“We live in the Bermuda triangle of coffee,” says Tess Poe, of the Masonic Street perch she shares with her husband, Carson Poe. Seven years ago when the couple moved to Northampton from Cambridge, they bought a 750 square foot condo, steps from the downtown Haymarket Cafe, Woodstar Café and Tart Baking Co.
“Carson is a transportation analyst; my degree is in regional planning, and the overarching idea was to celebrate density and connection, and the sustainability factor of shared space,” she explains. In other words, they wanted to practice what they preach.
Indeed, they found many things to love about urban living: sharing one car and running most of their errands — including food shopping — on foot or bike; never having to shovel snow. Plus, Poe says, “It doesn’t bother me if a Planning Board meeting goes until 10 p.m., because I’m literally walking across the street to go home, which enables me to be more civically engaged.”
Nonetheless, the Poes were sorely lacking in elbow room. “After four years we asked ourselves, ‘Might our future include children? Might it include aging parents? Might it include subletting?’ Regardless of the answer, we realized we needed more space.”
Carson works from home, they own four bicycles and four guitars between the two of them, and there was the matter of their rented storage space. “I don’t think we could have lived together in 750 square feet without also having a storage unit for furniture, file cabinets and off-season items,” Tess Poe, 42, admits. The more they considered alternative places to live — moving to Florence, shelling out for a second car, or buying even further out and reacquainting themselves with snow shovels, the more they realized how much their existing location suited their lifestyle.
“The last piece of it was realizing that packing and moving are the worst,” says Poe, so the duo hatched a plan to buy the one-bedroom unit above them and connect the two floors. They cared about different things: “I care about aesthetics, light, efficiency,” says Poe. “Carson’s biggest fear was starting and not finishing the project.”
So they began. They started the demo on Jan. 1, 2016, and when their kitchen counters arrive — any day now — the project will be complete. Opting to serve as their own general contractor, researching and coordinating all the people involved with the project, and undertaking a lot of the work themselves was all part of the plan.
“Whenever I get frustrated by having to make 42 phone calls, I think, this is what you pay a general contractor for,” explains Poe, “and if we’re not paying that person, that’s more money we can invest in a white European refrigerator with a wine rack — that was the trade-off.”
They did all of the demolition, or “deconstruction” as Poe calls it, themselves, donating and recycling materials whenever possible. “We bought a beautiful antique porcelain sink and a really lovely solid wooden door with glass panel inserts from the Iconica renovation,” says Poe, and repurposed some salvaged glass-paned windows from a farm in Granby into sliding closet doors. (The nearby Iconica Social Club, which opened last summer, was carved out of an 1800s-era carriage house.)
Sometimes, the work proved tedious. In order to restore the brick in the upstairs unit — that a previous tenant had painted mint green — Carson Poe, 39, removed the paint. By hand. Using a metal toothbrush. “He scraped it every weekend for months and months. Once he saw how much better it looked, he couldn’t stop,” says Poe. Her husband performed the same labor of love on all the exposed posts and beams, which had been painted brown by previous owners.
But the most significant and most creative aspect of the project — by far — involved designing a staircase from scratch. Most people assumed they’d install a spiral staircase and be done with it, but Poe, who owns Beehive Sewing Studio + Workspace on Pleasant Street, is someone who sweats the details. “I know that if I have a tendency to slip and fall, then my 72 year old Mom would be even more likely to slip and fall down a spiral staircase, and I just couldn’t see us using a spiral staircase 20 times a day,” she explains.
So Poe got out a pile of books, not to look through for inspiration, but to determine the most comfortable rise for the steps. “I spent a lot of time stacking up books at different levels and walking on them to figure out how far I wanted the steps to be from each other,” she says. “The thing I’m most proud of is when people walk up and down the stairs now and say, ‘I feel like I’m gliding.’”
They hired an engineer to draw up final plans so that their contractor, Daniel Hewins of Chesterfield, could cut the hole in the floor, woodworker Drew Palmore of Andrew Roy Woodworking in Easthampton could get cracking on the custom stair’s custom treads, and Jeff Slesinski of Accufab In Goshen could fabricate all of the staircase’s metal components offsite. “Our steel fabricator in Goshen normally does big stuff, like the gates at Smith College,” Poe explains. “When he delivered the components through the window with a crane, that was the moment I knew we couldn’t turn back.”
In truth, it’s more than a staircase. It’s a full-on recreational space. Built-in bookcases flow seamlessly into the fourth step, which allows plenty of space for sitting, reading, writing — all on the staircase itself. And it’s thoughtful solutions like that that make the combined unit — with an open living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs, with two bedrooms and space for working and doing yoga upstairs — much more than the sum of its parts. To emphasize the tall ceilings and ample windows — and create a sense of wonder — they hung prisms everywhere to cast rainbows on the walls all day long.
“There were definitely moments when we asked, ‘Is this worth it or should we just jump ship?’, but I’m proud that we stuck with it and didn’t get divorced,” Poe says, laughing.
Katy McColl Lukens can be reached at katymccollwork@gmail.com.