Dave Sellers (September 7, 1938-February 9, 2025) often said, “If you’re not having fun, it’s not worth doing.” That ethos defined his personal life and career as a convention-busting architect, designer, builder and inventor. For Dave, building houses was less about the science of home construction than it was about vision, experimentation and creativity.
Drive up Prickly Mountain Road in Warren, through the steep, wooded hills overlooking Blueberry Lake, and you can spot some of Dave’s whimsical creations. There’s his Pyramid House, built in 1968, which former Seven Days writer Mike Ives once described as “a wooden mass of triangles that suggests a Cape Cod rental whose water pipes have been laced with LSD.”
“His houses are literally expressions of being outside the box.” Louis Mackall
Nearby is the Tack House, which Dave built in 1966, then added to repeatedly. Named for the horse barn it replaced, it’s reminiscent of a Pablo Picasso painting, with semicircular windows, cascading arcs, trapezoidal protrusions and steep, angular rooflines. An exhibition guide to the Fleming Museum of Art’s 2008 retrospective of the work of Vermont architects in the 1960s and ’70s likened it to “a strange piece of machinery parked temporarily in a field.”
“His houses are literally expressions of being outside the box, pushing this way, that way, any way to get a little more excitement going,” said Louis Mackall, one of the architects Dave attracted to Warren in the mid-1960s. “Imagination and expression were everything.”
Dave, who died on February 9 at age 86 after a brief illness, was a maverick who encouraged other architects to step away from the drafting table, pick up some tools and build the structures they design. His hands-on, improvisational approach was a radical departure from the methods of the day and was instrumental in launching Vermont’s design-build movement. Architectural Digest once named Dave among the top 100 architects in the world.
“I can’t imagine what this valley would be like if it weren’t for Dave Sellers.” Lucy O’Brien
A teacher, visionary and serial entrepreneur who friends and family said never seemed to get tired, bored or angry, Dave didn’t limit himself to architecture. Fascinated by intriguing antiques and mechanical objects, he helped launch alternative energy firms, stove manufacturers, a sled company, a museum of everyday objects and a radio show, “Sprawl Talk,” that he hosted for years. His magnetic personality drew to Vermont other smart innovators, many of whom never left.
Said Lucy O’Brien, Dave’s companion for 29 years: “I can’t imagine what this valley would be like if it weren’t for Dave Sellers.”
Life Outside the Lines
Dave grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill., the second of three sons of Georgiana and Frederick Sellers, a printing company executive. Dave was an Eagle Scout, accomplished athlete and math genius who attended Yale University. There, he set a goal of whacking a golf ball over every building on campus, a feat he accomplished before graduating in 1960.
“He squeezed out the fun every day,” his daughter, Trillium Rose, said.
After college, he used a $1,000 gift from an aunt to buy a motorcycle in France, he told an interviewer in 2022. He wrecked the bike in Avignon but while waiting on repairs met a young French architecture student with whom he traveled the country. As Dave watched his companion sketch buildings, he thought he could do better.
Upon returning to the U.S., Dave began attending classes at the Yale School of Architecture before he had even applied, then convinced the professor to admit him.
In 1964, Dave and four Yale friends were skiing at Sugarbush Resort when they decided to move to the Mad River Valley and build vacation homes. They rented a local farmer’s house and, with a $1,000 down payment, bought 425 acres in Warren. Dave designated land for a small neighborhood that they called Prickly Mountain. Then they got busy erecting houses, often based on little more than rough sketches and solving problems on the fly.
The young architects were neither back-to-the-landers nor hippies, though they embodied both groups’ values of nonconformity and experimentation.
“There were almost no booze or drugs,” said Mackall, 85. “The ‘drug’ was a sheet of plywood, a stack of two-by-fours and the sense that you could do anything.”
In those years, Vermont had no statewide building codes, housing inspectors or permit requirements. Act 250, the state’s land-use and development law, wouldn’t be passed until 1970.
