When Chrissy Bellmyer and Sam Gabriels decided to design and build a house in the Mad River Valley a few years ago, they were confronted with what felt at the time like conflicting goals: They wanted it to be high quality, eco-friendly and affordable. The couple, who are in their mid-thirties, were looking to escape the rental market and start building the wealth that comes with homeownership — no easy task in a region rife with ski condos and multimillion-dollar mansions.
After purchasing a half-acre lot off Route 100 in Waitsfield for $90,000, Bellmyer and Gabriels approached Andy White, owner of Boreal Design in Waterbury, to help them design and build a home to fit their budget.
The result: a bright and airy cube of a house that, at 800 square feet, feels as cozy and playful as a tree house, without being claustrophobic. It’s also highly energy-efficient, meeting or exceeding the air-tightness and insulations levels of a Passive House, an international building standard that prioritizes eco-friendliness, comfort and indoor air quality. The home features two bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, an office nook, a kitchen, a living room and a dining area — and it cost less than $300,000 to build.
This house, and similar ones adjacent to it, provide what White called the “missing middle”: reasonably priced, market-rate housing for middle-income Vermonters that was built without state or federal subsidies. This often-overlooked demographic can struggle to find affordable homes, especially in tourism-dependent communities that cater mostly to short-term renters and wealthy second-home owners.
Bellmyer and Gabriels’ house is located in a 10-acre subdivision along the Mad River called the Waitsfield Ten. The former gravel pit contains a quirky, prism-like house that was built in the 1980s and ’90s by Yestermorrow Design/Build School founder John Connell and his students.
Satisfying the goals of affordability, quality and eco-friendliness was challenging.
After that house was sold in 2022, the new owners, Mac and Bobbi Rood, petitioned the town to amend the zoning to allow for denser housing. New houses are now limited to 2,000 square feet, and, depending on the lot, the buyers at the time of purchase can earn no more than the median household income for Washington County — $83,449 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Satisfying Bellmyer and Gabriels’ goals of affordability, quality and eco-friendliness was challenging, their builder admitted. Having studied environmental science and ecological design at the University of Vermont, White used to build high-efficiency mansions in California before he returned to Vermont a decade ago and opened his own design-build firm in 2017. But building to high-efficiency standards on a modest budget took ingenuity.
Fortuitously, the couple were design-savvy — Bellmyer works as operations manager at Yestermorrow, and Gabriels is a teacher in Montpelier — and they already had ideas for the home’s design when they met with White.
“One of our prompts was: Make it like Prickly Mountain,” Bellmyer said, referring to the iconoclastic Seussian houses that the late architect Dave Sellers and his cohorts built in Warren beginning in the 1960s. “We wanted that inspiration, that fun, that creativity, but to make it practical and high performance so we can be here for 30 years.”
Essentially, their house is a 22-foot cube, with a slanted mono-roof, and lacks a traditional concrete foundation. Instead, it sits on piers a few feet off the ground to allow it to sustain flooding from the Mad River with minimal damage. Its prefinished corrugated metal siding is durable yet affordable and won’t need painting. From afar, the house resembles a rook on a chessboard.
Among the project’s costlier components were its walls — 16 inches thick and filled with cellulose, providing an insulation value of R-42, considered exceptional by residential standards. That enables the couple to heat and cool the house with a single heat pump. In the first year, the couple’s electric bill averaged $150 per month, their only utility cost other than internet service.
Inside, one immediately notices the unconventional walls and floors, made from construction-grade plywood sheets that Bellmyer and Gabriels sanded and finished themselves and left unpainted. The house has very little Sheetrock, which saved the couple time and money; essentially, they moved in six months after the builder broke ground, albeit with parts of the house still unfinished.
“Another way we kept it affordable is, Sam and I did a lot of the work ourselves,” Bellmyer explained. Gabriels built the concrete kitchen countertops as well as the deck outside a sliding glass door. Bellmyer crafted and installed all the ceramic backsplash tiles in the kitchen and painted the cabinets with a friend.
“There are a lot of people who would love to take part in the building of their own house and save money doing that,” White said.
The couple further cut costs by shopping for building materials online. They found funky pink bathroom tiles and double- and triple-paned windows on Facebook Marketplace and bought their arty, cloud-themed cabinet pulls on Etsy. The sliding door to the first-floor bathroom is an antique, repurposed from a 19th-century house along Lake Champlain and hand-painted by their friend Meg Reinhold of Trillium Handcrafts.
Like a space-saving RV, the house has elements that serve dual purposes. Because the first floor is split-level, with the living room and kitchen on different planes, the crawl space below the dining area provides storage. And though the dining room looks small, its deep windowsill functions as bench seating.
“We’ve had 12 people sit around this table,” Gabriels said.
“It’s cozy, but it works,” Bellmyer added.
The living room is only 8 by 12 feet, with space for a small couch and a built-in daybed. But due to the large and abundant windows, it doesn’t feel cramped. Rather than having an entertainment center for a TV, the couple use a projector and ceiling-mounted pull-down screen.
The staircase, in the center of the house, has no risers or walls, which allows more natural light to flood the entire living space. The railings are painted tube steel, creating a hip and modern look.
On the second floor, the main bedroom is only large enough to accommodate a bed and nightstands; the smaller bedroom can fit a wardrobe. The couple opted to keep the main bedroom open to the rest of the house, though White designed it to accommodate standard French doors if they or future owners decide to add them later. A large wardrobe closet also contains a stacked washer and dryer, concealed behind a sliding plywood door that uses no hardware, another cost-saver.
White rigorously designed the entire house on a grid, which enables the owners to make modifications, such as adding walls or reconfiguring rooms, with minimal construction. Without Sheetrock, the walls can be unscrewed and removed to, say, run electrical wires or replace a window, then easily bolted back into place.
The Waitsfield Ten has the look and vibe of an intentional community. Homeowners enjoy six acres of common land, including a pond and shared leach field, and the homeowners’ association put limits on short-term rentals as well as income caps on reselling the houses for the first 10 years. That said, the like-minded values in the neighborhood seem to have grown organically.
“Our neighbors helped us. That was the most beautiful part,” Gabriels said. “Every time we worked on [the house], people showed up.”
There are so many moderate-income people who want to pick up a hammer and have a part in their home.
Andy White
“There are so many moderate-income people who want to pick up a hammer and have a part in their home,” White added. “If you just remove some of the multitude of barriers to pulling that off, you end up with a community of good neighbors who want to help each other.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cozy Cube: Small, bright and airy, an eco-friendly Waitsfield home helps fill the “missing middle” of affordable housing”
This article appears in Nest • Spring 2026.
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