“I promise not to cry” is what interior decorator Phyllis Higgerson said when her real estate agent told her about a rundown house for sale in the small Vermont village of Norwich. “She told me it had been neglected and needed work because it had been used as a rental for college students for nearly a decade,” remembers Higgerson. “I was expecting the worst.” That’s basically what she got. “From the outside it looked a bit like a rough-and-ready shanty with its brown cedar-shake siding that was in bad shape,” she remembers. The gardens were overgrown and unruly. Inside was not much better. The walls wore a variety of colors, the kitchen was a “disaster,” Higgerson says, and the floors were badly scratched. The entire layout needed reworking. The 1,150-square-foot home, built in 1913, was also too small for Higgerson and her husband, their two young daughters, and two dogs. “But the house also had a lot going for it,” says Michael Ertel, a family friend and Woodstock, Vermont-based architect, who accompanied the Higgersons on their first visit to the house. “The quiet, cozy neighborhood was what they’d been looking for. The house had some historic value to it and was consistent with the character of the street,” says Ertel. Best of all, the structure was sound. As the architect explains,
ABOVE LEFT: The dining room features a “The house had good bones.” painting by Woodstock, Vermont, artist Glenn “We all agreed that we could Suokko. ABOVE: Higgerson used Scandinavian make the house work,” says pieces like the painted console throughout the home. FACING PAGE: Following their Higgerson. They decided to gut design edict of “less is more,” the owners much of the original house— added subtle crown moldings throughout ripping many of the walls to the house and opted for furniture, walls, and drapes in muted beiges. the studs—and put an addition on the rear of the home. It was important to Higgerson that the renovation respect the history of the house. “My husband and I are both ‘old-house people,’” she says. “We wanted to respect the house’s history. I hated the idea of erasing someone’s story.” In concert with his clients, Ertel designed a twostory, 1,700-square-foot addition that holds a garage, mudroom, and powder room on the ground floor and a master bedroom suite, office, and laundry room above. Ertel’s design took its cue from the original house and was fashioned in the same vernacular. “We november–december 2015 New England Home 119
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