Nest — Summer 2022 by Seven Days

home design real estate

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In Morrisville, Thea Alvin creates art of place

More Vermonters are putting in pools

A gardening guru unearths her secrets

Aussie Damien Helem is building a reputation

SUMMER 2022

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It’s time to seize the summer, when the living spaces of Vermonters briefly expand to the great outdoors. No one blurs those lines more artfully than stonemason Thea Alvin, whose MORRISVILLE PROPERTY is a manifestation of her creative mind. Although her rows are straighter, GARDEN GURU ELLEN ECKER OGDEN of Manchester brings the best of both worlds to her kitchen gardens, which she recommends should be close enough to the house, as Nest’s Jordan Barry writes, so “that you can start sautéeing onions on the stove, run out to harvest a handful of herbs and be back before anything burns.” Thinking about INSTALLING A SWIMMING POOL? You’re not alone. There’s a long waiting list of Vermonters who want a bit of blue in the backyard. Charlotte-based CONTRACTOR DAMIEN HELEM is fully booked this summer, too, but made time to talk to Nest about his journey from a fundamentalist Christian family in Australia to the Vermont rehab business. Find all of that — and a Vermont mastermind of MATTRESS RECYCLING — in this issue.

Last Quarter.............................. 6

Vermont housing news

BY A NNE WAL L AC E AL L E N

Rock and a Good Place ............ 8

Let’s tackle that summer project

For stonemason Thea Alvin, life is about making and sharing beautiful art

together!

BY A M Y L IL LY

In the Swim ..............................12 Orders are flowing in to Vermont pool companies

kitchen remodel | new roof or deck | room addition

BY A NNE WAL L AC E AL L E N

Designing Dinner ....................15 Lessons from Ellen Ecker Ogden’s kitchen garden BY JO RD AN B AR RY

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With a small crew, Charlotte builder Damien Helem prioritizes creativity and quality

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ON THE COVER The winter root cellar and summer getaway cave at stone sculptor Thea Alvin’s home in Morrisville 8 In Morrisville, Thea Alvin creates art of place

12 More Vermonters are putting in pools

15 A gardening guru unearths her secrets

18 Aussie Damien Helem is building a reputation

SUMMER 2022

PHOTO BY BEAR CIERI

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6/29/22 12:03 PM

Last Quarter

Vermont housing news BY ANNE WALL ACE ALLEN anne@sevendaysvt.com

Realtor Mike Hickey in Stowe

BY THE NUMBERS

The percentage of women working in the trades, outside of administrative jobs, in Vermont. The statewide figure mirrors the national rate.

The percentage of Black households in Vermont that own their home. For white households, it’s about 72 percent.

62K

The number of vacant homes in Vermont in April 2020, which equates to 19 percent of the available housing stock. The Census Bureau defines these as homes not occupied by a full-time renter or owner. Homes used as short-term rentals, homes listed for sale and seasonal homes are considered vacant. Maine and Vermont have the highest percentage of such homes in the country.

NEST SUMMER 2022

When Staige Davis started out in the real estate business in 1980, the typical contract filled just one legal-size page, nobody talked about radon and there was no such thing as a home inspection. “You had your uncle Charlie come look at the house, and that was it,” said Davis, who is now executive chairman of Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty in South Burlington. Things have gotten more complicated. Once real estate agents used to control the information in the multiple listing service. Now details of every home listed with an agent are available through sites like Zillow and Redfin. Sale contracts are 18 legal-size pages or more — albeit digital — and if you’re not an expert at social media, you’re missing opportunities to find both sellers and buyers. When a dozen or more people are bidding on one home — a situation that’s arisen many times lately in Chittenden County’s overheated market — and one bidder is successful, that means at least 11 real estate agents will have done hours of paperwork, only to lose out with no commission. “It’s a tough, tough business,” said Mike Hickey, a broker at the Keller Williams Realty office in Stowe. But despite the difficulties, real estate is a popular job choice in Vermont. The number of licensed real estate agents rose 20 percent

between 2018 and 2022, from 1,125 to 1,348. The 40-hour pre-licensing courses offered by the Vermont Association of Realtors regularly sell out and have a waiting list, said Kathy Sweeten, the association CEO. “COVID kind of changed things, and people saw the opportunity to change careers,” Sweeten said. She thinks that’s why she’s now seeing more interest from younger people, a welcome development in a profession where the average age is 55.

