A House Like no Other
By Chip Blake
Photographs by John Gruen
Arriving at Peter Matson and Susan Colgan’s home on a Berkshire country road, the house and grounds make an immediate impression. The lines of the main house, as well as those of several outbuildings, create a jangle of pleasant angles. Bright orange doors add a cheerful splash of color to the dark-wood structures and dark-green woods. Stylish yellow Adirondack chairs in the yard face hills and mountains that slant away to the south. A sunburst, crafted from slightly different colored boards than those around them, is embedded in the gable of the garage. This is a place, you know right away, that has been loved and carefully conceived.
When Peter Matson and Susan Colgan decided to move permanently to the Berkshires, they asked Brad Morse, pictured above with Peter and Susan, to expand the kitchen by seven feet and create an outbuilding for Peter’s library. At right, Peter in the 1970s working on the house that was once a 1765 barn, moved piece by piece from Williamstown.
Peter and Susan’s experience with the house began almost five decades ago and has been one of constant evolution, change, and reinvention, with Peter doing a good part of the building. “There was never really a plan here,” he says, “but just some ideas and a bunch of drawings on the back of envelopes.”
The story of Peter and Susan’s association with the house began in 1972. Peter, a literary agent whose New York-based company has represented thousands of books (including Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and Barry Lopez’s Horizon) was looking for a place where they could meet on weekends and vacation with his children from his earlier marriage. Susan was forsaking journalism for painting and looking to spend more time in the country. Driving through the Berkshires one day, it struck them that this was the getaway they were looking for.
They began looking at houses but discovered they were more interested in the barns that were behind the houses. This was at a time when barns in Massachusetts were taxed as agricultural property and when many landowners, seeking to reduce their taxes, were taking down unused barns. They learned of a landowner in Williamstown who planned to remove a barn. They bought it, a classic English hay barn built in 1765, for $300.
The next step was finding a place to put it—and in time a site in Washington seemed like the right place. Richard Babcock, a master barn preservationist, disassembled the structure, moved the timbers there, and put them back together again on land cleared by Peter. With the help of friends and family, Peter then started the work of turning the barn frame into a house—putting in floors and walls, drilling a well, and installing plumbing. The first summer on their new property, they lived in a tent. The winter after that, their bedroom was the only room with heat. Because their lives were based in New York, they could only work on the project a bit at a time. But room by room, over the course of several years, the old barn frame became a house.
“The original idea,” Peter says, “was a to build a house and then put our knowledge toward building something better.” As the weekends and summers and years progressed, Peter and Susan realized they didn’t want to leave the property. “This place got a hold of us,” says Susan. “We began to understand that we had a deep investment in the rocks and the soil and the trees and the deer that surrounded the house. We realized that this was home.”
Peter’s experience of working on the house ran so deep that he even wrote a book about it, A Place in the Country, published by Random House in 1977. It begins, “A few years ago, I thought to find a place removed from the influences of the city, a simple place to be with my children on weekends, where vegetables would grow and water would come out of a well. Like many before me, I soon discovered that what I wanted was a house like none I had ever seen and that to realize it I would have to build it myself, with my own hands.”
Over the years, there have been many revisions, renovations, and reimaginings. In 1986, they added a studio to serve as a home for Susan’s growing painting career. Peter built a woodworking workshop for himself. The top of the garage was converted into an apartment for their children, who visited often. Stones, once part of an old house foundation, became rocks walls and the borders of flower gardens.
In 2018, Peter and Susan decided it was time to give up their New York digs and move permanently to the Berkshires. That meant another significant expansion to the house. Susan’s brother John Colgan, an architect, drew up plans for an addition. Some years ago, Peter had taken a timber framing class with Brad Morse at the Heartwood School in Becket. They stayed in touch, and he hired Brad to do the new construction, which involved expanding the kitchen and creating a new outbuilding to serve as Peter’s office and library.
“Peter and Susan’s home is one of the nicest homes that I’ve ever been in,” says Brad, whose company is Uncarved Block. “It’s not fancy or filled with expensive things, but everything in it is beautiful and it all fits together. They have made an amazing space.”
Now Peter and Susan are there full time—and just in time. “The home was built as a refuge, and it’s a wonderful place to be during a pandemic,” says Peter. He continues as chairman of Sterling Lord Literistic and works from his new library that is now filled with nearly 2,000 books, many of which are ones that he represented. Susan is painting and planning an exhibition of her work in her hometown of Nyack, New York, that will take place later this year. “My painting,” she says, “has everything to do with the life we live here in the Berkshires.” And the same can be said about this one-of-a-kind home that they built.