AMHERST — Emily Dickinson once said: “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings,” and soon her homestead will see one of those adjacent buildings revived.

The Emily Dickinson Museum spent the past 20 years preserving the 19th-century history within the existing walls of the Dickinson estate, but museum staff and donors broke ground on the John and Elizabeth Armstrong Carriage House on Aug. 27, the first new construction on the museum campus. Museum staff and members of the board of governors, donors and local politicians gathered in front of the construction site, next to The Evergreens house where Dickinson’s brother Austin and his wife Susan lived, to officially launch the $1 million project expected to be completed in 2025.

“We created a master plan that has lasted for these last 18 years, a plan that’s guided our stabilization and preservation and restoration work,” Executive Director Jane Wald said. “Eighteen years later, the Emily Dickinson Museum has really reached the end of what that plan told us we needed to do, and we reached the end of that path, and we’re stepping out on a new one into new territory by returning those adjacent buildings to the Dickinson grounds.”

A majority of the project’s funding comes from a $750,000 donation by John and Elizabeth Armstrong, a couple with personal ties to the Emily Dickinson Museum. Elizabeth started as a guide at the Homestead and Evergreens before joining the board of governors, and John served as chair of the board from 2013 to 2015. The Armstrongs also helped craft the museum’s master plan and supported early structural improvements to the Homestead.

“I’ve always been interested in the physical development of the property, but also the programming,” Elizabeth Armstrong said. “Both of those are going forward in tandem, which is very exciting.”

The Carriage House will first act as a visitors center and museum store while the third and final round of renovations to the main homestead take place. The two-floor rear addition to Dickinson’s house, Wald said, includes a kitchen, laundry room, woodshed, pantry and living corridors for domestic staff. Once all restorations are complete, the Carriage House will transition into its permanent role as educational program space for visitors of all ages and scholarly backgrounds.

“We seek to establish the homestead as the place to experience and explore Emily Dickinson’s life and work,” said Katherine Douglas, chair of the Board of Governor’s Development Committee. “A work that, as evidenced by the record number of visitors and participants in this year’s tours and programs, continues to entice, engage, intrigue and inspire successive generations.”

Designing the first new construction on the museum’s campus was a balancing act between historical accuracy and sustainability. Tim Widman, architect from edmStudio Architects, said the John and Elizabeth Armstrong Carriage House will be the first building in Amherst that meets passive house standards, a type of structure so energy efficient it can be heated by an incandescent light bulb. But this design requires an airtight envelop, and many attributes of the historic carriage house allow air to escape between the cracks. Many hours were dedicated to debating windows and doors of the new structure to create a sustainable building that assumes the Dickinson homestead attributes.

“That’s really been the whole sort of fun game, if you will, of approaching this,” Widman said, “is how do we create something that both is a nod to the past, as well as recognizes the nature of the facility that we’re building, and create something aspirational for the future for the longevity of the building.”

The design challenge is further exacerbated by the lack of documentation of the original Carriage House, which served as carriage, car and item storage during its lifetime from the 1840s to the 1940s. Wald said the staff constructed an approximation of the structure based on insurance maps, deeds, early town maps and a single existing photograph of the building. Widman said many carriage houses in New England followed a similar form, but the barn doors are on the long side rather than the gabel side.

General Contractor Teagno Construction Inc., of Amherst, will lead construction of the building over the next year. The newly-refurbished Evergreens House next to the construction site will remain open.

“The plans that have been envisioned and that are being wonderfully executed are ambitious and innovative. They court controversy at every turn, down to the windows,” Amherst College President Michael A. Elliott said. “And what could be a better tribute to Emily Dickinson, we did all of those things in her own life.”