinced then-Sugarbush owner Win Smith to rebuild the inn, inviting several colleagues, including Sanford, Syme and John Connell, founder of the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield, to each design a room.
Some Dave Sellers projects have an unfinished quality. They include his Warren workshop, known familiarly as the Temple of Dindor. The quirky, high-ceilinged, warehouse-like space has a poured-concrete fireplace, retractable glass doors, and railroad tracks for rolling large projects in and out. On a recent visit, it was still littered with objects Dave accumulated at flea markets and garage sales: a vintage bumper car, a tuba, a 15seat war canoe, a dusty ’80s-era Camaro.
Despite its unpolished appearance, the Temple “elevated the simplest and crudest of building materials — two-byfours, 16-penny nails, sheets of plywood — to enormous heights,” Sanford said. It also features two golf greens and multiple tees, where Dave and friends hit balls every day during lunch.
The workshop’s rough-hewn aesthetic also reflected some of the people with whom Dave associated. Warren builder Whitney Phillips, 46, who met Dave as a
Dave Sellers on his back porch in Warren in June 2024
teen and worked for him for years as a stoneworker, builder and then president of his sled company, Mad River Rocket, said Dave had a soft spot for underdogs and never put on airs, accepting good ideas no matter whom they came from.
Phillips’ aha moment in understanding Dave’s architecture happened at the Temple, when he realized that Dave was all about creating interesting spaces — balconies, alcoves, landings, staircases — where people naturally hang out.
“Every building he ever created had some special little interaction place,” Phillips said.
Dave met Lucy O’Brien, his partner of nearly three decades, in 1997. A Texas native, she dated Dave long-distance for three years before buying a house across from his in Warren village. The couple lived together for 17 years until a disagreement resulted in Dave moving out. The couple stayed together but lived separately, and Lucy told Dave to remove all of his clutter.
and innovation behind everyday objects.” Outside sits a vintage gas pump, rusting farm machinery and an old windmill. Inside a front door inlaid with a tennis racket lies a warren of rooms exhibiting antique toys, radios, typewriters and sleds.
Dave continued working into the final weeks of his life. Long an advocate for using poured concrete to construct inexpensive, durable homes, he built two in Warren: the Madsonian House and the Archie Bunker. A fire gutted the interior of the Archie Bunker in 2016 but left 99 percent of its structure intact.
“He loved piles. It got to where I couldn’t see the dining room table,” she said.
Lucy’s eviction of Dave’s junk eventually led him to open the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield, which celebrates the “artistry
Dave considered that a success.
In February, Dave was in Los Angeles with Parker exploring the feasibility of building fire-resistant concrete homes to replace those destroyed in this year’s wildfires. But a brief illness, compounded by a heart condition, proved too much for him at the age of 86.
Dave’s death seemed emblematic of how he lived: always pursuing another bold new idea. Said Parker, “There was never coasting with him. His foot was always on the gas pedal.”
Lucy agreed. A few years ago, a friend suggested that she convince Dave to retire.
“Are you kidding me?” Lucy replied. “The day he dies, Dave is going to rise up out of that pine box and
Interior of the Madsonian House in Warren
Dave Sellers
Trash Talk
Meet Curb, the waste collection startup helping Vermonters think twice before they toss
BY HANNAH FEUER • hfeuer@sevendaysvt.com
Brian Somers jabbed a gloved hand into a clear trash bag and fished out a metal tube. He tossed the bag into his truck, set the tube aside and sent a text to the South Burlington homeowner: Next time, separate metal from trash — it goes to a scrapyard, not the landfill.
“It’s hard,” Somers told a reporter tagging along on his afternoon trash route one recent Thursday. “I don’t know how we could expect everybody to know where absolutely everything goes.”
Somers, 34, isn’t your typical trash hauler. For starters, he co-owns the Chittenden County business, Curb Resource Collection. And when’s the last time your garbageman texted you with advice?
That hands-on approach is central to Curb’s mission: helping Vermonters become more thoughtful about what they throw away. Beyond Somers’ gentle reminders about proper sorting, an environmental ethos is baked into Curb’s pricing model. The business o ers compost and recycling pickup for a monthly flat fee — $54 for weekly or $36 for biweekly service — while landfill-bound trash costs $3 per bag. The idea is that unit pricing will make people more mindful of their waste and maybe, as a result, throw less away.
“It does provide some psychological e ect, just being mindful of each bag,” said Ryan Gonzales, a customer in South Burlington. Since using Curb, he said, he’s been composting more and disposing of less trash.
IT’S UNIQUE, HAVING A CONNECTION WITH YOUR TRASH GUY.
RYAN
Two married couples — Somers and Anna Stuart, and Kristen and Tommy Lyga — started Curb in 2022. The four met as college students in Burlington, Stuart at the University of Vermont and the rest at Champlain College. They kept in touch after graduation, and get-togethers that started as game nights playing Catan soon morphed into strategy sessions for a real-life venture.
