Imagination Houses | Two Creative New Hampshire Home Tours

In the depths of winter, Imagination settles in. It curls around the embers of a wood fire, peers through lidded windows. And sometimes it bursts its boundaries, in homes designed and built by artists—the one inspiring the other.

Less than 20 miles apart, two very different houses in New Hampshire keenly reflect the wildly divergent artistic sensibilities of their creators. Imagination, writ large.

A Scandinavian Saga | Lita Judge

I grew up in a house with eagles and otters, and roadkill in the fridge,” says Lita Judge, as we settle around the antique French farm table that serves as an island in her buttery-yellow kitchen. It’s a provocative sentence, but even so, I’m distracted by the deep serenity of this room, the somehow familiar look of the raised breakfast nook with its bank of windows facing Pack Monadnock.

The familiarity is quickly explained: The scene bears an uncanny resemblance to the cover of Carl Larsson’s Home, a book I studied obsessively when it came out years ago. Lita, a writer and artist with more than 20 children’s books to her credit, often cites the 19th-century illustrator’s impact on her life. In fact, before she and her husband, Dave, began building here, they visited Larsson’s house in Sundborn several times—open to the public, it’s frequently called “Sweden’s most famous home”—pacing out its rooms and then running outside to record the measurements (no indoor photography permitted).

There are other head-snapping influences here, too—like the 65-million-year-old fish fossil inlaid over the stove, a reminder of a long-held interest. “When I was 15, I wrote to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology [in Alberta, Canada] and asked to volunteer on a dinosaur dig,” Lita says. They accepted her; years later, she became a geologist and a paleontologist.

The brilliant parrot squawking nearby? Also perfectly in keeping. Born on a Tlingit Indian reservation in Ketchikan, Alaska, and raised by ornithologists, Lita grew up surrounded by wild creatures. It also was her back door into eventually becoming an illustrator. “I was always observing and drawing. I didn’t think of it as ‘art.’ Growing up, I was just supposed to take notes about what I saw.”

For their first Christmas together after meeting at Oregon State University, Dave brought Lita east, and they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It was my first art museum,” she says. “The art was incredible. I burst into tears. I realized I was doing the wrong thing.”

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to the dining room, a delicious replica of Larsson’s in yellow, green, and chili red. The walls are lined with paintings: Paris, Venice, Saint Petersburg. “I felt like I was too old to go to art school,” Lita says. “So we came up with a plan. We went to Europe, and I learned by copying paintings. We went three or four times a year, and used everything we earned from selling those paintings to go back. But we always saved one. This room is a gallery of our memories.”

The move east was a fluke. In 2002, Dave’s work as an engineer brought the West Coast couple to Boston, where “we jumped in the car to find Abbott Thayer’s studio [in Dublin]. We liked it in New Hampshire. That night, we decided to move.”

And a year later, they decided to build. Although Lita had sketchbooks filled with artists’ homes and studios, in the end they used a modified version of Larsson’s floor plan. “I had 98 pages of detailed drawings,” she says. “But we had to economize: his 16 rooms to our seven.”

Choosing a builder, though, was easy. “All of the builders kept looking at Dave when we were interviewing them,” she says. Grinning, Dave adds, “The builder we chose knew not to look to me. This was Lita’s house.”

The dining room looks exactly like Larsson’s. So does the “memory hall”—a skinny corridor that leads to the studio and is lined with illustrations from Lita’s children’s books. A moose careens down a snowy hillside under a full moon in Red Sled. A wide-eyed baby giraffe from Born in the Wild stares out from the wall. A page from Good Morning to ME! shows their real-life parrot, Beatrix, suffering an embrace from their Persian, Luna.

The buildup is like a visual drum roll. “I always knew someday I’d have a studio,” Lita says, pausing on the threshold. The feeling of cathedral space and uplift is anchored, at the far end of the room, by a huge Gothic window. “And I felt that when I built it, I’d do my mature work. I didn’t want to have any regrets.”

When they started building in 2003, she’d been painting for 10 years. “I was happy, but my secret wish all along was to write and illustrate books for kids.” The studio wasn’t even completed when Lita sat under that domed ceiling and wrote her first children’s book. It was rejected, but she got an agent. And when she wrote her second book, it was not only accepted but also critically praised: One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II.

Today, the studio walls are filled with arresting ink drawings, punctuated by massive storyboards. She’s making final tweaks to an illustrated novel that will be released this February: Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein. A bank of north-facing windows lights the work desk, like a romantic stage set from La Bohème. Still, the eye-catcher is that imposing Gothic window, from a convent in northern Maine—a detail Lita had drawn into the plans before they even found it.