IT’S A TOUGH, TOUGH BUSINESS. MIK E H IC K E Y

At age 35, Rep. Logan Nicoll (D-Ludlow) is one of those younger people. Nicoll works in maintenance at a hotel but recently obtained a real estate license because he wants the flexibility to carry out his duties in the legislature from January to May. Nicoll was prompted to try real estate because he noticed a lot of the agents he knows appeared to be nearing retirement age. And in a state where housing supply is low, he said, Ludlow — a ski town with many second homes — is an outlier, with a high rate of turnover. Nicoll noted that the skills he acquired when he was running for office in 2018 are

JEB WALLACE BRODEUR

Real Work directly transferable: “Cold calls, trying to strike up a conversation with somebody you have never talked to … campaigning and knocking on doors is all about selling yourself and selling your ideas,” he said. The Vermont Association of Realtors is working with the state’s Office of Professional Regulation to beef up the education requirements for real estate agent licensing. “We’re taking the largest transaction of [someone’s] life, potentially, and handing it to people who have 40 hours of education and saying, ‘good luck,’” said Hickey, the president of the association’s board. “You’re dealing with someone who has never owned a home, who might have lived in an apartment their whole life,” Hickey said of rookie real estate agents. “They don’t know what the big black tank is in the basement.” For those who figure out the business, though, there’s money to be made. According to the National Association of Realtors, brokers and agents with at least 16 years of experience reported an average income of $75,000 last year, down from $86,500 in 2019. Those with two years or fewer reported income of just $8,600. About 65 percent of all real estate agents and brokers are female college graduates who own a home, the association said.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL Efficiency Vermont devotes special attention each year to commercial and residential buildings that are exceptional for their design, affordability and energy efficiency. The Winooski nonprofit presents its Best of the Best awards at a Better Buildings by Design conference each spring. These winning projects were all constructed in 2020 or 2021.

Affordability Award Three 840-square-foot modular homes built by KBS Builders for a nonprofit mobile home park in downtown Bristol. John Graham Housing & Services customdesigned each two-bedroom home for its lot, and two of the homes were built to ADA guidelines. Estimated annual energy cost for each: $18.

Since Josh Costa started his Burlington mattress recycling company, Sleep Well Recycling, in 2020, he’s ripped up thousands of Vermont mattresses. The foam goes to a place in New Jersey that turns it into carpet pads; the wood to Burlington Electric Department’s McNeil Generating Station. The steel springs are trucked to All Metals Recycling in Williston. Costa studied marketing at Champlain College and spent a year playing with the Vietnamese national basketball team on his way to becoming a mattress recycler. A job at a junk removal company confirmed that his calling was finding ways to reduce the waste stream. Costa started Sleep Well Recycling with his brother, a college student. It took off quickly after he posted on Facebook that he was looking for mattresses; the Lodge at Spruce Peak in Stowe sent 900 of them in the first week. He expects to recycle 10,000 mattresses this year. For Costa, the beauty of

Josh Costa

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Best of the Best A four-bedroom, 974-square-foot home in Norwich that was built to house an adult and three teenagers. With a 12,000-BTU heat pump and a pellet stove, designer/ builder BackTilt Studio estimates the home’s annual energy costs at $1,694.

New Life for Old Mattresses

mattress recycling lies in the reuse of something that consumes an extraordinarily large amount of landfill space. “They are just big old voids in the pile of garbage,” he said of mattresses. “They sometimes ride a wave of methane to the surface, and make the whole thing wobbly, or they get stuck in loaders. They are a pain in the butt.”

Residential customers can drop off their mattresses at Sleep Well six days a week for $20 to $30, depending on size. Most of Costa’s business comes from furniture companies that pick up old mattresses when they deliver new ones; Champlain Housing Trust, which owns and manages rental housing; and local colleges and hotels. In May, he signed a contract

to take mattresses from the Chittenden Solid Waste District. His goal is to be recycling every discarded mattress and box spring in New England by 2024. “Someone’s trash really can be a treasure if you know what you are looking for,” Costa said. “Keeping it out of the landfill has always been an exciting proposition for me.”

GREEN POWER

“The fact that it’s quieter is very big for some people.

People who work on Zoom can’t be getting bombed by a gas engine flying by their window in the middle of a presentation.” MAT T S TUAR T of Electric Lawn, a fossil fuel-free lawn care business in Norwich

Healthy Homes Award A two-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot passive solar house in Calais. Designer/builder Montpelier Construction estimates the annual energy cost at $290.

