Weddings: Their little corner

Rescue of a historic wreck kindles a couple’s love

The 1890s “country cottage” was built for the Heather sisters by architect William Clark Bull. Bull built a grand 10,000 square-foot, intricately gabled, wood-frame mansion for the sisters. Three stories high, surrounded by beefy ashlar granite terraces and pretty formal gardens, it overlooked the picturesque river and the nearby farm’s sloping pastures and barns.

By Anita Rafael

For many long years, curious tourists and nosey locals alike have been asking each other the same round of questions about the 19th century mansion on Route 9, heading west into Searsburg from Wilmington’s Main Street. We’ve been wondering: Who in their right mind would buy that run-down old house? How many bedrooms are in there anyway? Is it haunted? Why are they taking apart the big stone terrace? Is that huge new barn in back of the house being built for a herd of dairy cows? Wait—what? … did passersby this past fall spy a beautiful woman coming out of the house in a long white wedding gown and matching long-sleeved lace and beaded jacket, carrying a stunning bridal bouquet?

Well, the answers are: a) a very right-minded career I.T. engineer named John Mincarelli, who luckily is an expert with a hammer; b) nine in all; c) definitely not; d) to build a broad, covered veranda for outdoor entertaining; e) no; and f) yes! On Oct. 12, 2019, John Mincarelli and Cheryl Bingham were wed at the first of what they hope will be many more such ceremonies and celebrations for other couples and families from near and far at the house they call Chez Nous.

We presume that, like us, you’ll want more of the juicier details, the threads that weave a colorful tapestry about a romance, more than 100 years of history, and an inconceivable amount of carpentry. The love story starts with a meet-cute modern love moment, thanks to the dating website Match.com. The mansion story starts 124 years ago with two affluent and adventuresome sisters, Mary and Celia Heather, relocated from the Midwest. The property’s daunting and expensive restoration story, the work being done to turn it into a glamorous wedding and events venue, starts with—as John puts it— “one construction project at a time.”

On October 12, 2019, John and Cheryl Mincarelli were wed at the first of what they hope will be many more such ceremonies and celebrations for other couples and families from near and far at the house they call Chez Nous. (Photo: Steve Holmes)

First, the love story:

“A few years ago, after a long time being single, my buddy, who wanted me to get back out there, as they say, signed me up on Match.com,” says John. “The algorithm produced a list of 10 dates for me. So, being true to type as a data nerd, I started at the bottom of the list—with number 10.” On the site he “communicated” with (presumably, although a gentlemen never tells) nine women, with whom few sparks flew. The one remaining name on John’s Match list was Cheryl Bingham, a business owner from Ludlow, Vermont.

Meanwhile, Cheryl, who had nearly reached the last few days of her Match.com membership, and who so far had no luck finding her one true love, says, “At the time I thought, Well, at least I made a lot of new guy friends from Match.” She saw John’s profile on the site, “and, he was different from the guys I’d usually been interested in,” she says. They messaged each other; they chatted on the phone; they met for dinner. On their second date John earnestly explained that, absolutely without compromise, “The old house that I am restoring is part of the deal of dating me.”

Not confident that what Cheryl would see at the construction site would wow her, he brought her to Searsburg to see the work in progress, and, boom, she fell in love—with John and with Chez Nous. Five years later, they were married in the glamorous new barn that they built for just such events at the same time that the Chez Nous rehab was nearing completion and being readied for its new role. The venue debuted two months ago for rental as an elegant private event space with splendid guest accommodations.

John’s and Cheryl’s ambitious cellar-to-rafter restoration of the house included rebuilding of the old staircase since the house was lifted about 13 inches.

Every autumn wedding in Vermont is enchanting, especially those memorable moments when sunshine illuminates the bright yellow, orange, and red fall foliage on the mountainsides. John and Cheryl’s wedding was more magical than they could have imagined because they gathered with family and friends to celebrate each other, as well as the work they had done together to realize their dreams at Chez Nous.