Below sits a 1774 wing chair that is said to have been a wedding gift to Lita’s great-great-great-great-great-aunt, who married John Adams’s son. It’s been passed down among the women in her family. She calls it her thinking chair. “So much of our house is about honoring the past,” she says. And it does. But the house also achieves exactly what Lita set out to do: create something uniquely personal.

“You build the space that speaks to your heart, and then the work starts bubbling up.”

The Philosopher’s Abode | Jon Brooks

A half hour, 18 miles, and worlds away from that Scandinavian retreat, I stumble into the land of Jon Brooks. The first hint that I’m getting close: a pair of brightly trimmed studios. A bit farther on, a lineup of twisted sculptures rises out of the landscape.

Suddenly, there it is. A mischievous little home. If it could gambol, it would. As it is, it unfurls from the snow like an Alice in Wonderland caterpillar wrapped in aging wooden shingles. A giant peace sign hovers near the entrance. The round, mosaic-tiled chimney looks like a crazy oversize stamen rendered by Gaudi. Altogether, it feels assertive and, well … extremely contented.

“I didn’t want to live in a box,” Jon says as he greets me, his head snugged into a patterned cap, hands shoved into his pockets.

If there’s one thing this home isn’t, it’s a box. But if there’s one thing Jon gets, it’s wood. Also whimsy. (You’ll know this if you’ve seen his teetering chair sculptures or a chunk of polished furniture he carved from a massive tree trunk.) Both wood and whimsy are here, in abundance. Climb the vertiginous floating stairs, and the living space opens into a yawning cavern that serves as kitchen, dining, living, and music room. Inside what feels like the body of a whale, we see its rib cage, all exposed structure and curving lines. Walls swoop upward, books stuffed into shelves created in the spaces between supports. A knobby ascension of hand-carved stairs ends in a sleeping loft set to one side of the kitchen. Tables and chairs for woodland creatures—all from the hands of Jon—define a dining room, a sitting area. Everything curves.

“I think of a right angle as a missed opportunity,” he says drolly.

A New Hampshire native, this internationally recognized sculptor and furniture maker who marries sinuous shapes with the grain of the wood started his art appreciation in second grade, with classes at the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester. After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, he moved to San Francisco in 1967. “I was there for the whole nine yards,” he says with a grin. “But I saw a lot of interesting architecture in Sausalito, back-to-the-land and creative.”

He also saw a lot of wood, especially when he moved to Muir Beach. Being, as he says, “strongly attracted to landscape and natural forms,” he began creating heavy carved pieces using natural tree sections, getting wood for free in the forest. 

When he and his first wife returned east in 1970, he was ready to put down roots. Land adjacent to his parents’ summer place in New Boston, New Hampshire, became available. Before long, Jon, and anybody who stopped by, could be found knee-deep in a hole, digging a round foundation. “People would come over, we’d hand them a shovel!”

They scavenged wood and lived in a shed while they were building. “We did what we could as we could afford it,” he says. “I had time but no money, and I wasn’t going anywhere near a bank.” Meanwhile, he was also making art and furniture, doing work for galleries and commissions.

The house grew like a living thing. Salvaged storefront windows were pressed into service for the long, narrow window slices that look out to the far fields, offering slivers of solar gain. He bartered with mosaic mural artist Isaiah Zagar, who did the tile work inside the entry and on the chimney. The Western cedar shingles on the exterior came from broken bundles. “This guy in Manchester said, ‘Make me an offer.’ We shingled the whole house for about $100.”

Always, however, there was the complicated matter of a roof. How do you cover something that swoops and banks and angles like a skateboarder? Jon bought time—first with double-coverage roll roofing and then, when that gave out, with plastic roofing cement and gravel. “In 1992, shortly after my [second] wife, Jami, moved in, it began to leak.” He grimaces. “It all went at once.”

Today, tough rubber roofing material covers the surface. He and Jami finished adding a pretty sunporch in 2015. Jon recently installed solar panels in his field, and he’s proud of the progression, over the years, from outhouse to indoor composting toilet to septic system and a real bathroom.

He readily acknowledges that there’s a certain vulnerability to his home because of its shape. And that he’s bucking historical tradition, which dictates that everything be built square. But then, with a dry twinkle, he waxes poetic: “It’s the serpentine wall and hyperbolic parameter that made it come alive.” Then he points to his head. “Not a lot of right angles in here, either.”