South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings on at South Mountain Company and occasional musings from John Abrams (and others).

Collaboration

On Building Second Homes

By South Mountain Co. |

This piece was written for and published in Fine Homebuilding. Thanks to Kevin Ireton (former FH editor) for the idea and his stellar editing. As always, he held my feet to the fire.

“How can you justify devoting so much time and energy to building vacation homes for rich people?”

It’s a good question,and one that I’ve heard often during my nearly 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard. In resort communities, many don’t have a first home. They’re scrambling to find stable housing while more than half the houses sit empty much of the year. That’s a problem. And in light of our climate crisis, the significant materials and energy dedicated to building and operating those houses compounds the problem.

When I came here in the 1970s, designing and building homes was so thrilling that I was content to build anything that developed new skills and knowledge. Working with head and hands gave me great pleasure; the idea that people would pay me to do it felt like a bonus. After a few years, however, the joy of the work and the satisfaction of the results were no longer enough. By then second homes had become a staple of our company, South Mountain, and my colleagues and I began to ask ourselves how we could justify this work.

The answer came in 1980. It began with a phone call from a woman named Madeline, who asked if I would look at a piece of land with her. She was a 60-year-old librarian whose husband had recently died. They had no children, and they had always lived in rented apartments. Her dream was to own property. She had $7,000 in cash. A realtor showed her a lot priced at exactly that, but her friends advised against buying it due to its topography and location.

The steeply sloping parcel was adjacent to the main road from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown. Traffic on the road was noisy and constant. The property faced due south toward a beautiful little valley. Except for the proximity to the road, it was lovely. I suggested an earth-bermed, partially underground house and told her we could design the noise of traffic right out of the picture. She was excited. She bought it.

At about the same time, I was approached by a single mother who owned property in West Tisbury and wondered whether we could build a house she could afford. Her budget was too small, but we had heard that the Farmer’s Home Administration was providing 1% loans to those with low and moderate income. We hoped to bundle a nice passive-solar house for Cathy and the earth-bermed house for Madeline, though the Farmer’s Home fixed-expenditure cap did not take into account either the Vineyard’s high construction costs or the long-term energy savings our houses would realize. We applied anyway.

We created plans for simple, compact houses and submitted them to Farmer’s Home with a request that they raise the mortgage limit (from $40,000 to $48,000) on each house due to the energy savings, which we analyzed and documented. After some bureaucratic wrangling, the increase was approved. Unfortunately, it still wasn’t enough to build the houses, unless we cut our overhead and profit to nothing and reduced our labor rates to below cost. Additional subsidies were needed.

Enter David and Pat Squire, who had purchased land in Edgartown and designed a second home with a Boston architect. They asked if we would be interested in bidding on the construction, and I told them that South Mountain built only those projects that we designed and that we didn’t bid on construction projects. They persisted, and a radical thought occurred to me: What if we gave the Squires a bid that had an explicit “premium” built in to subsidize the two Farmer’s Home houses? I shared the idea with the Squires, and they invited us to submit such a bid.

Our bid, one of three, was roughly $40,000 more than the next highest. They chose us nonetheless, and we built their house. We also built the two small houses for Madeline and Cathy by making up the shortfall with our extra earnings from the Squire project. Dreams came true, and mortgage payments were under $200. The Squires’ philosophical alignment with our purpose led them to become strong supporters of affordable-housing efforts on the Vineyard. Years later, when the Island Affordable Housing Fund was established to raise money for affordable housing, David became an important board member.

That was the first and only time that South Mountain inflated the cost of a project to support affordable housing efforts, but the experience inspired an idea that shaped the future of our company. If we could become a reasonably profitable enterprise, we could devote a portion of our earnings to affordable housing work for our community, and we could engage our wealthy clients in the issue.

At that point, the work of building second homes became meaningful. From then on, I often told new clients that they could count on me to ask them, in the future, to help with the Vineyard’s affordable housing problem (which they exacerbate, of course). I have done that now for 40 years, and the response has been heartwarming millions of dollars donated for attainable year-round housing.

