This is the story of two athletic people who formed a bond while cycling and built a house together near the coast of Maine. They built a small, energy-efficient house northwest of Camden that’s comfortable year-round: frost season, biting season, bug season. He’s got it.
This is also the story of three not-so-little pigs snacking in their field. We’ll get to them eventually.
Didier Bonner-Ganter and Nathalie Nopakun met seven years ago while participating in the Cadillac Challenge, an annual bike ride in Acadia National Park. Ms. Nopakun lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and had a job as a compliance officer for a Medicaid/Medicare plan, while Mr. Bonner-Ganter worked as a forester and arborist in Midcoast Maine.
“It was just one of those things,” Ms. Nopakun said, sounding like a very fit, female Cole Porter. “We were just completely attracted to each other. We’ve been throwing around a bunch of ideas about where to relocate because we’re bigger.” (Ms Nopakun is now 47 and Mr Bonner-Ganter is 53.)
He added: “It wasn’t like we were having a family or anything like that.”
But Mr. Bonner-Ganter had an established business in Maine, which Ms. Nopakun joined during the pandemic after an unhappy stint at her remote job. “I was just burnt out, so I begged and begged and he finally took me on,” she said.
Although the typical property available in coastal Maine is an old farmhouse, the couple didn’t want anything big and heavy that needed constant maintenance. Instead, they bought a 26-acre wooded lot near a small lake and a range of hills, clearing two acres for a house and barn, with the idea of turning the area back into pasture.
To build their 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom home, they hired GO Logic, in nearby Belfast, Maine. The company is a pioneer in passive house construction, where buildings are positioned and sealed in a way that harnesses the sun’s warmth (or lack thereof), making them less dependent on mechanical heating and cooling.
GO Logic achieves its energy efficiency with prefabricated insulated panels that are bolted together to create airtight building envelopes. The panels incorporate high-performance doors and large triple-glazed windows from Germany that let in copious amounts of sunlight. Each house is equipped with a ventilation system that recovers 90 percent of the heat and 50 percent of the moisture in the air exhausted outdoors.
As a result, the couple’s home, completed in June 2023, uses about 20 percent of the energy used to heat a conventional home — and that’s without solar panels, which they plan to add later.
“It makes a lot more sense to improve the envelope before you do any kind of renewable energy,” said Alan Gibson, co-founder of GO Logic, who is on the board of Phius, a nonprofit that certifies passive houses. “If you have a super-insulated house, if the power goes out in the winter — which happens here with some frequency — you’ll be comfortable.”
The contract price of Mr. Bonner-Ganter and Ms. Nopakun’s home was just over $600,000, including $40,000 for site work. Upgrades, including a wood stove, higher-end cabinets, bathroom counters and tile, and some built-ins, totaled about $35,000.
“We have priced the project in the fall of 2021,” Mr. Gibson said. “If we were to do it again today, I think the cost would be closer to $675,000.”
“We really wanted to be careful about the materials in the house and chose things that were as sustainable as possible,” Ms Nopakun said. “Especially as arborists, we didn’t want something like laminate. We wanted real wood.”
The exterior paneling is pine and the interior frames, cabinets and floating kitchen shelves are maple.
Black pine tar on the exterior created the charred wood effect of the Japanese shou sugi ban at a reduced price. It also offered natural, easy maintenance, with UV and moisture protection.
“If we were painting, that would have to be repainted somewhere down the road,” Mr Bonner-Ganter said. “Now we just have to touch it if we have to.”
Similarly, standing seam metal roofing was thought to be worth the luxury of installing it and then forgetting about it for many, many years.
OK: the pigs.
Their names are Wilson, Wanda and Da Vinci, and they are a New Zealand breed of pig called the Kunekune. Weighing about 200 pounds each, they are largely herbivores, meaning they graze in the field surrounding the house, but are careful enough not to blow up the soil.
In addition to grass, the pet pigs eat fruits and vegetables that a local farm trades for scrap wood from the couple’s business and uses to heat its greenhouses in the winter. (Sarah Szwajkos, who photographed the property for this story, said the pigs will model for apples.)
“These guys are very easy,” Mr. Bonner-Ganter said. “You don’t have to worry about walking on them. You don’t have to leave them out. It’s a low-carbon way to keep an open field and your view.”
Living Small is a bi-weekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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