Matt Stuart likes to think of a lawn as a habitat that deserves intention and respect — not just a place to be flattened and planted with grass. Stuart and his crew of about 10 are using six electric lawn mowers this summer to trim 250 lawns in the Upper Valley. The mowers are much more expensive than their gas counterparts

— about $22,000 compared to $10,000 — but Stuart said the payoff comes in the form of noise reduction and air quality. His customers appreciate the difference, and he said they’re willing to pay 20 percent more for the services of his company, Electric Lawn. He appreciates it, too, because it fits into his background as a gardener

Matt Stuart

and steward of the land. Stuart and his wife — who runs a gardening business — have an off-grid home and small farm where they have offered composting services to local restaurants and hosted other organic farmers. Starting his two-year-old

lawn mowing business and eschewing all fossil fuelpowered lawn machinery is an extension of that work, he said. “We’re not blowing through a lawn going Mach 3 and weed-whacking through peoples’ nice edges,” he said. “We’re very intentional.” NEST SUMMER 2022

For stonemason Thea Alvin, life is about making and sharing beautiful art BY AMY L I L LY • lilly@sevendaysvt.com

An astonishing stone corkscrew arch marks the spot along Route 100 where Thea Alvin put down roots — and rocks — in Morrisville. It took her two years to build the Helix, as she named it, which frames the Green Mountains in the distance through a series of arches that resemble a stretched-out Slinky.

Rock and a Good Place

PHOTOS: BEAR CIERI

Top: Thea Alvin’s home in Morrisville. Bottom: the kitchen

NEST SUMMER 2022

Her work can also be found farther afield, from Saint Michael’s College in Colchester to Duke University in North Carolina to the Piedmont and Puglia regions of Italy. Alvin’s precisely circular or keystone-shaped openings in curvilinear walls, all of which she improbably constructs from dozens of tons of fieldstones, have caught the attention of the New York Times and Oprah Winfrey. For years, Alvin, now 54, would travel for her work and return to her 1810 farmhouse and century-old barn in Morrisville. That is, until a devastating 3 a.m. fire in December 2017 destroyed the barn and half of the house. The cause was never identified; Alvin suspected spontaneous combustion in a load of hay that had been delivered the previous day. The fire killed 10 goats and 30 hens, along with 10 trees, and destroyed the living and working spaces of several artists who had been renting from Alvin. The tragedy spurred Alvin to a new creative project: designing and constructing the barn and house she had always wanted and healing from the ordeal in the process. Alvin showed Nest around her home on a recent sunny day, starting with the Helix. Asked why she made it, she said, “Because it’s impossible. I like to do hard things, big things — because I’m little.” (Alvin is 5 feet, 2 inches tall.) In April, the 20-year-old Helix was destroyed by a street sweeper. Alvin called on “my stonemason community,” as she put it, for help. In four days, 20 of them rebuilt the sculpture on top of a raised berm that Alvin created, out of the way of future sweepers. That communal approach was typical. Generous and collaborative, Alvin operates in a world of enthusiastic friendship and mutual support. When her barn burned, Philip Sweet of Sustainable Earth Project in Waitsfield helped her design a new one. A team of professional timber framers cut the pieces in 17 days, and some 100 friends showed up to raise the new barn over three days. The volunteer crew slept in tents on Alvin’s land or in her half-burned house, sharing meals and listening to music while they worked. One barn raiser was Greg Reid, a client who became a friend after Alvin built several stone structures on the grounds of his event garden, Mandala Gardens in Marion, Ill. “I drove from Illinois,” Reid recalled by phone. “I have no framing experience, but I was willing to go out there and do what I could, [because] she herself is so giving.” “[Alvin is] an extrovert, just a really friendly person.

HO ME T O UR

The Helix

SHE REALLY LIVES IN A

This tiny structure serves as root cellar in winter and getaway cave in summer.

WORK OF ART. M EG REIN HOLD

People want to help her, and she helps them,” said architect Mac Rood, of Bast & Rood Architects in Hinesburg. Rood and Alvin teach classes at Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield. They also coteach a stone restoration class through the school in Ghesc, Italy, an abandoned 15th-century village constructed completely of stone. Vermont filmmaker Art Bell of Dreamlike Pictures documented Alvin’s barn raising in a short titled “A Barn Built From Love.” Narrating the experience, Alvin expresses her primary reaction to the fire: anger. “I felt violated and shamed,” she says in the voice-over. “It leaves your heart bleeding all over the blackened snow.” There was little sign of that trauma as Alvin showed off her new barn. Along the way, she replenished the chickens’ water — her brood is again ROCK AND A GOOD PLACE