Building second homes also allowed us to experiment and take risks. One of these occurred in 1987 when, in response to a request from two long-time employees for a greater stake, I sold South Mountain to my employees (and myself). We became a worker-owned cooperative and began to introduce new values to our business activities. For example, we committed to the creation of lifelong living-wage jobs and family-first policies, such as flexible work arrangements and stellar benefits. We began to codify our commitment to our community by donating to essential nonprofits and engaging in pro-bono work. We became a triple bottom line company long before we’d ever heard the term, measuring our success not just by our profits but also by effects on people and the planet.

Our journey since then has been influenced by many others, but particularly by Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company that has become the gold standard for corporate social and environmental responsibility. Just like our second homes, many of Patagonia’s products are nonessential. Not everyone needs a pair of $300 ski pants or a lifetime wetsuit. So the company balances that reality with its social and environmental contributions, its political advocacy, and its important innovations, such as pioneering the use of organic and recycled cotton, and buying back old garments to refurbish and resell for far less than new ones.

Inspiration from Patagonia and others, combined with our own cantankerous sense of justice, has helped South Mountain become at once a profitable business, an active agent of community change, and a supporter of the local economy that supports us.

Today our second-home work is unusual in several ways. First, we restrict the size of the houses we are willing to build. Only on rare occasions, on very large parcels, have we designed and built houses over 3500 sq. ft.

We also use our second-home work for de-facto research to advance the building industry, especially with regards to energy performance, comfort, health, and durability. By experimenting with the homes of our well-to-do clients, we’ve learned a lot about high-performance building. As a result, we set minimum performance standards for our buildings that are well above code. Now we mostly produce net-zero-possible buildings. We use reclaimed materials extensively and are beginning to reduce embodied carbon (a work in progress with net-zero carbon as the ultimate goal).

By elevating performance standards, we make models that others can emulate and that we can incorporate in our affordable housing work. For us, truly affordable housing differs from luxury housing in only three ways: it’s smaller, it’s less detailed, and it’s differently financed. The performance and quality are uncompromised.

Perhaps the biggest step we have taken with our second-home work is doing less of it. Over time, we diversified South Mountain’s work into five parts; here’s a rough breakdown over the past year in terms of dollars per category:
• Limited-use second homes: 10%
• Year-round, fully occupied homes: 20%
• Attainable workforce housing: 10%
• Institutional work for nonprofits: 35%
• Solar for homes and businesses not built by us: 25%

This is only one year, and it happens to be a year with an uncharacteristically small amount of second-home work, but it indicates a direction: less harm, more good. Causing no harm is impossible — we are part of the problem too — but we share our experiences and hope others will join our push to turn some of the negative impacts of building into positive benefits for communities and the environment.

An added benefit of our business practices is that the second-home clients we attract tend to share our values. We love working with them. They go from being clients to becoming partners in our efforts to make the Vineyard a better place. Many have become friends for life. The rewards of this work and these relationships have become deeply ingrained in our core purpose.

A Joyous Building

By South Mountain Co. |

When a pack of wide-eyed youngsters cut the ribbons for the Island’s new Early Education and Care Center (EECC) earlier this month, it was a crowning moment – for both Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS) and South Mountain. It concluded five years of intensive planning, design, permitting and construction. (Technically it was far longer – MVCS first contacted us about renovating or replacing their outgrown, outmoded, and problematic buildings in 1999. But it wasn’t until 2017 that the organization was ready to create a long-term vision for a new campus and raise the funds to make it happen).

The new building is a tremendous improvement, but ultimately, it’s the program that the building houses that’s more important than the building itself. In a recent Vineyard Gazette article, Louisa Hufstader writes that “Nearly half of the Island’s children aged five and younger have no place to go for care and education while their parents are working.” The new EECC is the Vineyard’s largest early child care provider, with space for 65 kids plus a home-based Head Start program that accommodates another 40.

The scruffiest of the ribbon-cutting bunch – with his long unruly blonde hair – was my three-year old grandson Rockland. Among those behind him was Heather Quinn.

In the summer of 2008, my daughter Sophie was working at the Art Cliff Diner. Heather worked there too. At the time my wife Chris was the director of the Chilmark Preschool. Sophie learned that Heather had early childhood training and was a licensed preschool teacher. She told her mom about her new friend and said she should offer her a job. Chris did, and Heather took it.

