Mt Toby Retreat

Our home in Nature! Post & beam house w/ cabin-like, rustic feel, made of pines milled from forest behind house. Piano for songwriters. Borders state forest w/ trails waterfalls, creeks, caves, old growth forest, lookout at summit, 5000 acres of Mt. Toby... Lots of sugar maples - prime location for leaf peeping. Mon/Tues blocked for cleaning, but message if you want a week stay! 5-10 min to Montague Bookmill, Mt Sugarloaf, Historic Deerfield, 15-25 min to Amherst, Northampton, Greenfield. The space This is a place for travelers comfortable in an earthy, well-loved, family home, especially those looking to explore the outdoors - many miles of trails behind the house for hiking/running/cross country skiing. Upstairs there are two bedrooms with vaulted ceilings and a full bath; one of the bedrooms has an interior window looking down to the floor and two big skylights of the first floor. Downstairs is an open floor plan with the kitchen looking out into the living room space beneath the skylights, and a half bath/laundry room. The front yard is 1 acre of wild plants, gardens, goldenrods that support endangered species. The back yard is sugar maple and red oak forest that extends up Mt Toby. Although we will not be there and we have cleared out the house for guests, you will be peaking into our lifestyle in this stay — it is not a sterile corporate hotel, but a family home with all of its quirks and unfinished projects. This is our sacred space and we welcome guests that will value and respect it, including the occasional spider that might wander by. Guest access Unfortunately, the wood stove is not currently accessible for guest use, although at some point in the future we really want to be able to share this feature of our home. Other than this and a couple storage areas (back storage room, toolshed, and loft space), everything else is for guests, including laundry (please use HE soap provided), kitchen, studio upright piano, trails behind house. Other things to note There is a full kitchen, and if you use it, please clean up after yourself. We have no dishwasher, and so this will require washing dishes with our soap and sponge and placing clean dishes in the drying rack, or back on the shelves as appropriate. Thank you. Two winters ago, the baseboard heating pipes in one of the bedrooms (the Red one, not the Blue one) were clanking loudly, which may bother some guests. We’re out in the country, so if you arrive at night, it will be dark. The piano is a studio upright refurbished Estey from ~1910. Last tuned September 2023. Sorry, no fire pit in our yard, so no campfires or bonfires anywhere. Our house is always a work in progress - we need repainting some places, new window shades, to fix a few non functioning window handles, and there's always projects in the yard (like a recently blown-down woodshed and fence) spilling out of here and there. But we hope you’ll find that the basic beauty of the exposed wood in the house and the natural setting carries the charm on its own.