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BY LISA LYNN | PHOTOS BY MATTHEW NIEMANN AND OLIVER PARINI

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A 1980S SKI HOUSE? IN LUDLOW,

TWO FAMILIES GIVE THEIR SECOND-HOMES STUNNING MAKEOVERS.

Dream Home

RE-FRESH

A new entryway with a ski room (to the left), a storage room (far

right) and a walk-out patio off the downstairs den make the home

more functional .

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“When I was a kid, my parents had a house in Newfane and I remember getting up at the crack of dawn to go ski

Magic or Stratton,” remembers Kerry Berchem. For years, the lawyer from Fairfield, Conn. didn’t ski. “Then one day my husband, who had skied twice, wanted to take a family

ski trip. With three young kids, I thought it would be a disaster,” she says. But they went to Okemo and loved it.

“Everyone was so friendly and it was so laid back and not-New York,” Berchem says. They enjoyed Okemo so much so that a few years later

they bought a 1980s-era four-bedroom home just off the slopes. “When we were looking for a house, my daughter wanted a

separate living place for her generation, one son wanted a hot tub and the other a place on the mountain.” The house was on the mountain, had no hot tub and it needed work. “We started with a kitchen project, then we decided to do the bathrooms, then it snowballed,” Berchem says. She found designer Holly Hickey Moore, then of Burlington, and Burlington architect Jodie Fielding of Roots Design Studio, and they brought in Brandon-based builder McKernon. But as they began tearing down walls rot appeared, and the team realized the roof needed replacing. At that point, anything was fair game.

Some simple architectural changes made vast improvements. Creating a new entryway allowed for a large mudroom (“that’s where all the drama happens in the morning when you’re ready to go skiing,” Berchem says) and a ski locker. Under the house, a space was enclosed for storage. “I want friends to use the place and for us to be able to lock things away,” Berchem says. “The whole look I was after was ‘ski chalet meets boutique hotel.” Or, “playfully sophisticated,” as designer Moore calls it. Start to finish, the remodel took less than nine months. Now, it’s a place that Berchem and her family are thinking they’ll move

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Decks overwhelmed the original house (left), but it was large enough for Kerry Berchem’s family, with high ceilings and four bedrooms. The ground floor now houses kids’ rooms and a den. In the living and dining rooms (below), Berchem switched out the pine ceiling and Berber-carpeted floors for white oak. A new fireplace facade uses natural cleft slate, with sconces in white oak made by Burlington’s Conant Metal & Light. In the living room (below left), a new door to the right of the fireplace leads to the deck and new hot tub. Blue velvet swivel chairs found on Chairish.com and reupholstered add a post-modern touch. In the kitchen (right), a dining table, custom-built by McKernon, snugs up to a kitchen island, allowing seating for up to 14. Sleek, dark gray cabinets and white quartz counters pick up on the white/gray/blue color palette that anchors the house.

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to at some point, full-time. “Everything is just so much more relaxed here in Vermont,” she says.

Just down the road from Berchem’s house, another Connecticut family set out to update their 1980s era ski home as well. “They loved to come back to the house for lunch, often with friends, and wanted a lighter, airier kitchen,” says designer Sam Ostrow of Vermont Inte-grated Architecture in Middlebury.

The solution, replacing the outside staircase with an atrium-style indoor one , solved that and several other problems. “It also let us re-verse the interior stairs up to the bedrooms, giving a much bigger area and letting more light into the kitchen,” says Ostrow.

At the same time, they added on a new entry and a mudroom and moved the hot tub to a lower patio. “They hardly used the deck and the new design lets more light into the lower rooms,” Ostrow notes.

For both families, these renovations turned part-time 1980s ski houses into homes they can live in for generations to come.

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Just down the road, another Okemo house gets an equally dra-matic makeover. A new paint job, a new roof, a new entry and an enclosed addition didn’t change the footprint of the house much, but made a world of difference to its look, outside and in (top). The new staircase, encased in Marvin windows, rises two and half stories, becoming the main corridor for the house and leading to both the second-floor kitchen and third-floor bedrooms. The deck, which the family rarely used, was taken off and replaced with a smaller one behind the house. The hot tub was moved down to a ground level porch, just off the mud-room/ski room and winter entryway. Ashar Nelson (left), prin-cipal architect at VIA, tests the stairs he and Ostrow designed, along with the new cabinets and kitchen bar. The firm worked with local builder, Gassetts Group, to do the renovations.