» P.10

Thea Alvin at home in Morrisville NEST SUMMER 2022

PHOTOS: BEAR CIERI

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The barn at Alvin’s home in Morrisville

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Rock and a Good Place « P.9

as a root cellar in the winter and a tiny getaway cave, complete with rug and armchair, in the summer. Alvin led a workshop through her stonemason business, MyEarthwork, to help construct it. She also built the two ponds on her property — a small koi pond and a large one with a waterfall running over a

at 30 — and tended her 10 Angora goats. The females roam with their five kids between the barn and an adjacent enclosure. The two billy goats are kept in a separate pen, where they vie for Alvin’s attention. (“This is my boyfriend, and this is my other boyfriend,” she said, introducing the affectionate animals.) The hens produce about 18 eggs a day. Alvin gives them away to the community or uses them for barter — as she does with the blueberries and apples she grows, the honey she collects from her beehives, and the mohair yarn spun from her goats’ sheared coats. A back stairway leading to the barn’s second-floor deck — built, like many features on the property, by Yestermorrow students — provides the entrance to an upstairs studio and living space outfitted with a woodstove. Alvin hopes eventually to host an artist residency there in the style of the Johnson-based Vermont Studio Center’s Vermont Artists Week, which she has attended. Just below the deck and beside an outdoor sculpture studio — built for stone sculptor Michael Clookey — is a stone retaining wall featuring a circular arch fitted with a whimsical round, yellow door. The AliceStone arch in-Wonderland-like space serves

projecting slab — and the stick-and-vine archway, called the Portal, that leads to her burial site for animals. And the pizza oven, a circular fieldstone construction with a conical cement top that imitates the stone houses she restores in Puglia, called trulli. Alvin holds regular pizza nights there for friends in a grassy space strung with lights. “We wanted to build a beautiful place to be because we work from home,” she said, as the tour turned to the house. The artist also cares for her mother, Abbie Alvin, who has Alzheimer’s, as well as three golden retrievers. The post-fire house is a concatenation of forms. The surviving part of the old farmhouse contains a new kitchen with original ceiling beams now exposed between plaster installed by a Yestermorrow class. (“We never knew the house was timber-framed until the fire,” Alvin said.) A tower addition at the back — designed, framed and roofed by Rood with his Yestermorrow class — holds a living room with a main bedroom above it. A breezeway containing Alvin’s stained-glass and fiber studios — she learned to make windows at Yestermorrow and taught herself to dye yarn — connects the living room to the former garage via a hidden door that’s disguised as a bookcase.

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The garage is now a cozy living room for Abbie, who lives in an attached second tower that contains a small kitchen and upstairs bedroom. Handmade features and objects are integrated everywhere: Granville artist Meg Reinhold’s living room mural of giant Queen Anne’s lace, and another of birch trees in the bedroom; a carved wood table and cabinet made by Alvin’s grandfather, whose parents emigrated from Italy; gingerbread balusters on the staircase that Alvin carved in homage to her upbringing on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Reinhold, who recently became a full-time muralist, was a cook at Yestermorrow when she first met Alvin. She subsequently took a class with her, pre-fire, that included a tour of the house. Alvin’s bedroom mural, completed two years ago, was Reinhold’s first large-scale commission. “She gave me free rein and really encouraged me,” Reinhold, 38, recalled. “She’s been a mentor to me.” While she was painting the living room mural in May, Reinhold

continued, community members were constantly coming and going: a woman who purchased one of Alvin’s stainedglass pieces, a homeschooled child who was helping Alvin with her seedling plants, a doula who came to help the goats going into labor. “She’s always been really open with sharing her space, and she’s such a gracious hostess,” Reinhold said. “I’ve visited as a student [and] as a friend; she’s had spinning and knitting nights at her house, fabulous pizza parties — any excuse I have to go there. “It’s a sanctuary space,” Reinhold added. “Thea’s always bringing people through. She loves to share all the art incorporated in her lifestyle. She really lives in a work of art.” For Alvin, that last point is the key to life. “I want to live beautifully,” she said. “I can produce beautiful artwork because I live beautifully.” m

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In the Swim Orders are flowing in to Vermont pool companies BY A NNE WALL ACE ALLE N • anne@sevendaysvt.com

Vermont has a lot more backyard ponds than swimming pools. Or so it looked to surveyor Jack Milbank on a pre-pandemic glider ride over the town of Stowe.

