By Danielle M. Crosier, Vermont Country Magazine.
NORTH BENNINGTON — Perched atop a North Bennington hillside located just steps away from the picturesque back entrance to Bennington College, sits the Prospect Street Writers House – its sunny yellow door offering a promise of what is inside.
Once a former nursing home, where stories lived their final chapters, light now pours through the tall windows. The coffee steams on the counter, and the quiet hum overheard isn’t of machines or televisions – it’s of people making sentences.
Once a place of endings, the building now houses an airy, award-winning residency where writers come for a week or two at a time – to work, to replenish, to find each other, and to build new stories.
The Prospect Street Writers House is the late‑in‑life “senior project” of a onetime New York finance professional who reinvented himself as a poet and literary host. After an MFA program experience changed his life, Hansmann bought the derelict building in 2018 and spent years transforming it into a writers residency. With no mandatory programming and dinners cooked five nights a week by a local chef, the house offers something rare in a noisy world – the time, the place, the space, and the kind of friendships that can shape a writing life.
For its founder, V. Hansmann, the Prospect Writers House offers the answer to a question that haunted him after retirement: What now? “I was retired,” he said, offering a wry smile. “And retirement is just an antechamber for death. And, when I was put out to pasture,” said Hansmann, laughing, “I decided that I was going to be the English major I always intended to be. So, I applied to the Bennington College writing seminars.”
“What I loved [about Bennington College’s writing programs] were those residencies, and hanging out with smart people who were interested in making better sentences,” Hansmann recalled. “It was great. It was creative, it was intellectual – it was all kinds of stuff. And, I had fun building this – and now, I’m having fun as a businessman.”
It was then and there that Hansmann saw the old nursing home on the hill, noticed it again years later, and began to dream of his next chapter.
The building had sat on the market for five years. To most people it looked like a wreck but, to Hansmann – it offered a blank page.
By December 2018, it was his. Construction began the following June with Centerline Architects of Bennington. And, providing architect Gary Corey with simple instructions – 12 bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, an all‑purpose room, and a library – Hansmann felt secure in the vision.
“A lot of this is just him,” Hansmann said of the transformational design, which later won an award from the Vermont Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “But, Gary Corey – he got me.”
By March of 2020 – just as the pandemic hit – Hansmann had sold his New York apartment, moved into a rental in downtown Bennington, and “bore witness” as his vision came to life. Construction wrapped up in June of 2021 and, by June of 2022, Prospect Writers House was welcoming its very first paying guests.
The model for the business is deliberately simple. From early May through mid‑November, Prospect Street Writers House offers one‑ and two‑week residencies. A typical stay is six nights; with two‑week residents doubling it.
“We’re appealing to people with jobs, and to moms,” Hansmann said, noting that moms can “get the mother‑in‑law to take the kids for a week, but not for a whole month.”
Unlike many residencies, however, there’s no formal programming.
“They just come here and do their work,” he explained. “We offer them dinner, but not breakfast and lunch, and we just stay out of their way. There are no lectures or readings or nonsense in the evenings. And, everybody gets work done.”
Dinner is prepared five nights a week by chef Amy Buckley, formerly of the Brown Cow Café on Main Street.
The house has 12 bedrooms grouped into suites, and each suite hosts a shared sitting room and kitchenette. Most rooms have private baths. Sunlight washes across and through the large bedroom windows; dappled glass in the bathrooms protects privacy without blocking light. On the porch, rocking chairs face the steep slope to the village. In the library, shelves rise to the ceiling. And, in the open kitchen, folks gather in the casual familial atmosphere as dinner is prepared.
There’s also the yellow‑door motif, which has become both a brand and a metaphor. Prospect Street’s Yellow Door Fellowships fund 12 fully paid residencies a year – at last round, 90 writers applied. With managing director Gary Clark, formerly of Vermont Studio Center, Hansmann now also offers financial aid to many who have been unable to secure a fellowship.
“Gary’s idea is to follow up with the people who didn’t get the fellowships and tell them, you’ve been admitted,” V says. “We offer financial aid, if you still want to come.”
Sometimes, residents arrive alone and leave with new friends and future collaborators – and that’s by design.
Reaching for a line from poet and essayist Donald Hall, whose name graces the house’s main event room, “The friendship of writers is the history of a literature.”
“And, I try to do my best to embody that,” said Hansmann.
Although Hansmann has not yet published a book himself, a poetry collection might be in the works.
In the meantime, his work is all around him – in the lines being drafted at the inviting tables, in the notes in the guest book, in the gentle hum of stimulating conversation, in the renewal offered by the welcoming space, and in the sturdy and warm reception of the yellow door on the hill.
Danielle Crosier is a landlocked mermaid who found her way to Vermont by accident. She is a wife and mother, a former technical writer (10 years), former educator (19 years), and glass artisan with a background in marketing and strategic management. Her interests, though, lie mainly in studying and understanding systems and improving the lives of those around her. She also loves spending time with her precious children and their significant others, organizing, learning about social geography, creative endeavors, experimenting with various cuisines, and exploring the world around her.
