On a woodsy hillside below a high hayfield in West Tisbury, Bernie Holzer and Simmy Denhart have carved out a little world of their own. They’ve constructed buildings where they live and work, planted gardens, laid brick patios, levered stones into place for stairs that connect the paths, and they’ve done all the work themselves or with the help of friends. They live here with their old dog Waltzing Matilda, named by their granddaughter after the popular Australian song, and a flock of eleven mixed-breed chickens, including four roosters whose more-or-less constant crowing is the only sound breaking the quiet of this peaceful spot far from the main road.

At the top of the hill, rhododendron bushes border the area where vehicles share parking space with a dinghy and a couple of kayaks. Down the hill, the red roofs of the house and workshop show through the trees. Between and around the buildings are rows of grapevines, a little orchard, vegetable gardens, and everywhere, thoroughly tended flower beds. At the far end of the yard is a separate deck, festooned with Christmas lights, ready for Bernie and Simmy to eat dinner if it’s any night between June and October. Dinner is an event, with candles and lanterns lit, where they can talk about the activities of the day while enjoying Simmy’s healthy gourmet dishes and whatever Bernie has cooked on the grill.

Bernie is best known on the Vineyard as the ferry Islander’s purser – the one who announces in his unmistakable, high, crackly voice: “This is a no-smoking vessel. That means for the next forty-five minutes, you do not smoke.” When Bernie moved to the Island and went to work for the Steamship Authority in 1971, before he met Simmy, he built the original part of the house with the help of his friend Allan Miller, the Black Dog Tavern builder. For many years the house was one room upstairs and one down. When Simmy met him, she says, “There was almost nothing in the building – just a couch, a chair, and a bed. Everything else was in his sea bag. He only had an electrical spool for a table, but when he’d invite me for dinner, he’d set out place mats and a candle.”

After Bernie and Simmy married twenty years ago, Allan returned from where he was living in Florida to help add on a living room next to the kitchen. Now that computer equipment is cluttering up their bedroom, Bernie and Simmy plan to add a sixteen-by-twenty-foot addition to the back of the house. Simmy says, “The house is like a boat. It’s very tiny. I don’t have any objection to that, but a real bedroom, I think, would just be magnificent.”

The original downstairs room is full of light from the sliders that cover one wall. In a corner is the kitchen area, and across the room is a little eating table with the windows on one side and a wood stove on the other. On a dividing counter, beach shells share a basket with a squash and some onions. Next to the staircase is a beautifully crafted corner cupboard of varnished and white-painted wood built by Bernie. The brick floor, wooden ceiling, colorful tiles, and dishes on open shelves give the room a homey feeling.

Through a brick archway and down a step is the newer living room, which has the feeling of an old-fashioned parlor. In fact, Bernie and Simmy are in the process of installing a gas-burning Victorian parlor stove, which will replace the wood stove they’ve used to heat the house for years.

Two walls of the room are lined with bookshelves; the other two are painted, one yellow and one a peachy orange, and covered with a gallery’s worth of country landscape paintings in ornate frames, many from the 1700s and 1800s, handed down through generations of Simmy’s family. Simmy has refinished a velvet couch, upholstered armchair, and rocker, all from another age. The windows have wide mahogany sills, and the delicate beaded trim is composed of extra boards from a special order for an old Boston house that was being renovated. Bernie and Simmy got it at a good price at a New Hampshire woodworking shop. It took a year to find, but they would rather wait and find the right old treasure or bargain than buy something new.     

At the top of the yard is a tiny art studio where Bernie paints in the winter months, which he now takes off from his purser’s job, and where he expects to spend more time come 2008, when he plans to retire. Throughout the house are his paintings and half-models. Many years ago, when he was a sailor working on freighters, his sister gave him his first paints and brushes.

