Meet Your Hosts, Domenic and Sarah

Building community and creating affordable housing has been a through-line in Domenic's life for as long as he can remember, and it's a passion he and Sarah share. He's long believed that a fire and a shared meal unite people better than a television ever could, and that belief shapes the common spaces at TMI: the big Depot Street kitchen, the patio and pavilion, the fire pit where neighbors end up trading stories most nights.

He was designing and building tiny houses early in the tiny house movement, well before it had a name, and you can still see examples of his work at several of our other Airbnbs around Jamaica. That same post-and-beam building background, paired with a business degree from Green Mountain College (1991), is what let him look at a half-empty historic inn and see a working coliving community instead.

Some of that conviction was built the hard way: after college, Domenic spent four years living out of a Subaru with two dogs, no cell phone, crossing 48 states. It left him with a stubborn belief that people deserve the freedom to choose how and where they live. These days you're as likely to find him trading his truck for the fire engine as a volunteer with Jamaica Volunteer Fire and Rescue, a department he's served since 2012.

Sarah has spent much of her adult life in shared and community-centered living, and she knows what makes it work: private space to retreat to, and good company to come home to. Her path began with a year in AmeriCorps/SCA, living in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, a set of 1930s buildings where she lived and worked alongside like-minded people. Through the summers she camped four days a week in shared tents with 14 other people and two dogs, learning how a group can share space, meals, and responsibility, and come out closer for it.

At Frost Valley YMCA in New York's Catskills, she spent two years living in a cohousing house share with four other instructors and three dogs, hers included. Each person had a private room and shared the common areas, kitchen, and laundry, the same model TMI offers today.

She also spent five years living in a yurt in New Hampshire while running a working farm of beef cattle, egg and meat chickens, pigs, and milk goats. Through New Hampshire winters she heated with a wood stove, cooked on a wood-burning cookstove, hauled water from a frost-free hydrant, and made do without indoor plumbing. That experience gave her a deep appreciation for comfort, warmth, and a well-run home, and she brings it to every room at TMI.

Today Sarah is a teacher of more than 20 years, gently guiding homeschooling families and authoring original lesson plans on nature studies, sustainability, and hands-on activities. She lives with Domenic in an early 1800s Vermont farmhouse, where she tends a small homestead and a vegetable garden between visits to TMI.