In 2010 Chris was diagnosed with brain cancer and had surgery to remove it. One day during recovery at Mass General, Chris had a conference call with her teachers at the Chilmark Pre-School. She told them it was unlikely she’d be back for a long time (which turned out to be never). She said, “Heather, I want you to be the director. Laurisa, Talia, and Kathie – I want you to support Heather in every way that you can, and I know you will.” Both things happened.

A few years later Heather was hired to be the director of Early Childhood Programs at MVCS. Due to under-staffing, Heather has been teaching this year (as director, she usually doesn’t). Remarkably, the class that she teaches is Rock’s. Full circle. The woman mentored by Chris (the grandmother Rock never knew, because she died six months before he was born) is now Rock’s teacher. One of those multi-generational serendipitous stories that the Vineyard is full of, right?

Just a few years before Sophie met Heather at the Art Cliff, a young architect named Ryan Bushey came to work at South Mountain. Over time he became a company owner and today he is our Director of Architecture.

Ryan was the architect for the new EECC. But he was really the conductor of a comprehensive orchestra that always played in tune, due in large part to his attentiveness, creativity, collaborative spirit, leadership, and dedication. He deftly wove together:

  • MVCS staff (whose input was invaluable)
  • their highly effective building committee (led by board member Stephanie Mashek)
  • a collection of consultants (including Boston early childhood specialists Studio G)
  • a team of engineers who designed the structure and mechanical systems
  • town and regional regulatory officials
  • SMCo interior designer Beth Kostman
  • SMCo production staff led by Director of Production Newell Isbell-Shinn and Project Lead Rocco Bellebuono
  • our construction partner The Valle Group (based in Falmouth)
  • and a host of trade partners who did a stellar job.
Photo by Lynn Christophers for the MV Times

The process was tremendously complex but there was little strife. Despite the pandemic, it was completed on time and on budget. When students and staff transitioned from the old center to this new one, they went from a building that couldn’t have been much worse to a one that – I say immodestly, but with conviction – couldn’t be much better. The contrast is stark.

The new building epitomizes high performance in terms of energy, comfort, health, safety, and durability. The envelope is super-insulated. The mechanical systems are designed to provide highly efficient fossil-fuel-free ventilation, heat, and cooling (as designed, the ventilation system exceeded pandemic standards and required no updating). All finishes and furnishings are non-toxic. And with the addition of solar during the next phase, the building will likely produce more energy than it consumes.

The project also minimizes the negative impact on the Island ecology.  Stormwater is managed carefully with permeable pavement and rain gardens. Wastewater is treated with a denitrification system. The native plantings will thrive without irrigation. 

This is a building full of light. Nobody fails to notice this when they enter. Large windows and generous skylights flood every nook and cranny with daylight.

It’s a tranquil place. The teachers say their job is easier now than it was in the past – the thoughtful design, soothing colors, beautiful equipment, environmental comfort – all of these promote ease and well-being for staff and students alike. Parents even say it lifts their mood at drop-off and pick-up.

Donors can be proud that it’s economical too. Approximately 90% of the work was done by islanders, which rarely occurs with Vineyard public and institutional buildings. According to a benchmarking study conducted by CHA Companies, the owner’s representative for the project, this building cost the same or less than lower quality, less efficient off-island buildings of similar scale and use. Americans have become accustomed to mediocre buildings fashioned by a lowest-bidder, race-to-the-bottom mentality. There is no good reason for this. This building will cost little to maintain and operate, and it should serve our community well for 100 years or more.

Aside from all that, the building has another quality that results from Ryan and Beth’s design approach. Sometimes I pick Rock up after school and take him to the nearby skate park where he loves to ride his scooter with his friends. When he leaves the classroom, he always bounds up the cushion sculpture in the center of the atrium and jumps off the top. Joyously.

It’s a joyous building.


