The life that Guy built
Twenty years ago, Guy Petty found land he was looking for in Kittery Point—southern exposure, sloping to the water, with good thermal qualities. He traded an old Dodge for the plot and built a house that was based on principles, not drawings. He used local or recycled materials. Local pine clapboards (rather than Canadian cedar) covered with his own exterior house stain composed of turpentine, kerosene, linseed oil, and cayenne pepper to keep the bugs from eating the wood. The kitchen countertops are the backs of the old chalkboards that hung on the wall of the now defunct Warehouse Restaurant in Portsmouth. The house is so gorgeous, and yet so odd, he couldn’t get a mortgage.
Petty built a 10-ton Russian woodstove that burns so hot—1,800 degrees—that the chimney never needs cleaning. It’s fired up in the morning for a half hour, burning so hot the flames are horizontal, and then shut down so the heat from the firebox radiates through the bricks at 150 degrees, leaving the rooms at 72 degrees on a winter day. The southern side of the house facing Barter’s Creek is made of solar panels (sliding glass door replacements). He worries a little that the house is one degree off from true South.
“I did all these things back in the days when sustainable energy was called alternative energy,” Petty says.
Guy Petty has been doing naturally for more than two decades what the rest of us are just learning about. He calls it “making a clean stream for those who follow".
“The way to live is to assume that everybody else lives downstream, and we need to pay attention to what we’re doing upstream.”
And that’s how he teaches. “I teach my students to question the answers, not answer the questions,” he explains. “I want to be the catalyst, not the force.” The recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award in the Thompson School, Petty assigns class projects that include house designs. Last year’s class designed Sustainability Director Tom Kelly’s house.
Though Petty is a licensed architect, a professor of civil technology—presumably a land person—he prefers water. “I like the edge where the water meets the sea. It’s an equitable place. It has poor people and really rich people. It is the most amazing place.”
And that is where one would find Petty every third day of lobster season as he pulls his traps from his 18-foot Eastern lobsterboat—built, by the way, from parts of junked boats. (The hull is an Eastern, but that’s about it.)
I knew a little about boats before I interviewed Guy Petty, but nothing about him. So I wouldn’t appear stupid about boats when I met him, I said to a boat-builder friend before the interview, “He told me he just finished a Herreshoff tender—do you think he made it from a kit, or built it from scratch?”
“Oh,” said my friend, “probably a kit. Nobody builds a Herreshoff from scratch any more.”
Nobody, maybe, except Guy Petty. His Herreshoff is a 13-foot cedar-planked dinghy, the cedar steamed to the shape of the hull and riveted together; the seats, gunwales, and hourglass stern made of mahogany. It is a boat that shines so bright white and with such a deep ruddy heartwood that you catch your breath. It is a boat that, when you stand beside it, you stroke. You just can’t help it.
There were just enough planks to make the boat once—no room for a bad cut.
“When you build a boat having no extra material,” Petty says, “you think, and you think, and you think. Then, just before you make the cut, you think some more.”
He belongs to no Internet chat groups or boating e-mail lists. The Herreshoff is not what some call a furniture boat; Petty trailers it to the public wharf in Kittery Point and puts in the water as if it were just a boat.
“It is a boat,” he maintains.
The breast plate is a dead giveaway that this is no kit boat. It is made from the crotch of a white oak, cut and sanded and stained to silk. One sees the wood grains running separately along what were the two trunks, then converging and running together to the tip of the bow, as if downstream.
Petty is a registered architect with a private practice in Kittery Point, ME. At UNH, he teaches Statics (loads on beams and columns in structural design), computer-aided design (CAD I & II), and Architecture II.
—Kim Billings, UNH News Bureau