Just as well. Most of the young architects had never built a house before; one didn’t even own a hammer. But they threw themselves into the work with abandon, erecting quirky, eye-catching structures. Dave’s houses were “somewhat outrageous and frequently impractical,” Mackall said, “because the expression was more important than making sure there weren’t air leaks or it wasn’t chilly in the wintertime.”
“Drawings were just a very loose idea of what the project should be,” said Jim Sanford, who partnered with Dave in the firm Sanford, Sellers, Maclay, in Warren’s former Odd Fellows Hall. “When Dave got involved in the supervision of the job, only then did the real brilliance come out.”
Dave was teaching design at Goddard College in Plainfield in the early 1970s when he turned his attention to alternative energy, believing that houses needed to be eco-friendly as well as fun to live in.
Today, clean and attractive woodstoves are ubiquitous in Vermont. But in the early ’70s, most were ugly, dirty and inefficient. After Dave discovered a 1940s government research paper on the science of woodstoves, he and two friends, Duncan Syme and Dick Travers, held a competition to see which of them could build the best one. Travers, the winner, went on to found Vermont Iron Stove Works, while Syme cofounded Vermont Castings.
Dave also dabbled in wind energy. He and Don Mayer, now owner of Small Dog Electronics, won a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration to develop modern turbines. The pair rounded up defunct windmills from farms on the Great Plains, brought them back to Vermont, refurbished them and launched North Wind Power, now known as Northern Power Systems.
With Canadian biologist and academic John Todd, Dave designed a solar-aquatic sewage treatment system known as an “eco machine.” They cofounded a company called Four Elements. Todd, a University of Vermont professor emeritus, would go on to found John Todd Ecological Design.
Dave’s projects weren’t all business ventures. The Prickly Mountain group was legendary for its prize-winning floats in Warren’s Fourth of July parades. Constructed from scrap lumber, the floats featured elaborate movable parts, such as flapping eagle’s wings and a Statue of Liberty who raised her torch.
Among the participants in Warren’s 1976 bicentennial parade was artist Candy Barr, who soon started dating Dave. They married on New Year’s Eve 1977. The couple lived in the Tack House and had their daughter, Trillium, in 1978 and their son, Parker, in 1981.
What was life like on Prickly Mountain?
“As fun as you can imagine,” Candy, 73, recalled. Famous for their “soirées,” the couple threw elaborate, often impromptu bashes for guests as eclectic as their home. Many slept over, then woke the next morning to play ice hockey, Candy said.
“The energy level was always high,” Trillium recalled. “We had a rule in our house that if someone was singing or making music, you couldn’t stop them.”
With its fanciful design, the Tack House was also popular with kids.
“A lot of effort was put into the children’s play zone,” Parker remembered. With its curved ceilings and labyrinthine design, the Tack House has a balcony with ladders, a slide and a small passageway through which kids can crawl onto a carpeted catwalk encircling a large bedroom below. As Trillium put it, “Coloring books were not part of my growing up.”
Indeed, Dave did little inside the lines. He would mow the lawn in a spiral pattern rather than in straight rows. He loved classic cars but didn’t bother keeping them pristine or even clean.
Nor did he stress over day-to-day responsibilities such as cooking dinner, paying bills, organizing his clutter — he was an inveterate pack rat — or doing basic home repairs.
“If there was a leak in the house, he would say, ‘It’s only water,'” Candy said. “He wasn’t interested in chores. He was interested in creating stuff.”
But Dave’s tendency to be, as one friend put it, “impervious to norms,” finally landed him in trouble. In 1987 he pled guilty to having sex with an underage teen and agreed to a one- to three-year suspended sentence. The conviction alienated many in the Mad River Valley, ended his marriage and haunted Dave for the rest of his life.
