SWEET SOOT OF LIFE by Hannah Goldfield TH E ON LY TH I NG MOR E I M PR E SS IVE than the fact that Anthony Esteves 09 SC (who is 31) built a house
from scratch and painstakingly restored another on his family compound on coastal Maine is the fact that he’d never done it before. This is not to say he hadn’t had any training, but it was not the kind you might assume.
Susanna (Vagt) Chapman 09 IL + Jessica Phoenix 05 IL Susanna and Jessica collaborated on the well-received book The Girl Who Ran: Bobbi Gibb, The First Woman to Run the Boston Marathon (Compendium Incorporated, 2017). Susanna created the illustrations to accompany text by Kristina Yee and Frances Poletti, while Jessica handled the art direction and design.
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2008 continued In October Elie Glyn FD began a new job as the inaugural assistant director of exhibitions at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA. Hayley Morris FAV (pages 30-31) If you haven’t yet, it’s time you Got a Girl Crush. With creative direction by Amanda Stosz PH , a Brooklyn-based photographer, bike rider, cat fancier and dog buddy who joined the team in 2015, the worthy blog and annual magazine (gotagirlcrush.com) is “about women, by women, for everyone.” Evolution, a solo exhibition of colorful acrylic works by Boston-based artist Sophy Tuttle IL, was on view in October at Gallery Z in Lowell, MA.
If it takes a village to raise a child, Esteves and O’Rourke are upping the ante by essentially building their own village. Currently under construction, just behind the Cape, is a classic New England barn — to be finished in soot-paint, of course — which will serve as the family library, home to their collection of more than 7,000 books. This story originally appeared in The New York Times (9.19.17) and is reprinted here with permission.
For more go to anthonyesteves.com, instagram.com/tonejabrone and instagram.com/rudyjude.
Kathrine Zeren AP is the creative director behind an eponymous line (kathrine zeren.com) of “ethically and sustainably produced men’s accessories and apothecary products.”
2009 Since 2014 Open Style Lab (OSL) has been working to “raise awareness and build accessible wearables” for people with physical disabilities, explains Executive
left: photos of Esteves family compound by Greta Rybus
At RISD, he studied not architecture but sculpture, “which I think now comes through in my work more so than ever,” he says. “I got out of school and figured out over a couple years that the building process was really like my studio practice.” Other than that, he was armed with only a deep and abiding appreciation for the architecture of both New England and Japan (having grown up in the former and spent time in the latter) and a passion for research. When the property was purchased, it had just one structure: a 1754 Cape Cod that had been dismantled and rebuilt. He restored it not according to strict historical preservation standards —“I feel like it’s so constricting, and people do things just for the yield,” he says — but, rather, to his “vision of what a historic building should be.” Esteves was interested, he explains, in “getting it to a place where it’s informed by the entirety of New England architecture — things that I find interesting — so that it’s completely about the New England aesthetic but it isn’t tied to the historic preservation of this building exactly.” This meant not only poring through books and historical records but also learning from older local-builder friends (including one nonagenarian), who passed down information and techniques that had been passed down to them. The finished Cape is now occupied by his mother, who moved up from Rhode Island, where Esteves was raised. Mere feet away, he lives with his partner, Julie O’Rourke 08 TX , a native of Maine who is also an artist, and their young son, Diogo, in a house entirely of his own design. This one uses New England as a jumping-off point but also incorporates some of his favorite Japanese techniques: traditional colonial clapboard siding, for example, which is a dying art in Maine. “The vinyl
salesman is pretty big up here,” Esteves says with a laugh. It’s painted black, using a Japanese-style, fermented soot-based paint that he makes himself. And though the dimensions of the “soot house,” as the family has affectionately named it, “are in relation to very common New England homes”— from the pitch of the roof to the volume of the rooms — part of it is built with what he calls “burn boards,” slats of cedar that have been charred in the style of a Japanese practice called shou sugi ban. Also inspired by the Japanese penchant for efficiency, Esteves carefully figured out how to heat the entire house with a single, tiny stove that burns just half a cord of wood each winter.