Riding Toward A New Future

By John Abrams |

More than 25 years ago, I was in a room somewhere organizing a conference for the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association. There were two new faces among the group – Marc Rosenbaum and Bruce Coldham – who were engaging and appeared to know their stuff. Not long after, The Wampanoag Tribe asked SMCo to design a new Headquarters, the first building they would raise as a tribe in 300 years. I was excited, but knew we had neither knowledge or capacity to take this on alone. I asked Marc (a mechanical and systems engineer from New Hampshire) and Bruce (an architect from Western MA) if they would collaborate. They agreed; we did that project together and several more after. Although we collaborated deeply on all aspects, at the heart of our shared work, Marc was Numbers, Bruce was Pictures, and I was Words. Together, a seamless composition.

Thus began a relationship that has endured. For several decades, Marc was our go-to consultant about all things energy and systems. He taught us so much about buildings that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. He still does!

Ten years ago, our relationship changed. Marc and wife Jill moved to the Vineyard. He became an SMCo employee, and later an owner. His contributions to the company, to our buildings, and to our institutional knowledge ever since have been entirely remarkable. He thinks in a way that is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. The thing about Marc is – he cares. About truth, excellence, people, life, and impeccable data-driven information. It matters to him to make a difference; he’s committed to improving conditions for people on our planet. He does – consistently, relentlessly, and generously.

At the end of this year, our relationship will change again. Marc recently announced to our leadership team that he will end his time as an employee-owner and transition back to being a trusted consultant. He has other endeavors he wants to combine with his SMCo work, so he wants to be more independent and flexible and . . . well, you know, unemployed. He’ll still work with our architects, engineers, solar team, and production staff on most of our projects. It really won’t be much different (since he’s not in the office these pandemic days anyway). We’ll still be asking “Hey Marc…” on a regular basis. He’ll still be finding the best intelligence, dreaming up new solutions, and teaching us all. We’ll still have the benefit of well-filtered know-how from his extraordinary nationwide network of experts. He’ll still be pointing out my typos and making bad puns.

He’ll still be here. We’re very lucky and very grateful. We all hope that his path forward is all-the-way fulfilling, as we’re sure it will be. After all, he’s never been one to waste opportunity.

Our mutual friend Jamie Wolf illustrates this point with an early NESEA conference story. He remembers this guy in the front row at every presentation. Invariably, his hand would shoot up to ask penetrating questions. “I first met the back of his head,” says Jamie. “Inquiry, scrutiny, mastery. That was his method. He embodied that – it’s the NESEA ethic, but we learned it, as much as from anyone, from Marc.”

About SMCo, Marc wrote after his announcement, “ . . . This community of people is extraordinary in so many ways. . . . . I’ve never been in a group where dedication to excellence, and doing the best one can, has been so prevalent. The richness comes from the diversity of what we define as excellence. That diversity leads to differences of opinion about what should be prioritized, but the commitments we bring are the foundation of goodwill that allows us to, together, create something profoundly better than any of us could do alone.”

The first time I visited Marc and Jill in New Hampshire, decades ago, I stayed in their finished basement. Hanging on a sheetrock wall in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, where you’d expect a painting to be, was a bicycle. I asked him about it. “Oh, that’s a bicycle I built for my senior thesis at MIT. At the time, it was the lightest bicycle in the world.”

Buildings are one of his passions. Bicycles are another. He’ll surely find time for both in this new chapter – The Rosenbaum Chronicles, part three.

Larger Than Life

By John Abrams |

Paul “walking on water”.
That first house.

When Paul Simmons was 22, he built a house in Acushnet, just down the road from his hometown of New Bedford, where his father had a concrete form business. He built it from the ground up – the foundation and everything else too. He and his first wife raised two sons there.

For the last 30 years (since he was 32), Paul has battled multiple sclerosis. He was diagnosed a few days after the morning he woke up, got out of bed, and crumpled to the floor. He had no feeling from the waist down. When the doctors finally figured out what was wrong, one of them, a neurologist, told Paul he would never walk again.

“Give me that goddam wheelchair,” Paul replied. He pulled himself into it, wheeled to the door, and left the room, only looking back to say to the doctor, “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”

Three weeks later, Paul shoved the wheelchair against the wall and asked his wife for a walker. He got up. He learned to walk. A few months later, he went skiing! Paul has always loved to ski. It was the favored family activity when his kids were growing up, but in recent years, his degenerative MS has made each run more difficult.