Stainless plunge pool designed by Cynthia Knauf of Knauf Landscape Architecture

NEST SUMMER 2022

That appears to be changing. In the past two and a half years, more splashes of blue — in some cases, classic aqua — have been added to the Green Mountain State landscape. Milbank has worked on five pool projects, which for him, he said, is “a lot.” Nationally, pool builders have been flooded with orders — a trend that’s in line with the overall home improvement surge that started in 2020. Denise Rundle, a co-owner of Northeast Pools & Spas in Sharon, laughed when asked if she’s going on vacation this summer. Rundle’s company will install 10 high-end swimming pools during Vermont’s few short months of warm weather, and, with 30 clients on her waiting list, she’s never been busier. Rundle’s pools cost between $65,000 and $250,000, and the company is booked out until 2024. Rundle said inquiries have tripled since before the pandemic — mostly from “the people moving from the cities.” Real estate agent Averill Cook noted the same thing while showing a $2.5 million home in Shelburne. “One of the common questions that came up was: ‘Can you put a pool in?’” he said of the recent listing. After enough potential buyers asked, he called Milbank at Civil Engineering Associates in South Burlington to get an answer. “They’re all considered structures,” Milbank said of backyard pools, noting the array of permitting rules that may restrict their construction in Vermont. Shelburne has lakeshore setback requirements. A variety of state environmental permits may apply, too, depending on the surrounding patios and other features. Some towns — including South Burlington — have their own permitting requirements. In some communities, even lower-cost, aboveground pools need a permit if any kind of deck is involved.

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In the case of the Shelburne house, however, Cook assured the potential buyers that, yes, a pool was possible. He also leveled with them: “There is, I believe, the last time I checked, a two-year wait list on pools these days.” A survey in April of the nation’s top pool and spa builders found that 20 percent have at least a yearlong backlog of orders. Forty percent told the industry website Pool and Spa News that their revenue had increased by one-fifth in the last year. Residential swimming pools — indoors and out — come in all shapes, sizes and even colors. The kidney shape was big for decades, starting in the ’50s. Pool designers and builders say rectangles are popular in Vermont at the moment. Rundle said that’s because they pair well with an automatic cover. “The typical thing I do is a rectangle with an automatic safety cover, because it retains heat in this cold region,” she said.

“I personally am not willing to take the risk of a grotto crashing down because frost heaves the stones,” she said. She thinks Vermont’s landscape is so appealing and varied that customers don’t need to add a lot of decorative elements. “Many of those places in Texas, Tennessee and Florida, where they have a lot of swimming pools with grottoes and stones, those are flat areas,” Rundle said. “They’re trying to create some privacy screens. Here, we already have beautiful things to look at; we don’t need to create a rock mountain in our backyard.” Rundle, who also works in New York and New Hampshire, said the latter requires more inspections during construction than Vermont does. It also has more state rules regarding pool fencing, which Vermont leaves up to municipalities. “We recommend everyone have a fence or safety cover no matter where

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Rundle added that most people ask for a built-in heater and a dark finish on the bottom. “It looks more natural in this environment. They don’t want that bright aqua.” Landscape designer Cynthia Knauf, who has an office in Colchester, has created several infinity pools over the 30 years she’s been in business. The pools are often part of a larger plan. “I always prefer to fit the pool into the natural conditions,” said Knauf, who does a lot of her work in resort areas such as Stowe. “It’s part of a bigger outdoor space. There are usually terraces, gardens and paths, and it needs to have a nice connection to the house.” There’s almost no limit to what you can add to a pool, such as fountains, grottoes and waterfalls. Some high-end pools are made to look like natural landscape features, with real or artificial rock instead of tile. But Knauf said she designs most of her pools to fit in more naturally with the shape of the home. “Mimicking the lines of the house is one way to connect it to the house,” she said. “And then you can soften it with your plants.” Rundle avoids rocks, because they tend to move during the freeze-andthaw cycle.

they live,” Rundle said. “Many insurance companies require it even if the municipality does not.” Another must is regular cleaning and sanitation. Chlorine is still the go-to chemical, although Rundle said she hears a lot of requests for alternatives. She said using a pool cover can help lessen chlorine use by minimizing the pool’s exposure to UV rays. She discourages customers from installing saltwater pools because salt is corrosive, especially when added to chlorine. “Salt doesn’t have any sanitizing properties whatsoever,” Rundle added. The labor shortage is limiting pool construction and maintenance. An increase in material prices is making it difficult to estimate costs in the future. Earlier this year Rundle sold off the service department at Northeast Pools & Spas, which she co-owns with her brother and father. “I had just lost a longtime employee, and I would have to leave my job of running the company to go clean pools just to keep up,” Rundle said. “My brother was doing the same thing; he’d have to leave construction to clean pools. You can’t skip a week or you’ll have algae.” m