It was not a country wedding despite being held in the country. The ceremony took place outside, where rows of white chairs for their guests had been arranged to face the high cathedral-like east wall of the barn. An antique gilded mantel, a piece original to Chez Nous, was festooned with red and white bouquets and served as the backdrop for their vows. For accompaniment, John and Cheryl chose a violin, flute, and guitar trio. Cheryl’s granddaughter was the picture-perfect flower girl. In her long flowered and lace gown, she tossed rose petals among the autumn leaves that lay fallen on the grass. The 5-foot train of Cheryl’s dress and jacket floated over the colored leaves and pretty petals as she walked up the grassy path to stand beside John.

John and Cheryl have spent hours putting together a coffee-table album of newspaper clippings, photographs, and ephemera, and are patiently researching the Heather sisters’ lives and the missing bits of the long and colorful history of Chez Nous. Over the last six years, their digging provided them with many clues during their restoration work about the way things looked, inside and out, when the Heather sisters lived there — elements they have strived to truthfully recreate.

Inside the barn, where the catered reception was held, the décor was simple and spectacular. Streamers of white bunting drifted through the crystal chandeliers from beam to beam high above the dance floor, and the tables and chairs were arranged among yards and yards of gown-white cloth that cascaded to the floor from the top of the 3-story timber posts.

A subtle shift

In the movie version of this part of the story you would watch flickery black-and-white flashbacks to the 1890s, and two sisters would be seen wearing full-length frilly summer dresses and beribboned bonnets while they enjoy a beautiful summer’s day on the lawn at their old farmhouse—known as the old Grimes place—on the north bank of the Deerfield River.

The delight of Chez Nous was — and still is — a cross-vaulted and crystal-chandeliered music room, its intricate 8-sided ceiling rising two full stories to a large opening quite high up in one wall. On the third floor, that unusual opening from below formed the balcony at one end of a ballroom, where the ladies hosted gala dances. It will become a living room once the furniture is distributed to the rooms throughout the house.

In their youth, Mary and Celia Heather had visited their grandparents in Vermont, making the 1,300-mile journey by rail from their home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to the Green Mountains. Those fond memories drew the sisters back to Vermont when they were in their 20s, where they jointly invested in what had been a hardworking and profitable dairy farm. The young women, both single and moneyed from their father’s Western mining profits, decided to spend $80,000 beginning in 1895 (more than $2.4 million now) on the construction of a proper “country cottage” for themselves to share, hiring as their architect William Clark Bull of Bennington. (A number of the majestic Victorian-era homes, those still standing and some since torn down, in the Old Bennington Historic District were built by Bull.)

Just east of the women’s old farmhouse (which eventually fell to fire), Bull built a grand 10,000-square-foot intricately gabled wood-frame mansion for the sisters. Three stories high, surrounded by beefy ashlar granite terraces and pretty formal gardens, it overlooked the picturesque river and the nearby farm’s sloping pastures and barns. It is said that the style of the house could have been inspired by the Heather family’s ancestral manor in Scotland, although they referred to their new house by a French name: Chez Nous.

The sisters spent an additional $20,000 on superb décor and furnishings (more than $600,000 in today’s value). On the first floor, Mary and Celia enjoyed a formal parlor off the great hall, a large dining room, and a formal library that featured a rich walnut mantelpiece and cabinets. Along the north side of the house they tended to their exotic plants in a large-windowed stone-built conservatory, which was also a lovely spot where they could take tea and entertain guests. At the rear of the first floor there was a kitchen, butler’s pantry, food pantry, storage, and rooms for servants.

At the top of the grand staircase, Mary and Celia would have walked through a broad, columned hall to reach six large second-floor bedrooms. The delight of Chez Nous was—and is—a cross-vaulted and crystal-chandeliered music room, its intricate eight-sided ceiling rising two full stories to a large opening quite high up in one wall.

On the third floor, that unusual opening from below formed the balcony at one end of a ballroom, where the ladies hosted gala dances. The sounds from the hired orchestra seated in the music room billowed aloft through the opening.

There were 25 rooms in all, and the house was admired for being a marvelously modern mansion. Chez Nous was built with indoor plumbing, central heating, both gas and electric lighting, and ingenious front stairs. Electrical contacts hidden under the treads sounded buzzers at the back of the house, alerting servants and others that someone was going up or down.