Full Speed Ahead
In the 1990s, Dave’s unconventional architecture drew the attention of another iconoclast: Patch Adams, a physician and clown famous for preaching the healing power of laughter. Adams invited Dave to design buildings at his nonprofit Gesundheit! Institute in Hillsboro, W.Va. Among them is the Dacha, which looks like it was lifted from a Dr. Seuss book, with wooden minarets and onion domes. Dave also spent decades working with Adams to build sustainable villages, hospitals and clinics for the poor in Latin America.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Dave also worked on high-end hotels, including the Pitcher Inn in Warren, which burned down in 1993. Dave convinced then-Sugarbush owner Win Smith to rebuild the inn, inviting several colleagues, including Sanford, Syme and John Connell, founder of the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Waitsfield, to each design a room.
Some Dave Sellers projects have an unfinished quality. They include his Warren workshop, known familiarly as the Temple of Dindor. The quirky, high-ceilinged, warehouse-like space has a poured-concrete fireplace, retractable glass doors, and railroad tracks for rolling large projects in and out. On a recent visit, it was still littered with objects Dave accumulated at flea markets and garage sales: a vintage bumper car, a tuba, a 15-seat war canoe, a dusty ’80s-era Camaro.
Despite its unpolished appearance, the Temple “elevated the simplest and crudest of building materials — two-by-fours, 16-penny nails, sheets of plywood — to enormous heights,” Sanford said. It also features two golf greens and multiple tees, where Dave and friends hit balls every day during lunch.
The workshop’s rough-hewn aesthetic also reflected some of the people with whom Dave associated. Warren builder Whitney Phillips, 46, who met Dave as a teen and worked for him for years as a stoneworker, builder and then president of his sled company, Mad River Rocket, said Dave had a soft spot for underdogs and never put on airs, accepting good ideas no matter whom they came from.
Phillips’ aha moment in understanding Dave’s architecture happened at the Temple, when he realized that Dave was all about creating interesting spaces — balconies, alcoves, landings, staircases — where people naturally hang out.
“Every building he ever created had some special little interaction place,” Phillips said.
Dave met Lucy O’Brien, his partner of nearly three decades, in 1997. A Texas native, she dated Dave long-distance for three years before buying a house across from his in Warren village. The couple lived together for 17 years until a disagreement resulted in Dave moving out. The couple stayed together but lived separately, and Lucy told Dave to remove all of his clutter.
“He loved piles. It got to where I couldn’t see the dining room table,” she said.
Lucy’s eviction of Dave’s junk eventually led him to open the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield, which celebrates the “artistry and innovation behind everyday objects.” Outside sits a vintage gas pump, rusting farm machinery and an old windmill. Inside a front door inlaid with a tennis racket lies a warren of rooms exhibiting antique toys, radios, typewriters and sleds.
Dave continued working into the final weeks of his life. Long an advocate for using poured concrete to construct inexpensive, durable homes, he built two in Warren: the Madsonian House and the Archie Bunker. A fire gutted the interior of the Archie Bunker in 2016 but left 99 percent of its structure intact. Dave considered that a success.
In February, Dave was in Los Angeles with Parker exploring the feasibility of building fire-resistant concrete homes to replace those destroyed in this year’s wildfires. But a brief illness, compounded by a heart condition, proved too much for him at the age of 86.
Dave’s death seemed emblematic of how he lived: always pursuing another bold new idea. Said Parker, “There was never coasting with him. His foot was always on the gas pedal.”
Lucy agreed. A few years ago, a friend suggested that she convince Dave to retire.
“Are you kidding me?” Lucy replied. “The day he dies, Dave is going to rise up out of that pine box and say, ‘We can design a better box.'”
“Life Stories” is a series profiling Vermonters who have recently died. Know of someone we should write about? Email us at lifestories@sevendaysvt.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Imagination and Expression Were Everything’ | David Edward Sellers, September 7, 1938-February 9, 2025”
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This article appears in Nest — Spring 2025.
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