Today, Curb is a profitable business with hundreds of customers. Somers is employed by the company full time, driving the sole black Curb truck. For the others, it’s a part-time gig. By day, Stuart works as a cybersecurity lawyer, Kristen as a real estate agent and Tommy as a commercial account manager at Vermont Construction.
Somers is the waste whiz of the bunch. After studying business at Champlain, he went to work for Green Mountain Compost, which was later absorbed by Chittenden Solid Waste District. In 2015, he moved on, first working as a scale operator weighing inbound trash for a waste management company near Boston and later as a sales
Curb founders, from left: Tommy Lyga, Kristen Lyga, Anna Stuart and Brian Somers
COURTESY
representative for a similar company in New York City.
Those roles inspired Somers to look more closely at the waste management industry, which is a complex patchwork of private companies and municipal programs depending on the area. In Vermont, waste collection is generally handled by private haulers — though Burlington has mandatory municipal recycling.
Somers noticed that the “pay-asyou-throw” pricing model was gaining traction. In 2022, more than 7,000 U.S. cities and towns charged for trash by the bag, including Seattle and Portland, Maine. The results were significant. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection found that towns with pay-as-you-throw systems generated an average of 30 percent less trash per household in 2020, compared with households in towns that didn’t use that approach.
Curb set out to bring that model to environmentally conscious Vermont. While most local waste collectors charge a flat fee based on bin size — regardless of how much trash a customer actually sets out — Curb takes a different approach. Customers buy $3 stickers to attach to each trash bag, paying only for what they throw away.
More discrete pricing was part of the appeal for Burlington resident Becky Wilkins, who signed up for Curb when she bought her house last June. Her household of five only generates about one 15-gallon trash bag each week — a result of thoughtful consumption, composting, recycling and feeding food scraps to her backyard chickens.
“I really didn’t want to be paying the full price for regular curbside pickup when I don’t need that much trash pickup,” she said. “I really liked [Curb’s] payment structure and their whole philosophy.”
Curb also distinguishes itself from larger haulers with responsive customer service — its employees answer the phone — and flexible scheduling.
Customers who don’t have trash some weeks can pause service and earn a $4 credit.
Somers also takes pride in educating customers, and he’ll send them a
message if something’s off. Some frequent offenders: In Vermont, greasy pizza boxes can be recycled. Styrofoam cannot.
Somers builds rapport with customers, too. Gonzales, who works from home, often chats with him during pickups.
“It’s unique, having a connection with
your trash guy,” Gonzales said. “I have his cellphone number!”
Yet being a hyperlocal waste collection company also has its challenges. Curb’s biggest competitor, Casella Waste Systems, is a publicly traded company with 4,000 employees compared with Curb’s four.
Rather than convincing people to switch waste collectors, Curb sees the most success with new homeowners.
The business doesn’t invest much in advertising, instead relying on word of mouth and the visibility of its distinctive black trash bins.
Still, Somers often drives past clusters of Casella bins just to reach a few Curb customers, making his routes less fuel-efficient. The business is working to increase density on its four routes across Chittenden County, with hopes of adding a second truck and driver soon.
Even disposal happens on Casella turf. After finishing pickups that Thursday, Somers pulled into the Casella Transfer Station in Williston, weighed in, dumped the trash and weighed the truck again. He’d unloaded 1,500 pounds of garbage collected from 67 homes. Birds circled the mountains of trash, the air thick with the stench of rot. From there, the trash would be trucked to Vermont’s only landfill, in Coventry.
Next up, it was time to unload compost at the Chittenden Solid Waste District Drop-Off Center in Williston. Somers hoisted bins out of the truck and dumped 60 gallons into a growing pile of eggshells, citrus peels, half-eaten grapes, and squishy chunks of tomatoes and onions.
Somers took a big swig of water as he climbed back into the truck. He was done for now, but he’d be back on the road on Tuesday — compost and trash day in Burlington. ➆
Learn more at curbyourwaste.com.
Brian Somers on a recent pickup
My house in Marshfield village was small and a century old — hardly deluxe. But when I decided to move last fall, I had a feeling I’d have no trouble selling it.
I settled on an asking price of $225,000, which seemed fair for a cute but aging structure with few modern conveniences, nor space for them. But I knew that would be considered a bargain. A three-bedroom home under $350,000 is a rarity in the coveted “missing middle” category of Vermont’s overheated housing market.
Marketplace Report
Essay:
How I sold my house on Facebook Marketplace in three days
library, and the house is in a great location, just a few minutes from the railbed that leads to Groton State Forest. The backyard is a portal to thousands of acres of woods, largely untouched by roads.
Months after posting my ads, I’d received only a few responses on Craigslist, most of them spam. But about 30 seconds after the listing hit Facebook, my phone started to buzz.
up from Rhode Island tomorrow?
I thought briefly about hiring a real estate agent, but it seemed like a lot of money for something I could do myself. I’d bought the place without an agent in 2020 after learning about it from friends — the way a lot of homes seem to change hands in small-town Vermont — and it had never been listed on the MLS.
