This New England

Comments by WILLIAM MORGAN, photo by JONATHAN BELL

With a gritty 19th-Century downtown squashed between steep hills and the Connecticut River, Brattleboro, Vt., is one of those progressive New England towns that seems to have its own foreign policy--a sort of little hippy republic with more than its share of bookstores and organic restaurants.

{Whitcomb note: It was also for a few years the home of Rudyard Kipling, until a family dispute made him leave where he was the happiest in his life.}

It is not surprising, then, that Brattleboro is home to this handsome new house that uses an ingenious architectural solution to a marital problem. A professor and an administrator at the School for International Training divorced, but they wanted to raise their two pre-teen-aged children together and yet lead independent lives.

Jonathan Bell, a Princeton-trained architect based in Providence, came up with a double house: one unit for each parent, joined by a children's bedroom suite that could be accessed from either side.

Zoning in this particular neighborhood allows only single-family homes. So Bell liberally applied the Vermont statute that permits an in-law apartment to exist within a dwelling provided it occupies no more than 30 percent of the total area of the structure.

Each parent's part is that amount, plus there's shared space arranged around the children's bedrooms. That common space is where the families' lives overlap, with play room, guest quarters, storage and utility areas.

The exterior reveals nothing of the advanced social engineering behind the crisp wood-clad wrapping. Modern in many senses of the word.