A small practice, rooted in the Northeast.

Solanna is a small estate restoration practice based in Stowe, Vermont, working across Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, and Maine. We restore log home estates, timber-frame properties, and heritage residences — the substantial Northeast homes that carry their era on their bones and deserve to keep doing so.

The firm has operated under this name for roughly a decade, evolving from the broader renovation work Joe Hodge — the founder — led in the decades before. Seven full-time craftspeople make up the team today. That size is deliberate, and we intend to keep it.

A larger firm could take more projects. A smaller firm couldn’t take the ones we do.

Joe.

Joe Hodge grew up on a commune in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, near the abandoned Lyndonville Air Force Station — the tract of sky where the guards first saw the lights later attributed to the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. His father, a carpenter from New Jersey, restored an old Vermont sugarhouse into their family home. His mother taught school. Joe watched his father shape the beams that held up his childhood, and understood early that a building could hold a life.

He took the long way back to the work.

He earned degrees in English, Psychology, and Communications from UVM. He worked as a radio DJ and news cameraman at WCAX-TV in Burlington under Marselis Parsons. He quit, mounted a Harley-Davidson, and rode alone across the country — a journey he later published as Freedom Road, a travel memoir. He is now at work on his twenty-fourth book. He wrote Departed Harvest, an award-winning film-and-television franchise that won the Rhode Island Film Festival Screenplay Competition and drew this response from the actor Larry Holden of Batman Begins and Memento:

“I was amazed by your writing.”
— Larry Holden

He founded and directed the New York Film and Television Festival. He was among the vanguard of a new fine arts school. He has lived in more countries than his clients can usually name in a single sitting, and he carried something from each of them home.

The carpentry never left. In every year alongside the writing and the film work, Joe kept his hands in the trade—having restored over 1,000 Northeast homes working with his father for 33 years. He apprenticed under Rocky, a master craftsman who taught him log home and timber-frame restoration in the traditional Northern methods — how to read a settled log wall, how to scribe a replacement log to the courses above and below it, how to chink a joint that will still be tight in forty years. Rocky’s discipline is what Joe carried forward: the refusal to hide anything, the insistence on doing the invisible work as though it would be seen.

Alongside Rocky’s craft tradition, Joe trained under an Army Ranger with three black belts — an experience that shaped how he thinks about discipline, situational awareness, and how a team functions under pressure. His mentor served as a lead foreman for Pizzagalli, the largest employee-owned construction company in the United States and one of the top ten concrete builders globally. What he brought back from Pizzagalli was the operational discipline of large-scale construction — how a real project is scheduled, sequenced, safety-managed, and closed out — applied ever since to the smaller, more considered work Solanna does now.

Clients often remark on the same thing: Joe is fluent in worlds that rarely speak to each other. He can discuss a Rumford damper with a stonemason and, an hour later, a lighting cue with a director of photography, with equal specificity. He carries the craft rigor of a traditional Northern log builder, the operational rigor of a major construction firm’s foreman, and the composed attention of a novelist and filmmaker. Craft and composition are not separate disciplines in Joe’s telling. They are the same discipline applied to different materials.

What we believe.

A great home estate, cared for correctly, should be more of itself in fifty years than it is today. This is the belief that anchors Solanna’s work.

The Northeast is full of substantial homes — log estates in the New York Adirondacks, timber frames in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, hand-hewn log cabins in the White Mountains, Atlantic coastal properties Down East Maine — that were built to last centuries and are now, quietly, entering their most vulnerable decades. Solanna exists to see those homes into their next century.

We work on a small number of estates at any given time. Joe is on every property, in every meaningful conversation, at every decision point. There is no account manager, no handoff, no forgotten detail. When a Solanna project begins, the person who walked the property in the first week is the person who signs the final walkthrough in the last.

We are not the fastest firm in the region. We are not the largest. We do not chase every project. We are trying to do a specific kind of work at a specific level of care, and we would rather do fewer projects better than more projects adequately.

The house Joe is building.

Joe is currently building his own house.

He is building it in the same four-state region his firm serves. He is building it with the same disaster-resistant infrastructure Solanna designs into clients’ estates — standby power, independent water, hardened structure where it matters, quiet capability throughout. He is doing this because he believes in the work enough to entrust his own family to it.

The house is not a showroom, and it is not open to clients. It is simply where he lives. But it is, in its own way, the most complete statement Solanna can make about what we believe. We build for others what we build for ourselves.

The invitation.

If your estate has been on your mind — if you have inherited a substantial property and are trying to understand what you have, if you are living with a house that could be more than it currently is, or if you are simply looking for someone who will treat your home with the seriousness it deserves — the next step is a conversation.

Joe answers the phone himself.

802 · 710 · 0333 Email

Solanna serves Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, and Maine.