WAITSFIELD — Charlotte Potter is executive director of Yestermorrow, a Waitsfield school for designers and builders that turns 40 years old next year.
Yestermorrow is the creation of John Connell, an architect who bought the former Alpine Inn and 32 acres of land near the Sugarbush resort in 1990 and started offering classes to people who wanted to learn how to create their own built spaces.
Nowadays, the school serves about 800 students per year with classes in areas such as woodworking, tiny house design and construction, timber framing, and sustainable prefab design and delivery. Next year, it will offer its first shipping container design/build class, taught by Connell.
Students from schools like Goddard and Sterling Colleges and the University of Massachusetts who take Yestermorrow’s semester-long classes earn undergraduate credits in architecture. The nonprofit school’s board is made up primarily of architects from as far away as California and Bluff, Utah – where Yestermorrow has a 13-acre outpost. Connell, who now lives in Rhode Island, is still on the board.
Yestermorrow has always been a scrappy place, producing unorthodox structures such as bus stops, treehouses, playgrounds and other one-of-a-kind items that now dot the Mad River Valley. It has been pronounced unsustainable several times over the years, Potter said. Visiting students live in the former hotel – now converted so it also holds administrative offices, a kitchen and teaching space – and in a yurt, tents or experimental student-built structures on campus.
Potter, a glass artist who started last January as the school’s fourth executive director in four years, plans to strengthen Yestermorrow by raising its profile and creating more partnerships with other institutions. To that end, this year Yestermorrow served as a partner for the fourth annual Tiny House Festival, which drew 2,000 people from the U.S. and Canada for seminars and tours in October.
Yestermorrow students have started construction on a 1,250-square-foot dormitory that will sleep 16 and hold a kitchen and common area. Potter spent some time talking to VTDigger about Yestermorrow and its future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VTDigger: How did you decide that a dorm was the top construction priority?
Charlotte Potter: Outside consultants created a master plan for our campus 10 years ago, and everyone thought the first move would be to build a new studio. When I came on board, we dusted off the plan and we decided it has to be a dorm. A dorm is the first thing that would get us revenue. Two-thirds of our students are housed on campus; the rest have to be housed in the outside community because we don’t have the capacity.
The second thing was that a studio building was a $1 million capital campaign, and the dorm is $150,000. We’re using discounted materials, and the student body does a large portion of the labor.
For the dorm, students designed these ingenious little bunk pods, inspired by Japanese architecture and design, so each person can stand up and pull a little sliding door behind them and be alone with their belongings. There are steep stairways up to each bunk. It is furniture, not walls; we could take them apart if we wanted to.
There’s a little kitchenette, a communal living space, and bathrooms so the campers have access to running water, which has been an issue in the past. The cheapest option when people come to stay with us is camping.
VTD: What happens at Yestermorrow in the winter?
CP: We’re winding up our classes for the year, and then we’ll only have staff on campus until January 15. In the new year, we get into more of our professional development courses. For example, we partner with PHIUS, the Passive House Institute of the U.S.
A lot of lecture-based and woodworking classes happen in the winter, and in the spring we gear up for building. For the first time in over a decade, we have a real live building on our campus – the dorm – so all the students who work on it will have created a piece of architecture.
When nobody is staying here, we’ll offer the dorm off-season to someone like Sugarbush, because they need a place for their snowmaking crews. One of the biggest things our master plan came away with was we can’t think of ourselves as an autonomous solution for anything. We are one particle of the constellation that is the Mad River Valley. We don’t want to replicate things that are already out there.
VTD: Do classes design, build, and complete projects?
CP: We never set up the expectation with any class that they’re going to finish a build. Builds take a year; that’s just how long they take. A large portion of this is giving people the information they need about parts of the build. So if we are teaching a home design/build class, we’ll have someone teach a little part on plumbing, and a little electrical –- just enough for people to know they have to go out and hire a plumber and electrician.
With the dorm, our CNC furniture class will be building out the pods. The carpentry course, trim class, concrete countertops course – those classes will work on the dorm.
VTD: How does the Tiny House Festival fit in with all this?
CP: We got involved last year because the festival needed more administrative support, and the festival was in line with our mission. Yestermorrow had hosted the first tiny house festival in Vermont in 2003 – some people say it was the first in the nation – so Erin (Erin Maile O’Keefe, the festival co-founder) felt Yestermorrow would be a natural partner.
This year we moved it up from Brattleboro to the Mad River Valley. It was much more successful than I had imagined. More than 2,000 people came out in the worst possible weather, and they were seriously engaged and asking thoughtful questions. They want to design their own homes. Yestermorrow reaches 800 students a year. If the festival can reach 2,000 people in one day, that’s huge for us.
Yestermorrow’s mission is to empower people to create objects and spaces and landscapes that reflect their values. If people are interested in having a smaller impact on the earth, a tiny house is one way to solve that riddle.
One thing we talked about at the festival is that “tiny house” is relative. I am trying to design a home for me and our family of four, and trying to design something around 1,200 square feet is really small for us and the way we live. It’s about creating something that reflects your values and whatever that means for you.
VTD: Does tuition support Yestermorrow?
CP: No, I have to fundraise; we’re about $150,000 $200,000 short each year. The only way we make that up is donations from alumni and supporters. We are still fundraising to complete the dorm; we need $65,000.
For the UMass classes, it’s listed for $6,800 for a semester, and Yestermorrow adds another $9,000, so it ends up being over $15,000 for tuition plus room and board. We’re trying to find scholarships; right now you have to be able to pay our tuition.
Our annual budget fluctuates from three-quarters of a million to a million dollars, depending on how ambitious we are over the course of the year.
We’re not a trade school, we’re not a craft school, we’re not an architecture school. We’re a little bit of everything, and we’re filling an important void.