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G A R DENI NG

Designing

Dinner

Lessons from Ellen Ecker Ogden’s kitchen garden BY J O R D AN BAR RY • jbarry@sevendaysvt.com

Ellen Ecker Ogden in her kitchen garden

“I garden because I love to eat,” Ellen Ecker Ogden wrote in her most recent book, The New Heirloom Garden: Designs, Recipes, and Heirloom Plants for Cooks Who Love to Garden. A well-designed kitchen garden, the Manchester-based kitchen-garden designer, educator and cookbook author continued, can “turn ‘work’ into ‘play.’”

Apples from Ogden’s old, twisted apple tree

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DAVID BARNUM

Ogden’s yard and kitchen garden from above

In 2003, Ogden downsized dramatically from the 10-acre farm where she’d run a seed catalog, The Cook’s Garden, with her former husband, to a quarter-acre plot in the village of Manchester. On it, the yellow house built as a boardinghouse for employees at the nearby Equinox House, now the Equinox Golf Resort and Spa, “seemed like a perfect temporary spot,” Ogden said. She planned to stay for a few years while her children finished college. “Now it’s been 18 years,” she said. “Once you start putting in gardens…” The property had a few old crab apple trees and lilac bushes but was otherwise gardenless. For $150, she hired a landscaper to lay out a general plan. The first step was to move the driveway and plant a boxwood hedge in front of the gingerbread-style porch. The rest of the front garden is now filled with things “meant to make people smile as they pass by,” Ogden said, including fragrant nicotiana, bright sunflowers, droopy kiss-me-over-the-gardengate and 100 ornamental allium bulbs that lined the boxwood with their tall, purple puffs this spring. A pollinator patch of milkweed, wolfsbane, cimicifuga and an DESIGNING DINNER

» P.16

I’VE BECOME LESS OF

A FUSSY GARDENER. EL L EN EC K ER O G D EN

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G A R DENI NG Scarlet runner beans collected from Ogden’s garden

Designing Dinner « P.15

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DAVID BARNUM

assortment of native plants tends to grow a bit wild but is constantly abuzz. “I just want people to walk by and be excited by a garden,” Ogden said. “And there’s so much pleasure in planting not just for the beauty of it but for all kinds of visitors.” When Ogden teaches garden design, she starts with the big picture: Students grab a pen and paper and draw the yard from above. The bird’s-eye view gets them thinking about how their design will fit into the landscape and connect with its surroundings, Ogden said. Where does the sun come from? The wind? Are your neighbors annoying enough that you need a visual block? Often, vegetable gardens are relegated to the far reaches of the yard, while flower beds surround the house. When designing a kitchen garden, Ogden recommends getting it as close to the house as possible — close enough that you can start sautéing onions on the stove, run out to harvest a handful of herbs and be back before anything burns. In her own small yard, the default place for a kitchen garden was on the south side of the house, hidden by a hedge from the public-facing front. “Welcome to my Secret Garden,” Ogden said, stepping through the hedge’s gap into the enclosed space. The classic foursquare parterre design is anchored by an ornamental lilac in the center of the river-stone path, with alpine strawberries, volunteer poppies and borage growing underneath. Three massive rhubarb plants in their full early-summer glory threaten to take over one corner, and pink and white peonies provide a perennial pop of color. As formal as the layout seems, it’s also a practical one: The four growing areas make it easy to rotate crops to keep the soil healthy. Most of the plants in

Alpine strawberry

Ogden’s kitchen garden change every year — and every few weeks. Neat rows of tiny arugula shoots were sneaking up between more established chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, edible flowers, basil and other herbs. Ogden replants a nearly constant succession of lettuce and mesclun greens, paying attention to how long it takes for the chervil, cress, cutting mix and purslane to grow and staggering them so they are ready to pick at the same time. In mid-June, a spring planting of loose-leaf lettuces had become brilliant red and speckled green poufs. They had passed their peak flavor, but the rabbits were still interested, Ogden said. “I’ve become less of a fussy gardener,” she said, pointing out a patch of spinach starting to go to seed. “More and more, I like the wild piece — but it took me years to really be OK with that.” Ogden had already moved collards and kale into containers on the other side of the house, removing them from the threat of hungry rabbits in the unfenced kitchen garden. Brussels sprouts were next on the rescue list.

