Cold comfort: High-performance homes for mountain living

By June Donenfeld

This trio of stunning mountain homes are the stuff that dreams are made on. Beautifully designed and exactingly constructed, they all met the challenges that high-performance building in a cold, harsh climate can present, from the topographical to the meteorological. But most importantly, they also demonstrate how that success was the direct outcome of homeowners, designers and builders sitting down together to ensure clear communication—long before the projects broke ground.

A Sugarloaf Mountain dream home

MEGAN FLYNN grew up in Bangor but spent many family holidays at Sugarloaf Mountain, where her family owned a condo. “It was such a special place for me, filled with amazing memories and, of course, great skiing,” says Flynn, the Boston-based co-owner of M. Flynn jewelry store. “And though the condo was eventually sold, Sugarloaf stayed close to my heart.”

Flynn’s husband, Roman Gramc, a software engineer, is also an avid skier. But having grown up in Slovenia, a country renowned for its natural beauty and alpine sports, his day trips to the crowded mountains around Boston had left him skeptical about Northeast skiing. Once Flynn took him to Sugarloaf, though, he fell in love with it, too. “After that, we knew we wanted a place of our own,” she says…

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Built for adventure at Mt. Abram

ON FRIGID winter evenings, warm, welcoming light streams from the large windows of Charlotte and Luke’s* slopeside retreat in western Maine. Tucked away in dense woods at the base of Mt. Abram, the two-story ski-in, ski-out house is “comfortable, even on the most bitterly cold, windy winter nights,” Charlotte says. And though it is located at the base of a busy mountain close to a large ski lift, inside, stillness reigns.

For Charlotte and Luke, young professionals in finance and engineering, respectively, their “mountain house,” as they call it, was a dream many years in the making. They had skied at Mt. Abram for many years but only began serious house hunting there in early 2020. Yet time and time again, the available houses they visited fell short…

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Purpose-built Passive House in Gorham, NH

WHAT DO YOU DO when you have a clear vision for a home that reflects your deepest values and desires— and want to ensure that vision is realized? If you were Rachel Rennard and Mike Bratina, who work in biotechnology and IT, respectively, you’d write a deeply thoughtful mission statement and seek out a crackerjack team that could bring it to life. That’s exactly what this couple did when they decided to move from the Boston area and make New Hampshire their new home. Both love skiing, mountain biking and hiking, so they chose the town of Gorham to be closer to the many outdoor recreational activities that the White Mountains offer….

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