Last year, he tackled Wildcat Mountain with his grandkids. From the summit, he looked across the valley to Tuckerman’s Ravine at Mt. Washington, remembering the times he had hiked and skied the headwall, the good lines, the beautiful days. The day before, skiing with the kids, Paul had fallen and couldn’t get up. He did, somehow. Now, a day later, he could feel that this run was going to be trouble. Maybe his last one.

He told the kids to go on ahead; he would catch up. It took him an hour and a half to struggle down the mountain, in part because it was such a monumental effort and in part because he kept stopping, looking across the valley, savoring his last run.

One of Paul’s largest scale projects.

Paul takes after his Dad. His company, L.P. Simmons (it used to stand for “Lonely and Poor” after his second divorce, now it’s “Level and Plumb” deep into his third marriage), has built all our concrete foundations for the past few decades. The rough-and-tumble, boisterous nature of Paul and his cohort overlays consummate professionalism, tremendous skill, and a remarkable breadth of experience.

Paul is very good at what he does.

Paul with son Tim circa 1992.

He has skied hundreds of days and built hundreds of foundations with no feeling in his knees. These days, he can’t manage the hard physical work; his son, Tim, manages the on-site aspect of his business. Tim says his Dad is his number one priority (don’t tell his partner Aja). He says Paul’s a genius. “He looks at a set of plans and immediately sees everything. And he can do anything. But he should have been a critic – that’s his real calling. Food, movies, me – he’ll tell you what he thinks about all of ‘em.” Tim has been through some rough times, too, and beat the odds. He feels that his father’s love was a big part of what carried him through the rapids.

Paul’s physical limitations don’t stop him. Remember that house he built 40 years ago? Since then, he has built half a dozen more in his spare time. Today he lives at the end of a dirt road in Vineyard Haven with his wife Ann. Recently, he took me for a tour. The house is chockablok full of hand-crafted treasures – ingenious woodwork (much of it made with reclaimed lumber from our yard, from jobsites, and driftwood). There are curvy polished concrete counters and fine tile work. There’s even a recent addition to the house with a beautiful iron and wood stair railing. He still does everything himself (mostly).

Paul with wife Ann in their Vineyard Haven home.

He has a tiny shop in the basement with rudimentary tools. He carefully figures out everything he needs, goes downstairs, cuts the pieces, and hauls them up. Once they’ve arrived upstairs, they don’t go back down for corrections. It’s too hard to negotiate the stairs. He measures twice and cuts once.

Whenever Paul comes to our office (these days assisted by a cane) to drop off a quote or pick up a check, he lights the place up. He’s as friendly as he is loud, and he brings a bit of joy into the day, no matter how he’s feeling. As our Director of Finance, Siobhán, describes it, “Everyone starts smiling. He’s larger than life.”

We’re lucky to work with him, to benefit from his vast experience, to enjoy his friendship, and to endure his good-natured insults and admonishments. The positive spirit and defiant optimism that pulled him up out of that wheelchair 30 years ago continue to define him. He’s a lesson to us all.

There’s Deirdre . . . and then there’s Rob…

By John Abrams |

At South Mountain, there are seven standing members of our Management Committee (which we call MCom). An eighth member, always an owner, rotates onto MCom for a six month stint. This allows all our owners to experience and contribute to the management process and learn to understand the complexity and dynamics of running our business.

Two of my management colleagues, Deirdre Bohan and Rob Meyers, have interesting stories. The rest do too (I mean hey, we all do, right?) but these two are particularly compelling because they took circuitous and unconventional paths to their current positions.

Twenty two years ago, when our bookkeeper moved off-island, we hired Deirdre to replace her. Within a year she had developed robust systems and reduced what was previously a taxing 40 hour job to a reasonable 20 hour job.

She came to me and said she didn’t have enough to do. “What do you want to do?” I said.

“That’s up to you,” she replied.

“No, I mean what do you really want to do?”