Kitchen gardens take a different mindset from big, production-heavy vegetable gardens, Ogden explained. The compact, European-style potager blends utility with beauty and should focus on culinary herbs, salad greens and unique heirloom vegetables that are difficult to find elsewhere. “We’re so lucky to have great farmers markets and moderately good supermarkets,” Ogden said. “So I don’t believe in trying to grow everything.” Instead, she follows an 80/20 rule: Each year, she devotes 80 percent of the garden to favorite varieties such as Italian purple pole beans and curly, flavor-packed heirloom Anellino beans. The other 20 percent is for something new, like this year’s Cinderella pumpkins. One year, she tried artichokes; they were so successful that they’re now part of her tried-and-true roster. Ogden is a big fan of vines and creates all sorts of bamboo trellises around the yard for them to climb on. One such trellis — soon to be embraced by the vines of chocolate runner beans, started from seeds she saved last fall — arches

over the back steps down from the kitchen garden into the rest of the yard. Straight ahead is the garden’s focal point: an old, twisted apple tree. A remnant of a former orchard, it reliably produces green apples that aren’t great for eating fresh but make for wonderful pie. Ogden considers it her garden’s “sweet spot.” Irish author and garden designer Mary Reynolds talks about the importance of finding the place in a yard “that sends up an extra vibration,” Ogden said. “That’s where you want to put your garden bench.” Ogden believes every garden needs a bench or chair — somewhere to sit, observe and listen. She has sprinkled benches throughout her quarter acre, providing different vantage points and reminders to relax. Every garden also needs a shed, Ogden said, so that tools are close at hand. That was the missing piece during a recent garden consultation, so she asked the client if anything on the property could be repurposed. “It turned out they had an outhouse way down in the lower field,” Ogden said with a laugh. In her consultations, classes and books, Ogden balances practical suggestions for making gardening more pleasurable — a bench, a shed, proper tools — with overarching wisdom about the importance of planning. A five-year plan, in fact. But perhaps her most important lesson for new gardeners and for herself is “don’t try to be too perfect.” “Vermonters spend so much time shivering in the cold,” Ogden said. “Creating a space that fills us up again so we can get through that long winter is so important. It’s a sanctuary, and it just has to make you smile.” m

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Sutherland Comfort

With a small crew, Charlotte builder Damien Helem prioritizes creativity and quality BY KEN PI CARD • ken@sevendaysvt.com

The creativity that builder Damien Helem brings to his projects is evident in his own Charlotte home. The four-bedroom, threebathroom house, which he renovated in 2017, features cathedral ceilings, an open floor plan and huge windows that provide stunning views of Camel’s Hump and the Green Mountains. But it’s the industrial-chic design, midcentury modern décor and small, playful touches that make it a unique pad. Helem, who owns Sutherland Construction in Charlotte, suspended a hammock from the structural I beam that spans the living room. His dining room “wall” — actually a garage door — opens with the touch of a button onto a spacious screened-in porch. And beneath his sleek kitchen counter, Helem installed a pipe that whisks away empty beer cans to a recycling bin downstairs.

Inside Damien Helem’s home in Charlotte

Damien Helem’s home in Charlotte

PHOTOS: JAMES BUCK

NEST SUMMER 2022

HO ME CO NS T R UCT I O N

occasionally rents out his home on Airbnb when he doesn’t have the kids. Though Helem has built homes from scratch, he prefers renovations and remodels, especially when he can work with clients to help them realize their vision and have fun with it. “I just love life, you know?” the tall, blue-eyed Aussie said, sporting his signature five-o’clock shadow and mischievous grin. “Being brought up in that religion where I was so controlled and oppressed, once I found my groove, I was like, ‘Let’s enjoy it.’” Seven Days caught up with Helem recently at his Charlotte home to talk about his business and the future of the building trades in Vermont.

SD: I hear that some contractors are only taking big jobs now. Are you? DH: It is nice for us to have some smaller jobs sprinkled in between the larger ones, especially for existing clients who need a window replaced or something like that. It’s nice to have those filler jobs, especially if we’re waiting on a [subcontractor] or materials on a larger job.

be I’d place an ad for a few weeks until someone popped up. Now, I have ads for a helper, a carpenter and a lead carpenter. The jobs have been open for months, and I’ve had maybe six hits. Yesterday a kid called for a summer job. I said, “Great,” texted him the work address — and never heard from him again. We’re really stretched thin at the moment.

