Alan Melad and Barbara Necol’s home and studio in Peterborough have evolved as their lives have changed, resulting in a unique space that is clearly the home of a designer.
“We initially built the house as my shop, and the smaller building was the garage,” Melad said. “Now, the old shop is the house, and the old garage is the shop. We could not justify having the building there sitting idle, filled with old machinery, so we attempted — we are still attempting — to make it into our home. We’ve lived here for 40 years and it’s still unfinished,” he adds with a chuckle.
Melad said the family never actually parked a car in the garage.
“We kept the machinery here,” he said.
Originally, the Melads lived in the small farmhouse on the property, where they raised their two sons.
“It was very charming; it still is. We gutted the whole thing, and we lived there with two little kids for a number of years. You could practically touch both walls when you reached out your arms — it’s only 12 feet wide. But we managed it,” Melad said.
Melad remembers buying the double oven in the house from Derby’s Country Department Store in Peterborough.
“We got our first appliances there; we got our clothing, it had tools. We remember the salesman, Mr. Miller. He insisted to Barbara that we get the double oven, and we got it, and it lasted 30 years,” Melad said.
When they were first married, Melad and Necol lived in Boston, but after having to leave their mill space in the South End, they moved to Greenville, purchasing part of an old mill.
“We loved it there, but we needed outside space,” Melad said.
Melad, who has had a nearly six-decade career as a furniture maker and interior designer, calls his large, well-appointed woodshop his “retirement shop.” While the space obviously belongs to a highly experienced woodworker, with tools, blades and parts carefully organized, it is a much smaller version of the shops Melad worked out of during the height of his career in Boston.
“This shop is smaller for many reasons. I had much larger shops, with employees, and now I’m old, and I’m by myself, which is wonderful, but at this point in my life, lifting large things like a 4×8 sheet of plywood is not as easy as it used to be. I used to wheel those around like they were feathers,” Melad said. “Life changes, and you move along with it.”
The second floor of the woodshop is a light-filled studio showcasing Melad’s furniture as well as paintings by his son, Elias. The work of both Melads is featured on the Monadnock Arts Tour every fall.
Scale models of Melad’s furniture from over the years, called “maquettes,” are displayed on many surfaces, creating a visual record of Melad’s career.
“Many of my works are still in progress. I’m trying to finish them up for this year’s tour,” Melad said.
Melad now makes smaller, more manageable pieces of furniture, including small coffee and end tables. A retrospective of his career is currently on display at NIDU Studio in Depot Square in Peterborough.
“I can’t handle something which weighs two or three hundred pounds anymore,” Melad said. “But that’s ok.”
Melad said that while he is not an architect, as an interior designer, he was tangentially involved in the design of many buildings and homes over the years, and had plenty of ideas when it came time to convert the shop to a house.
“It was fun to be able to design a small part of my own home. I was fortunate enough to be able to work with architects in my career and make suggestions when things weren’t set in stone, or if someone was doing a major renovation, I would have input on that,” he said.
On the east side of the house, a 12×12-foot glass brick, stone, and wood structure juts out from the main building.
“We had to have a real entrance, because all it was was a shop,” Melad said. “We refer to this as ‘The Crash,’ because the image I had was that it came down from the sky and literally crashed into the house. We used the same materials on the inside; it’s concrete and glass blocks and where you see the other side of it.”
The property is surrounded by Casalis State Forest, which has a host of trails and wetlands.
“Nobody seems to know about Casalis State Forest. It is not used very heavily,” Melad said. “It’s a 270-acre forest, with a marsh and beavers, and it’s full of trails. We sort of think of it as being our own, because it is not used much by the public.
To cope with the harsh New Hampshire winters, Melad added a large woodshed onto the west end of the house, and the house is primarily heated with wood.
“Fifty percent of our heat comes from wood, although I am getting a little too old to deal with it,” he said.
The house has passive solar, with a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows facing south over an open field. The large windows on the south side also contain an invisible gel compound which retains heat.
“It was highly specialized glass with gel in between the layers that retains heat. What’s great about the passive solar approach is you absorb all the heat during the day, but at three o’clock when the sun goes down in the winter, you lose all that heat. But with this material, it actually holds the heat and gives it off much more slowly,” Melad said.
Melad says that sadly, the product never made it to the mass market.
“A friend of ours was working on it. It’s in our windows, and it works great, but unfortunately I don’t think they could figure out how to make money with it,” Melad said.
In the middle of the open-plan house, Melad created a smaller space the family calls the den.
“There is a 10-foot ceiling in here, but there is no reason why everything had to go up to 10 feet,” Melad said. “This space floats within the larger space.”
Melad and Necol are happy to let their house continue to change and evolve with their needs.
“We probably won’t still be here in 15 years,” Melad said. “But we’ll see.”
