Two artist partners

Two Artist Partners, One Dream Studio

by Steve Noble

Petie_Jim_studio_0094 A strange thing happened when Petey Mitchell flipped a switch and warm electric light filled a room in the 250-year-old house she and her husband, Jim Giddings, were renovating into their dream studio. She cried.

“We’re the first people to ever have electricity in this house,” said Mitchell. It was a telling moment in a renovation project whose unique trajectory has been guided by a special appreciation for time. It’s a project where the needs of the present cozy up gently to a respect for the past, where the future is bound up in bringing things back to the way they always have been.

“We just feel like it’s a beautiful little part of this greater region,” said Giddings. “This is a special little spot.”

It’s been that way for a long time. Some records place the house’s origins around 1750. And Stark Road in Marlboro is an old road that connects to a system of other old roads that leads all the way to Albany, N.Y. The house first caught the eye of this husband-and-wife artist duo about two decades ago. It had probably not been lived in for several years at that point, and its dingy green paint job only enhanced its forlornness.

“For 20 or 30 years, it sat as a big mystery house,” said Giddings. “This is the place we wanted to own.”

In the meantime, they bought a small place just down the road and made it their home, while continuing to hope that the Ketter Family would one day sell “The Green House” to them. In 2001, Mitchell and Giddings were finally able to buy the house — and immediately they saw they had a big project on their hands.

“It was really dingy and really dark and really decrepit, but we loved it anyway,” said Mitchell.
Still, for seven years, the renovation was on hold, in part because of the demands of careers as artists, and in part to give them time to assess the condition of the house and allow their dreams for it to crystallize. Finally, in 2008, they took the plunge.

Now, their four-year renovation project is just about finished, and they can’t wait to show it off. Work should certainly be done in time for the fourth annual Brattleboro West-Arts Open Studio Tour, on Sept. 29-30, and Stark Road Studios should be a popular stop.

It certainly was in 2011, despite it still being a work-in-progress and despite the difficulties getting there because of the ravages of Tropical Storm Irene just three weeks before. Though their house wasn’t damaged, Mitchell and Giddings saw the flood waters from the storm cut a gash in the road right outside their house.

“It isolated us, but it didn’t do anything to our project,” said Giddings.

In the days after the storm, the property was a staging area. They used a winch on a tractor to help haul cars up through a field, around the gash in the road, so people could continue on up Stark Road and over the mountain. As with many Vermonters, the value of neighbors helping neighbors was something the storm reinforced.

“That’s what you do. You just pull people out of the mud,” said Giddings.

In truth, that ethos guided the renovations. In the spirit of an Amish barn-raising, friends and neighbors pitched in.

“We had lots of work parties,” said Mitchell, recalling the group effort that transformed what had been a cold, unfinished attic into what will now be Mitchell’s studio, a 36-by-28-foot, warm, well-insulated dream come true, flooded with natural light. It is a marvelous mixture of the old and new. Retaining the old hemlock beams and keeping the wide, wooden floorboards, Mitchell and Giddings and crew added contemporary touches. They dropped in insulating Foard Panels under the metal roof and installed modern, energy efficient windows. They blew in insulation and covered the walls with plaster and sheetrock — but took pains to keep the old rafters and timbers visible. They put in a new, wider staircase so that Mitchell could get her large-scale canvases up there.

Sometimes more than a dozen friends and neighbors would be on hand for what were called “sheet rocking splatter parties.” The help they got saved thousands of dollars and allowed Mitchell and Giddings to bring the project in on budget — $55,000. But these parties were more than just a way to save money. They were integral to their vision for Stark Road Studios.

“The community effort here is one of the ways we want to use this space, and this really was the beginning of that … getting everyone involved,” said Mitchell, who envisions the space being used for workshops , classes, meditation sessions, writing groups and maybe even a rousing game of pool, in addition to as her studio. (Giddings’ studio is in a small camp across the road).

In the three rooms downstairs, the plaster walls needed a lot of repair. They sanded and redtored the original old flooring, trading paintings to Myles Danaher for some of the work. A recycling ethic and a bit of ingenuity had them turn old boards they had taken down into wainscotting in one of the rooms. They installed two woodstoves for heat.

Before doing all that, they had jacked up the house and repaired the foundations, sills and floor joists with the help of local builder Dan MacArthur and other neighbors. While he was down there under the floors, Giddings found a good luck charm — an 1868 penny.

To run electricity to the house, they decided the most economical way to do it was to run a line from their existing house down the hill, 900 feet up to the studio. So they rented an excavator and dug a trench, crossing their fingers they wouldn’t run into bedrock. It took a work party two days to dig the trench, lay the line and fill it in. An electrician inspected the work and pronounced it safe.

Though the house now has electricity, it still has no plumbing. There’s a two-seater outhouse in the attached shed, and water comes from a hand pump. The present still yields respectively to the past whenever it can.

“We wanted it to be safe, usable and warm and keep its integrity as an old building,” said Mitchell.

Equally important to Mitchell and Giddings is the land around it. The house sits on 25 acres, some with old growth forest. There are old stonewalls, a stream, and charming small open fields. They have conserved the land from development.

The little house on Stark Road is no longer a dingy green, but a fresh, clean white, fitting for something old that has turned the page forward to an exciting new chapter and backward to where it was 250 years ago, when it was humble homestead on a hard but pleasant plot of land.