She told me she had a long-standing interest in interior design; it was one of the reasons she came to work at SMCo. For years we had done interior design partially and unsystematically; we wished to add a serious interior design practice but hadn’t had the resources and had failed to pro-actively seek them. So there it was: we decided to devote the time Deirdre had created (20 hours a week) to her education. She assembled a well-rounded program that combined the resources of several design schools. She was soon leading a thriving interior design business. We hired a bookkeeper to replace her; Siobhán has now been here 14 years and is our Financial Manager and another of our standing MCom members.

In 2004 and 2005 I spent two consecutive winters on sabbatical, writing a book and seeing how the company would fare in my absence. Deirdre was the person who stepped most effectively and thoroughly into the leadership void. The experience, coupled with her innate intelligence and the computer science degree she had earned at Brown, helped her recognize that there were operations issues that weren’t getting the attention they needed. She articulated this and soon became our COO. The operations job became nearly full time, and we hired an architect, Beth Kostman, to fill some of the interior design aspects of her job.

In 2010 Deirdre and her husband Dave had a son, Declan. She was 43. I think the lessons of parenting refined and strengthened her leadership skills, while softening them at the same time. She already had a deep intuitive sense of what makes people tick, but parenting always adds a special dimension – greater empathy and flexibility perhaps.

Deirdre now chairs MCom, co-manages the company with me, manages in my absence, and would become interim CEO (at least) if something were to happen to me (which we call the Avalanche Scenario). I couldn’t ask for a better collaborator. Quite a journey from bookkeeper to now!

And then there’s Rob Meyers.

Rob was hired as a carpenter in 1997. He was an average carpenter, but nothing special. He liked jawin’ more than sawin’. After a few years he packed up his family and went back to Michigan, where he’d grown up. Short-lived detour. Not so good. He came back in 2002 and has been here since. His carpentry improved, but it wasn’t what he really wanted to do, so he began trying on a variety of new and different roles within the company. The shift fueled his ambition and allowed his latent entrepreneurial abilities to blossom.

In 2007 we decided to devote significant resources to wind and solar. We wrote a business plan (I think that was the first time we ever wrote one, for anything). We did it because we had made a number of faltering attempts in past years to start a solar division but somehow it never came to fruition. I’m amazed to say we carried out that plan, and have gone far beyond it, specifically with solar. Today our lively Energy Services division is producing roughly a third of our revenues. Our solar work allows us to touch the lives of and provide something meaningful for far more people than our architecture and building does. It pushes our mission forward. It diversifies and strengthens our business.

Rob now manages this business endeavor with passion, commitment, connectivity, and competence. His gregarious nature and sharp intellect have helped him become a force in the industry throughout New England. He influences policy, and he has a national reach through our membership in Amicus Solar a member-owned purchasing cooperative and peer group network of 50 of the most progressive solar companies in the country (that’s another story for another time). And his mixology skills and lore are second to none.

These two people, Deirdre and Rob, have become true leaders. They came to South Mountain without the experience or the skills to do the jobs they are doing now. And they’re not just doing them, they’re doing them with remarkable professionalism and constant innovation, making it clear that they (along with others of the managers and owners here), are well-equipped to take the South Mountain juggernaut forward into an unpredictable future. One of the most thrilling aspects of my job – maybe the most – is witnessing the growth and development of the people who have chosen to build their careers here. As I often say, “Every morning I walk up the stairs and say to myself, ‘Hey, can you believe I get to work with these people, all day long, and I get paid for this’”?

There oughta be a law. But if there was, I’d have to break it.

Terry Hass – Artful As Can Be

By John Abrams |

Terry Hass – Artful As Can Be

NOTE: I wrote this on July 9th, just after Terry Hass died.

Twice each day Chris and I remove toothbrushes and toothpaste from the ceramic holder – the one that Terry made - that sits on the shelf below our medicine cabinet.

The glazes are a mix of brown and gray, earthy like all her pottery. A series of elongated S—like perforations provide ventilation and drying, and are reminiscent of a flock of birds in flight. Practicality and beauty were inseparable for her.

Now that she’s gone those holes in the toothbrush holder are like the holes in our heart.

Read More about Terry Hass – Artful As Can Be