Tracymay Kalvaitis laughs when she thinks about her first impression of the house in Dublin that is now her family’s home.

“It was the ugliest house I had ever seen. It was absolutely the last one I ever wanted to look at,” she said. “Driving by, I’m sure everyone wonders what it could possibly be like inside.”

Kalvaitis had been familiar with the house on Cobb Meadow Road for  many years prior to buying it, as her older children attended Cobb Meadow School right next door. When she and her family were house-hunting years later, in 2016, family friend Jim Haddock encouraged them to look at the house, which had been built by his parents, James Haddock and Doris Haddock, otherwise known as the  famous political activist “Granny D.” 

“Jim said, ‘Just come see it,’ ” Kalvaitis said. “So we did. And walking in the door – that was it. He was right. You have to see the inside to understand.”

Inside, triangular skylights bring light into the high-ceilinged entryway. The house is a split-level, with a full walk-out basement. On the second level, a wall of windows in the great room overlook the forest sloping down to the banks of Brush Brook.

The attic space, which is accessible by a large hatch and has sun streaming through a row of skylights, was used by the four Kalvaitis children as a play space and hideout.  The main room includes an entire wall of built-in bookshelves which display paintings and drawings by the whole family.

“Three generations of our family have been living here together here since 2016,” Kalvaitis said. “It’s a multi-generational home, and we’re almost all artists.”

The senior Haddocks, who were committed conservationists and environmentalists, had originally planned to build a ski chalet-type house with a modified A-frame design in North Conway. The Haddocks were avid Nordic skiers, and had planned to retire to the mountains. When they decided to build in Dublin instead to be close to their son Jim and his family, they used the same house design, perching the house over the banks of Brush Brook instead of facing the White Mountains.

The Haddocks lived in the home for decades, and it was from there that Doris Haddock launched her famous campaign for finance reform and founded Open Democracy at the age of 90. 

Kalvaitis, who is the minister of Dublin Community Church and  the Community Church of Harrisville and Chesham, is honored to live in a home with such an unique history. Her own family is equally unusual, having moved back and forth between New Hampshire and Hawaii while the four children were growing up.

“My husband and I would come home and teach and earn enough money to go live in Hawaii for a while, then we would stay as long as we could, and then we would come back,” Kalvaitis said. 

Each of the four Kalvaitis children, who all have Hawaiian names, spent their first two years in Hawaii, where the family lived off-grid in the Waipi’o Valley on the Big Island.

“In Hawaii, we lived off the land. We took public transportation; we didn’t have a car,”  Kalviatis said. “We caught fish and picked coconuts.”

When the youngest Kalvaitis children, twins, turned 2, the family decided to come back to the Monadnock region for good.

“It was the access to water that did it for me,” Kalvaitis said, indicating the rushing waters of Brush Brook below the house. “And the view. But water was really important.  When we lived in Hawaii, we were camping, and we didn’t have running water. Hawaii does not have a lot of fresh water sources; we drank surface water. After living like that, water is something I never take for granted. We’ve actually used water from the brook in power outages.” 

The house stands on 28 conserved acres. Brush Brook plunges down from Beech Hill, which is the  top of Dublin’s watershed. Just above the waterfall is a beaver pond, and the family sees wildlife frequently.

“The best thing was, one time we saw a bunch of otters from right here in the house! They were just playing in the stream, jumping in and out of the ice. It was just incredible,” Kalvaitis said. “We’ve seen bear scat, a lot of deer. It’s completely quiet back here. People are shocked when they come inside, because you can’t see the brook from the road, so they have no idea. It just kind of looks like this ugly house with no windows.”

Kalvaitis added a display of fairy lights in a heart shape on the roof facing the road, now a landmark in town.

“People tell me all the time how much they love the heart lights, and they thank me for putting them up,” Kalvaitis said. “We feel very fortunate to be here. This place is just perfect for us.”