 Bernie has had a long history on the ocean. He spent about twenty years as a “day man,” working eight hours at a stretch on ocean freighters all over the world, going out for months at a time. Before that, he worked on the Great Lakes on ore carriers between Duluth and Buffalo. The last time Bernie went to get his Coast Guard licensing card renewed, the official offered to take the archaic coal passer’s endorsement off it. (The coal passer was the man who used to stoke the fire by hand in coal-powered ships.) Bernie decided to keep it for the sake of tradition.

Bernie knows all the long-timers on the Tisbury waterfront. He was best man at Captain Bob Douglas’s wedding. Ross Gannon, of the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway, the traditional boatbuilding yard, is his next-door neighbor and friend of thirty-five years. For many years Bernie helped Ross with charter trips in the Caribbean on the seventy-two-foot wooden yawl Zorra.

Among his friends, Bernie has quite a reputation for his artwork, which is almost exclusively steamships done in the style of early American marine paintings. People tell him he should show them, but he says, “I’m not an artist. I’m just doing it for the fun of it, just for my own satisfaction. I don’t want to be pressured into having to do it.” Bernie has only ever given away a couple of his paintings. Simmy says, “He gave me one after we were together for about a month. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I was really flattered. I guess that was an indication of things to come.”

Simmy met Bernie when he was fifty-two years old and had never been married. She had one grown son and had come to the Island to teach, and because she wanted to rebuild her grandfather’s old Portuguese-style workboat Dola, which she had inherited. It was a family heirloom, and she went to Ross Gannon for advice about fixing it. Simmy says, “He took one look at it and said, ‘You know, you ought to make a planter out of that.’” Simmy burst into tears, and Ross reconsidered and agreed to rebuild it.

In the five months during reconstruction, Bernie was often in and out of the boatyard. Simmy says, “I only remember this funny guy with a funny voice, but I never met him.” Then Ross invited her to come sailing on Zorra, so Simmy flew to St. Martin and was sitting in a bar waiting to get on the boat when “this guy” came up to her and started talking. She wasn’t in the mood for a pickup and he was very persistent, but she knew she’d be getting on the boat soon. When the launch came, he got in it, too, and Simmy says, “I thought, wait a minute – this is going a little too far.” It turned out that this guy – Bernie – was part of the crew. They got to know each other on the boat, and back on the Island, Bernie asked her out for dinner. Two months later, they were married.

Across the yard below Bernie’s studio is a workshop where, downstairs, Bernie keeps a workbench and tools and builds his half-models. Simmy refinishes furniture here. Upstairs she has a sewing room where she makes boat cushions and covers for the chaise lounges around the yard and lays out her handiwork projects. At the top of the building, like the crow’s nest of a ship, is a tiny room where family members can go to read. On the roof is a cupola with a weather vane. Simmy says, “The only way to get the weather vane up was that Ross got up there on the roof and Bernie stood on his shoulders. I was so nervous I went into the house!”

In another house adventure, she and Bernie were moving a washing machine from upstairs. Simmy says, “It was too big and we got stuck. Bernie had it on his back and we couldn’t move it up or down. He said, ‘Go call Ross.’ So I called him at the boatyard and said, ‘Ross, you’ve got to get up here really quickly because Bernie is standing in the middle of the stairs with a washing machine on his back, and I don’t know how long he can stand there.’ Ross jumped into his truck and came up. This is the kind of relationship they have.”

Bernie and Simmy and some of their friends and neighbors have carried on a general swap of building materials and help over the years. Wood that might have been lying around someone’s barn for years becomes someone else’s living room floor, with payback coming years later, maybe in the form of an old sink or window for the other person’s building project. Awhile back when there was a house being taken down, Bernie and Ross and others were all there gleaning what they could. Simmy says, “It’s a neat way to be, to scour around. It gives character to whatever you’re doing.” She doesn’t understand the appeal of the big new houses being built on the Island and says, “The dimensions are off; the measurements are off.”

In the traditional Island style, a home-grown house is built over time with the resources available. Like Bernie and Simmy’s house, it grows and ages, settling in with the years like its inhabitants do, and ends up reflecting the story of their lives.