Architect Robert Swinburne vividly remembers the second time he visited the sugar bush in Putney, Vermont. It was a sunny day in early winter, and a layer of snow had fallen. The trees, perfect sugar maple specimens that had been maintained for harvesting sap to make maple syrup, cast long, purple shadows across the open ground.

“The colors, everything was so stripped down, almost to an abstract level,” he recalls. “That was my first strong impression of what to do with the project.”

The project in question was a private home for Nancy, a 60-something woman who was looking to simplify her lifestyle. She had lived in the area for decades, but her 2,400-square-foot home on 18 acres with multiple outbuildings no longer suited her.

After buying a five-acre sugar bush—an area of sugar maples that had been used to make maple syrup—she connected with Swinburne, who often uses the phrase “carpenter modern” to describe his work. He immediately brought in builder Gero Dolfus, and a collaborative process unfolded where much of the design phase overlapped with construction.

Swinburne envisioned a simple structure that would age in place, with minimal upkeep. An early sketch showed a home with warm light emanating from the windows, like “a glowing candle in the woods, or a campfire,” he says. “We tried to adhere to that vision.”

They created a dialogue between the house—a 1,300-square-foot rectangle with a single-plane roof—and the landscape in more ways than one. The vertical, finned board-and-batten-esque siding casts shadows throughout the day, mimicking those of the surrounding trees. But the intrinsic connection to the land comes from the materials themselves—many of which were harvested on-site, all of which are local.

Locally harvested pine sheaths the house, while the siding and framing is local hemlock. The design team used black locust from the site for the porch decking, and cherry and maple, also from the site, show up in the stair treads, flooring, and windowsills—many of which feature holes from when the trees were tapped for sap.

“When you’re inside, you get a strong sense of where the wood came from and what its story was,” says Swinburne.

While simple in shape, the home deploys some pretty advanced building science. It’s a certified Passive House, so it features a thick shell for superior insulation—two feet of cellulose in the roof, and a foot in the walls—so the placement of windows had to be carefully considered in each room.

“With a thick shell, you end up having to tune the windows to each space,” explains Swinburne. “In bed, what do you want to see in the morning looking out—not just in the summer, but in winter, and different times of year? What kind of light comes in? Is there a particular tree that might develop a relationship with the room? You try to look at these different levels of connection to inside and outside.”

In the loft bedroom, a window looks out onto the trees and captures the rising moon, while an aperture near the sofa tucked into the inglenook offers a viewpoint to watch the snow fall while curled up next to the fire. Windows wrap the southeast corner of the living space to capture sunlight and open up views to the deck.

“We really pushed that inside/outside connection and made it much more about time, really—time of day, time of year, time of life,” says Swinburne.

The extra attention paid to perfecting the windows was worth it; they are the owner’s favorite part about the house.

“Each season brings dramatic change in the views, but there are always the shadows of the trees on the grass or snow,” Nancy says. “I think of it as a sanctuary that brings the outdoor world inside.”

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Project Credits:

Architect: Robert Swinburne Architect, LLC

Builder: Mindel and Morse Builders

Lighting design: Brilliant Lighting

Staircase design: Flywheel Industrial Arts

Cabinetry: Avalon Woodwork

Forestry/lumber: Best Wood - Jon Williams

Foundation system: Warm Form

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This Vermont Passive House Is Built From the Forest That Surrounds It