Instead, I decided to post my home on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. I’d listed a lot of stu with success on the former, from light fixtures to rughooking wool, and I reasoned it couldn’t hurt to use the latter.
My first step in the process was a photo shoot. I boxed up my knickknacks, art supplies, kids’ artwork, and a picture gallery of long-gone dogs and cats. Mindful that strangers would soon be viewing the tiny bedroom I used as a walk-in closet, I stashed most of my clothes in the car. I pushed a bunch of bike tools under a bed and recycled a few of my grown kids’ books and other stu . (Kids, if you’re reading this: It was time.)
For my neighbors’ sake, I wanted the house to go to people who would live there, not to parttime residents or investors. So when I wrote a description, I mentioned the close-knit community and the school bus stop, just steps away.
The house is warm and cozy, with nearly an acre of lawn and gardens and a huge flowering crab apple tree out front, but it has issues. There’s no dishwasher in the outdated kitchen, nor counter space to roll out a piecrust. Many Vermonters will not be surprised to hear that the basement is floored with concrete, dirt and rocks — but home shoppers from New York and Massachusetts were. The floors are sloped, and the stairs are steep. The bright side: The neighbors are friendly, there are a lot of activities at the nearby town
Most messages were urgent and friendly: Could they see the house right now? Could they drive up from Rhode Island tomorrow? Some were beseeching: Could I do owner financing? Rent-toown? A huge price cut?
own? A huge price cut?
that I hoped to find a buyer described themselves
Many callers seemed to know without being told that I hoped to find a buyer who would be present in the community. They described themselves accordingly. Others did not intuit as much. A few people called from southern New England wondering if the house would make a good shortterm rental; I said it would
few people called from would make a good shortterm rental; I said it would not.
Some skiers who must
Some skiers who must have been pretty desperate — the closest ski area is Burke Mountain, 45 minutes away — peppered me with questions about local dining and attractions, of which there are practically none, unless you count Sunday pickleball and the waterfall up the road.
is Burke Mountain, 45 about local dining and attractions, of which none, unless you count Sunday pickleball and the
One Massachusetts resident seeking a place near Mad River Glen drove up to Vermont anyway and was visibly shocked at the rural setting where he found himself. He left without touring the house. I expected to hear from people who had lost their homes in last summer’s Plainfield flooding, but only one stopped by. A neighbor displaced by that flood told me that as much as she wants to buy a house, she’d never again live on a hillside like mine, under threat of potential runo . (In the spirit of full disclosure, I showed buyers where and how I pumped out the basement after the 2023 flood and warned, “It will happen again.”)
One Massachusetts resident seeking a place drove up to Vermont anyway setting where he found himself. He left without
It was unnerving to have the interior of my home visible to all on Facebook, but it was also rather festive. Strangers messaged me solely to say they liked the wall colors and décor, including a one-of-a-kind recliner that my daughter Sophie reupholstered. A long-ago Associated Press colleague in upstate New York saw the posting and got in touch to say hello. Work contacts galore mentioned the house — or my blue couch — in between otherwise mundane topics.
The listing exposed some of the craziness that our tight housing supply has created. A guy in the Philippines
phoned from an outfit called sold.com that’s buying up homes for institutional investors. He claimed the company wanted to make a cash offer and could send a “local expert,” a Realtor from St. Albans, to inspect the house the next day. I declined. I don’t understand how, with no contacts, no manager and no other nearby inventory, a remote investor could make a profit selling or renting the place.
I posted the ad on a Wednesday. Within the first 24 hours, I heard from several dozen people — a depressing reminder of how broken our economy is and how many Vermonters are waiting for a home.
By Saturday, I had two offers above
ABOUT 30 SECONDS AFTER THE LISTING HIT FACEBOOK, MY PHONE STARTED
TO BUZZ.
asking price. I chose a young couple who have Vermont jobs and who graduated from North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College, which my daughter attended — a random fact that immediately endeared them to me.
Placing the ads on Facebook and Craigslist was free — and allowed me to avoid paying a real estate agent a 3 percent seller’s commission of $7,200. I did pay $1,000 to a lawyer who
completed the transaction for me. And the buyers’ agent, Libby Ratico, helpfully explained some of the contract language to me.
I care about Marshfield and feel good about the new owners. When I was chosen as the buyer for the house in May 2020, I felt as though I’d won a lottery; it was a prize that enabled me to continue living in this state. Last fall I sought to pass on my good fortune to someone else who wants to make a life here. Marshfield is still a place that feels like home, even though I’m ditching it to live in Barre, closer to work, town and friends.
Plot twist: I found my new home on Craigslist. ➆
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR NEW PARTNERS!
Long-time firm members Jess Gasek, AIA, and Jocelyn Noyes, AIA have been elevated to Partner. Their growing expertise and strong client skills make them outstanding members of any project team.
They continue to contribute to S+P’s portfolio of commercial, multi-family, healthcare, dental, hospitality and higher education markets.
Please join us in congratulating these talented young architects on their most recent career achievements.
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