It all started with the view. Twelve years ago, Don Jones and his wife, Nancy, were biking in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom when it struck Don that the state might be a nice place to live. With successful careers behind them and their two sons out of the house, the Boston-based Joneses were ready to start the next chapter of their lives.

For Don, Vermont wasn’t new—he grew up skiing in New England, and for several years the family had rented an old farmhouse in the town of Warren during winter school breaks—but there was something about the picturesque landscape that struck him as he and Nancy cycled down into East Burke.

“It was just spectacularly beautiful,” Don recalls. “I turned to Nancy, and I said, ‘We have got to come back here,’ and she wholeheartedly agreed.” The idea of revisting quickly turned to talk of relocating, and Nancy, an outdoors lover, was soon on board for a move.

The couple hired a realtor and spent weekends driving to north central Vermont to look at properties. One afternoon, on their way home from a weekend of scouting, Don and Nancy remembered a listing they had seen online but hadn’t yet toured. “It was 5 pm,” Don recalls, “and we thought, ‘Why don’t we just drive by and take a look?’”

Pulling up to the property, Don and Nancy spotted a 1970s ski house on a steep hillside. It was locked, but the pair walked out onto a small deck off the east-facing side of the house to take in the views. “We were looking straight across the Mad River Valley,” Don recalls. “There were sweeping views of the Green Mountains, and we knew that we wanted to come back and have a serious look.”

On a subsequent visit, the Joneses brought a good friend, architect David R. MacLean, who had done work for the couple before, to get his opinion on renovating. After much discussion, and several years of using the house as a weekend escape, they decided that a remodel wasn’t worth the time and money, so they demolished it, leaving just the foundation as the base for a new build.

After their first winter of visits, but before demolition, the Joneses quickly realized that they needed a garage due to extreme snowfall and harsh weather—so MacLean suggested building a carriage house on the property. Modeled after traditional Vermont barns (which typically have one large volume with a lofted ceiling), the structure has a steeply pitched metal roof that sheds heavy snow loads and a ground-level garage and storage area.

Two glass cupolas with pyramid-shaped tops protrude from the roof, letting in daylight with a nod to the regional architectural vernacular. “Making them glass is a tweak that modernizes them,” says architect Dave Fredricks, a senior associate at David R. MacLean & Associates Architecture.

According to MacLean, the carriage house served as a prototype for the main house, “continuing in the same spirit and inspired by the modernization of the ski cabin.”

Built with an open floor plan—and utilizing regional materials including Vermont fir, ash, and locally quarried granite—the main residence faces southwest and is organized into two rectangular forms that sit above a steeply sloping hill. The bedrooms and bathrooms are located in the eastern zone, while the public areas (kitchen, dining, and living room) sit opposite.

The home’s circulation spine includes a minimal staircase, and each tread is a piece of one-inch-solid steel with a quarter-inch ash veneer laminated onto all sides of the steel plate. The result is an elegant set of steps that seems to float up to the second floor. “They took incredible construction gymnastics,” MacLean says of the design and building process.

Upstairs is the primary suite, which like the rest of the house, features horizontal board-and-batten walls built with fir and ash. A glass bridge extends above the open living area to link the primary suite with the study. Deep-set skylights on either side of the walkway fill the atrium with light throughout the day, and beams with integrated lighting slice through the bridge for structural support and dramatic effect.

Most of the home’s interiors connect with the surrounding landscape via windows or decks. At the main house, a large ipe deck cantilevers over the property’s slope, and a thin, stainless-steel railing nearly disappears against the forest backdrop. “We spend all summer out there,” Don says. “That view is what hooked us in the first place.”

“This site is spectacular,” MacLean adds, “it has a multi-million-dollar view, but they still get a great sense of privacy tucked onto the side of the mountain in the middle of the woods.”

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Project Credits:

Architecture: David MacLean & Associates

Builder: Roundtree Construction

Structural and Stair Engineer: Coastal Engineering Company, Inc.

Landscape Design: T.L. Studio

Interior Design: Dana Donaldson Designs

Mechanical Engineering: W.A. Mattson Engineering

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Retired Vermont-Lovers Build a Forever Home Inspired by Vintage Ski Cabins