Isa Deloge didn’t stumble upon her dream house so much as she manifested it. The process just took a while. An admittedly picky house hunter, she and her husband, Jim, who had been renting and looking for a house in Northampton for nearly three years, decided to expand the search to Hadley. Deloge, then a development director for a nonprofit, immediately fell for a place that “looks like a red barn from the outside,” she says. The only hitch? The home was already under contract — and then it was gone.
“My husband’s a grounded engineer,” so he didn’t let himself get too attached to this house, she explains. “But I’m an intuitive feeler, and I knew this was our home.”
So, she stalked the place, driving by every single day for two long years. “My husband would say, ‘Knock it off. Stop being such a weirdo,” she says, laughing, when she’d rope him into the detour en route to Target. But she kept it up, writing down the house numbers of all the places in that neighborhood she could imagine living. She liked the way the neighborhood had been laid out in a horseshoe shape and how many of the houses featured post and beam construction. She imagined taking walks in the evening with Jim and their future children.
Then one day she stopped a woman pushing a stroller and asked if anyone in the neighborhood might be thinking about selling. As a matter of fact, the woman replied, she was. “Is it 8 Wampanoag Drive?” Deloge asked. The woman explained that her husband was changing jobs, and – unbelievably – they were selling the place that Deloge had been coveting for two years.
“I grew up in a neighborhood where all the houses were split-level ranches that looked the same except for the paint colors.” This four bedroom post and beam style home, however, struck her as unique. It has the feel of a lake house or a ski cabin, she says, with wide pine floors, cathedral ceilings and a fireplace with a massive stone hearth. The living room can accommodate a hotel-lobby-size Christmas tree. Though small, the kitchen had been laid out by a chef, and everything is within easy reach. But the best feature, she says, is the loft, which she could envision children using as an indoor tree house for playing and reading.
“My mom decorates a lot and she always had themes — the Asian room, the seashell room, the cat room. I tend to like simple things. The most important thing to me is the color of a room.”
Despite her love of color, she felt challenged by choosing interior paints. “Left to my own devices, everything would be different shades of periwinkle,” she explains. So she hired Amy Woolf, a local architectural colorist, to come help her pick out a palette. Together they chose an unexpected cool-toned gray to tie the house together, and a toned-down periwinkle that complements the natural woods of the couple’s bedroom. (Though the house includes a downstairs master bedroom, the couple chose to reserve that for guests and sleep in a small, cozier room upstairs — “There’s a skylight, and I love to lie down and look at the stars,” she explains.)
She says that the colors they chose and the way they make her feel represent some of the best money she spent. She also bought a gigantic dining room table that comfortably seats 15. “It looks like something that should be surrounded by knights eating turkey legs.” Instead, it hosts the members of the book club she belongs to, made up of women who’d met at the Beyond Birth group at Cooley Dickinson Hospital moderated by Ann Buscemi. Deloge, 38, a stay-at-home mother, describes her book club as “one of the highlights of my life.” The other highlight is her seven-month-old daughter, Autumn. “I’m so happy being this little nugget’s mommy.”
For a couple who loves nature but feared feeling isolated in the Hilltowns, Hadley has turned out to be a great fit. Isa, Jim and Autumn visit the DAR Forest in Goshen and Look Park and Musante Beach in Northampton in their free time. “I feel like we have all the convenience of the stores in Hadley, plus we borrow downtown Northampton and Amherst as our own,” Deloge says. In their back yard, they have the space for a garden, and Deloge thought she would love gardening, but she found herself discouraged by all the weeds. No matter. The property came with a fetching chicken coop — a red and white miniature version of the house — and she’s thinking about raising some chickens. Deloge hears that hens eat ticks, and before too long, Autumn will be old enough to collect eggs with her mom.
Katy McColl Lukens can be reached at katymccollwork@gmail.com.