South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

The Company We Keep

A Blog About South Mountain, Employee Ownership, and the Business of Community and Place

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SunPower Features South Mountain & Vineyard for Earth Day

To honor Earth day this year, SunPower, the manufacturer of the solar panels we install, decided to do a campaign about South Mountain here on the Vineyard. They put a ton of effort into this. They spent time here with us last Fall, did several videos and photo shoots, and wrote extensively about our company and our work. We’re honored by their decision to feature us, and we appreciate their beautiful work. We also appreciate our relationship with SunPower, an American company that makes the best solar panels in the world. If you’d like to see what they’re up to with this, click here.

17_RESI-201_EarthBlog-Social-Images-Facebook-1 CROPPED FOR BLOG

An Exceptional Danish Woodworker

An Exceptional Danish Woodworker

My cousin Peter Lazes was in Copenhagen on business. He was having dinner alone in a restaurant. Next to him were a man and his daughter. She got up to go to the restroom. While she was gone Peter and the man made small talk. Turned out the daughter is a woodworker, just done with four intense years of school and yearning for an internship in the U.S. My cousin suggested she might want to talk to me. He gave her my contact information.

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Ten Lessons He Learned

Ten Lessons He Learned

Architect Ryan Bushey, one of my co-owners and co-manager of our design department, recently designed and built a house for he and his family in Oak Bluffs. Building a house shouldn’t be much of a trick for a talented and experienced architect like Ryan, right?

Hmm. Let’s see. Last week Ryan shared with us, at a company meeting, “Ten Lessons I Learned Building My House”. Here you go:

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The Lease of the Long Now

After a year of design, we’ve just begun construction of a sweet project for a great family on an extraordinary property at Seven Gates Farm. It’s the third project we have done, on different pieces of this remarkable this part of the Vineyard. The first was in 1995, the second in 2004, and now this one.

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M-Line Homes

In 1980 a woman named Madeline Blakeley asked me to look at a piece of land with her. She was a librarian in her early sixties whose husband had recently died. They had no children and had always lived in rented apartments. Her dream was to own a piece of property.

She had $7,000 in cash. A realtor showed her a lot priced at exactly that, but her friends advised her against buying it. The lot fell steeply south to a sweet little valley, a perfectly matched solar exposure and view, but it was right beside the main road from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown, which was very loud. Except for that proximity and the fact that the whole lot was a hillside, it was lovely. There was nothing else on Martha’s Vineyard even close to her price range.

I suggested that we could cut and fill and build an earth-bermed, partially underground house. “The southern orientation aims away from the road just enough, and the berming would dull the noise as long as the house doesn’t open to that side. We can design the traffic right out of this scene!” She was excited. Even though she didn’t imagine she could afford to build anything at all, the idea that the land could eventually be sensibly used was appealing. I didn’t tell her that we didn’t – at the time – actually know how to properly build an earth-integrated house.

She bought the property.

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Transitions Followup…

Apparently my last blog post touched a nerve – I have been swamped with wonderfully soulful e-mails from a wide variety of people and places.  I can’t really post the responses – many are quite personal – but I will say this: there’s a whole lotta heart out there.  But we knew that, didn’t we?

My Dad died peacefully, painlessly, surrounded by family.  He charted his own course.  Many do not have this opportunity.

Not long ago, I read Atul Gawande’s extraordinary book Being Mortal  (don’t miss this one), and more recently Diane Rehm’s book On My Own.  Rehms, who plans to retire from her NPR show after November’s election (and maybe head for Canada with the rest of us if the unthinkable happens!) lost her husband to Parkinson’s disease.

Unlike my Dad, Rehm’s husband was not able to chart his own course.  The experience of his death caused her to become a strong advocate for Compassion & Choices[LINK], the right-to-die organization which was responsible for the first U.S. death with dignity law in Oregon.  Four other states have followed Oregon’s lead and there will be more.  I’ll be glad.

Anyway, to all of you who wrote, and those that might, thanks so much for the outpouring.  I will try to respond to each of you, over time.  But this brings up something that interests me: most people, when they respond to my blog posts, e-mail me directly rather than commenting on the blog for all to see.  I love getting responses either way, so don’t hesitate, but I am curious about why most people choose to do it that way.  I’d love to learn.  Let me know.

Thanks.