SD: Any difficulties getting building supplies? DH: With the work we do, we’ve been a bit more protected from supply chain issues. It’s not like we’re building huge houses and need a shitload of two-by-fours and plywood. With remodeling, we might be changing out a window or building an

SD: What’s driving the shortage in your industry? DH: Even before the pandemic, we were struggling to find young people interested in learning the trade. Young people here are being encouraged to go to college and find a white-collar job then leaving college saddled with debt and probably getting a low-paid job that’s not even in the line of work they wanted. I’m really worried about the future of the industry, to be honest. The real craftsmen of our generation are going to be retiring in the next 10 to 20 years, and there’s not enough young people to carry the torch.

COURTESY OF SUTHERLAND CONSTRUCTION

Helem’s cheeky approach to design won’t surprise anyone who knows the fun-loving Australian. But he takes his work seriously and expects the same from his team. Despite a dearth of hirable tradespeople — he’s lost half of his sixperson crew in the last month — Helem doesn’t employ workers who are, as he put it, “rough around the edges.” He insists on a crew that’s “clean, tidy and respectable.” In fact, he says, having a smaller team enables him to put out a better product. Helem’s optimism and joie de vivre is a product of his upbringing — or a reaction to it. The 45-year-old grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, where his father, who worked in a furniture factory, introduced him to woodworking. His family belonged to a strict Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, which forbade radio, television and competitive sports. Helem had to attend church every night and five times on Sundays. So he left home at 16, mostly because he wanted to play Australian Rules football. Through Melbourne’s sports community, Helem met a commercial painter who convinced him to join his decorating company and set him on his current path as a tradesman. “He was hard on me. He had a really high expectation of quality, a solid work ethic,” Helem recalled. “I have a reputation for an attention to detail, and I think that’s where it came from.” Still, it took him a while to find himself. Helem spent years traveling through Australia and Southeast Asia before buying a one-way ticket to the UK in his twenties. There, he got a job at Hare & Humphreys, a prestigious London conservation and decoration company known for its restorations of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the British Museum and the Royal Opera House. Then, while exploring Europe in a van, Helem met a woman from Maine. He accompanied her to the U.S. in the mid-2000s and took a job with a highend remodeling firm in Boston, where he further honed his carpentry skills. Helem later married a different American woman with whom he moved to Vermont in 2012, working odd jobs as a handyman. That year he founded Sutherland Construction – Sutherland is his father’s middle name — and hired his first employee. One employee quickly became six, and his business took off. Since then, Helem has had remodeling jobs at such businesses as Peg & Ter’s Bar and Kitchen and Elli Parr Boutique, both in Shelburne, and Red Barn Kitchen in Charlotte. Now a divorced father of two, he

SD: What’s it like working with a smaller team? DH: Actually, it seems to be a formula that’s worked well. If I wanted to scale up, I’d have to scale a lot, and trying to find the staff to do that right now is really hard. I feel like [losing staff ] has been a bit of a blessing. I’ve been on-site much more, and I enjoy getting my hands on the tools again. It could be a good path forward — a smaller, tighter crew and higher-quality work on higher-end projects.

I HAVE NO DESIRE TO WORK ON COOKIE-CUTTER HOUSES. IT’S NICE TO BE CHALLENGED WITH INTERESTING ARCHITECTURE. D AMIE N H E L E M

SEVEN DAYS: What was your work like during the pandemic? DAMIEN HELEM: Honestly, it was kind of nice to take a forced break, but it was also very stressful. No one knew how we were going to adapt, and I was terrified no one would have money to spend. Were we going to be building veggie patches and goat pens for people starting to homestead?

addition. Our biggest challenges are with [getting] windows and doors. Some are months out [on back order], whereas they used to be maybe a couple weeks. Same with kitchen cabinets.

SD: But you’re back up to a full schedule. How far out are you booking jobs? DH: We’re looking at the summer of 2023.

SD: How’s it been trying to find workers? DH: Even when I have a full six-man crew, I still have an open ad on [the employment website] Indeed. Used to

SD: Have the prices stabilized? DH: They’ve come down a lot, actually, almost to where they were pre-pandemic.

SD: Are you known for a particular style? DH: I love modern architecture. But I really enjoy the historic restoration stuff, as well — working on interesting homes that have a story to tell. I have no desire to work on cookie-cutter houses. It’s nice to be challenged with interesting architecture. SD: Do you have a reputation for something in particular? DH: The feedback I get is that people enjoy the care and quality of work of the guys I’ve hired. We’re known for having a good attention to detail. I’m not a designer or an architect, but I have a good eye. I can throw out good ideas, and I like to think outside the box. m

INFO

Learn more at sutherlandvt.com. NEST SUMMER 2022

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