Signed, Sealed, Delivered

A few years ago, Michelle Valladares ’85 says, her husband, Malcolm Logan, came to her with an online listing for an old post office on the Isle of Arran, Scotland, and said, “Here’s what I’d like to buy.” 

The post office was more than 100 years old. It was one of the last post offices in Scotland with a thatched roof (replaced in the 1980s) and had once held the telephone box for the rural area and been a community hub. 

They bought the property in August 2023. Seeing it for the first time a day before closing, “I literally could only stay in the interior for five minutes,” Valladares says. “It was so damp.” 

They have spent the last two years working to make it habitable. Logan, a carpenter, spends months at a time camping on the property and doing construction on the post office — a one-room building that was expanded into a three-bedroom home in 1976 — and the outbuildings. Empty for years, the house was still full of stuff, Valladares says, like it had been suddenly abandoned; a teacup was left on a windowsill. Other surprises included a box of tiny records and old photos in the attic. 

Trying to get materials to the site — and rubbish hauled away — is a feat, given that it is only accessible by ferry. Winds up to 140 miles per hour batter the island and blew off a metal roof. It took days to find the water shutoff; an old man who had retired from the water department eventually remembered the tap was in a field across the road. 

“It’s the memory of stories that is going to help us build this house,” Valladares says. 

After living in New York City for most of her life, Valladares, a professor at City College of New York, can’t wait to spend each summer in what she described as “paradise,” swimming in the cold ocean and mailing postcards from the still-operational red post box, which bears the royal cypher of King Edward VII, who ruled from 1901 until 1910. 

“It’s a great story to tell my friends,” she says. “Everyone is planning their future visits.”