The merry country life of farming combined with gracious hospitality and dressy fêtes at Chez Nous lasted but a fleeting moment in the two women’s long lives. It ended because of the inevitable consequences of the sisters’ dwindling bank accounts and years of distressing debt (plus a significant loss of income from the sisters’ registered Jersey cows due to an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis). It led to foreclosure in the mid-1930s.

Mary Heather (who had married Harry Fox in 1902 and with whom she had a son named Daniel) died in Brattleboro Memorial Hospital in 1950, aged 79. Celia Heather, who had never married, died in a hospital in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1957, aged 84.

With stories to tell…

Stuck in cycles of optimism and despair for decades, the mansion has endured much. It stood empty; was inhabited; was an inn called Chateau Calvin Coolidge; stood empty; was bought; was sold; was cleaned up; was a ski lodge called Alpine Chateau; stood empty again; was vandalized; and, in time, began to dry-rot as it changed hands many times throughout the 20th century. For a time in the 1970s, there was a nearly realized plan to resurrect it as a small elegant country inn.

John and Cheryl have spent hours putting together a coffee table album of newspaper clippings, photographs, and ephemera, and are patiently researching the Heather sisters’ lives and the missing bits of the long and colorful history of Chez Nous. Over the past six years, their digging provided them with many clues about the way things looked, inside and out, when the Heather sisters lived there—elements they have strived to truthfully recreate during the restoration work.

John says that when he bought the house in 2013 he found boxes of “junk and old papers,” and he was amazed at what was in them: including photos of Mary, Celia, and others. “There were old photos of the property before the land reverted to dense woods, and you can see how much of it was open farmland when the house was first built,” he says. One of the grainy and faded images in the album is “old man Nido,” as John says, the grandfather of the current Nidos at Wilmington’s Guy E. Nido Oil Co. He is pictured on a winter’s day at Chez Nous, delivering heating oil from an enormous tank mounted on a horse-drawn sled.

John’s and Cheryl’s ambitious cellar-to-rafter restoration of the house has been in so many ways a true labor of love, and sharing the love is the reason Chez Nous is now open for others to rent and enjoy, as well. Every element of the venue has been designed to make the guests at special events, weddings, celebrations, family vacations, or corporate retreats feel utterly at home. “Chez Nous has rooms large enough for everyone to be together, and smaller private spaces where two or three people can relax and have a quiet conversation,” says John. “It is a mansion, and yet it always feels like a family home.”

The barn where John and Cheryl were wed is 3,000 square feet of heated space, and was designed and built to be adaptable for various types of events. It easily accommodates up to 250, and many more when the French doors are swung open, allowing people to flow onto the covered porch and lawns. The barn can be reserved for functions apart from the house. There is ample access for catering crews to set up at one end of the barn, and a performance platform for musicians at the opposite end. John and Cheryl could have attached a huge new wing for parties and dancing onto one side of the mansion but they decided to recreate some of the feeling from the era when this was a working farm. The big barn is proper for the property’s historical context.

“We want guests who rent the house and barn to fall in love with this setting just like we did. We continued to call it Chez Nous, which means our house in French, for two reasons,” says Cheryl. “One is that we know that the guests who come here for their weddings and celebrations will feel like it is their house while they are here.” The new open floor plan, as they conceived it, has cheery, bright rooms, with comfortable furniture, making it inviting for guests to gather to cook, eat, and, as the Heather sisters did, to kick up their heels. She says, “There are not a lot of televisions in the house because we hope people will focus on enjoying each other’s company during their stay at Chez Nous.”

The second reason that John and Cheryl decided to keep with name Chez Nous for their venue is because of the words that the Heather sisters had carved into the polished mantelpiece in the library. Deeply cut into the narrow board just below the shelf it says NOTRE PETIT COINS EST SI DOUX, POUR VIVRE HEUREUX RESTONS CHEZ NOUS. Quite poetically interpreted by John it is: “Our little corner is so sweet, to live happy, let’s stay home.”

Indeed, it is quite a home.