Country Style + Community Conscience = Hammertown at 25
In the very beginning 25 years ago, there were mostly crafts and gift items. “And lots of dried flowers!” recalls Hammertown Barn owner and founder Joan Osofsky, grinning and wincing at the memory of mid-1980s country style. “We had quilting and stenciling workshops, too.” When she opened a shop in the barn next to her house on Route 199 a mile east of downtown Pine Plains, she was looking for a way to help support her family that was consistent with their new rural life. She and her now-ex-husband were both 40 years old, and they had tired of living in suburban New Jersey. “We were seeking a life change,” explains Joan, whose husband yearned to work with his brothers at the family’s Ronnybrook Farm Dairy in Ancramdale.
A former school teacher, Joan is a self-taught merchandiser and stylist with the soul of a community organizer. “There was no grand vision or plan 25 years ago,” she says. Her son, Gregg (photo right with his mom) was in sixth grade, and her daughter, Dana, was in eighth grade, and she knew the family could not live on their share of profits from Ronnybrook (which had not yet started selling milk in glass bottles at the New York City Greenmarkets.) “I spent $10,000 to fix up the barn—there were still horse stalls in one half—and $5,000 on inventory,” she recalls. “I also ran a bed and breakfast in our house to get our cash flowing.”
Soon, Joan partnered with a neighbor from Ancramdale, Katherine Martucci, to buy and sell antiques. “Those were the days when I could drive an hour and find enough things to fill a truck,” she says. (After a few years, Joan bought out Martucci.) “Now, good antiques are so hard to come by.” Joan started going to England and France, bringing back linens, dishes and accessories that would look right in the old Colonials and farmhouses that more and more city people were buying and renovating as weekend houses. “At the heart of what I do is the love of country life,” says the one-time farmer’s wife as her dogs with their dirty paws jump on her lap and lick her face.
In fact, her pets led her into the upholstered furniture business in 1998. “I had a five-year-old sofa, and the arm was fraying because that is where my dog rested his head,” she says. “I went to Pottery Barn and other stores and could not find appropriately sized slipcovered sofas with good style.” She discovered that the North Carolina-based Mitchell Gold Company made affordable slip-covered furniture that she thought was perfect not only for her home but for her customers’ homes, too. “You had to place a minimum order of $25,000,” she recalls. “I nearly choked when I wrote that check.”
It was a turning point for Hammertown, which was now on a path to becoming a comprehensive lifestyle store. With big pieces of furniture to sell, she opened a second shop on Warren Street in Hudson in 1999, but she only had a one-year lease and her landlord would not renew it. “Dick Hermans was opening his second Oblong Books in Rhinebeck and he told me the space next door was available, and that’s how we got to Rhinebeck,” she says. “We opened a month after 9/11.” The next summer, she expanded in the other direction by opening a branch in Great Barrington. “All my stores are in such special communities,” she says.
Joan can be found most days behind the register at the Pine Plains flagship, which keeps her intimately aware of her clients’ needs and desires. “My goal has always been for locals and people just visiting for the weekend to feel comfortable and inspired,” she says. “I am drawn to things that are beautiful, usable, affordable, soulful. You can always find a $10 gift here, and I think we are the easiest place in the world to buy a baby present.” With its chockablock arrangements of ottomans, rugs, pillows, coffee table books, toys, jewelry, candles, glasses, cookware and gadgets, Hammertown is a dry goods store with a modern rural flair. When did she realize that Hammertown had come to represent the Hudson Valley/Berkshires aesthetic? She pauses. “I’m just beginning to feel that now,” she says.
Her son, Gregg, a tech-savvy activist and Stanford graduate who has lived in Brooklyn but is always drawn back to Pine Plains, has come home to work with his mother to keep Hammertown vital and relevant. “I believe we can grow but without having to open more stores,” says Gregg who paid attention to Hammertown’s books even as a teenager. (His sister, Dana, left with their mother, also works at Hammertown.) Joan is clearly comforted and inspired by her children. “Gregg is the one who said we had to build an online community on the Internet,” she says. “He’s the one who said we could only do e-commerce if we created a niche, curated experience because we cannot compete with the big retailers and catalogs.”
Both mother and son seem as concerned with quality of life as with the bottom line. “What I want to do here is not married to gross receipts,” says Gregg, who has recently renovated the downstairs of his childhood home next door to the Barn, knocking down walls to create a large open kitchen where Hammertown can host cooking classes, how-to workshops and salon-style events. “Hammertown is really about local living,” he says. “It’s important to bring in fresh blood. I want young people from the city to come explore living upstate.”
The Osofskys have become big supporters of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and on October 2, they will be hosting their 5th annual benefit and silent auction for the Neighbor-to-Neighbor program for Columbia and northeast Dutchess counties, which provides funds to individuals and families who are in great difficulty and need an emergency financial boost in a particular area of their lives to help stabilize their immediate situation. “Last year we raised $27,000,” says Joan. It will be the second time they’ve pitched a tent in four weeks, because this weekend is Hammertown’s annual Labor Day tent sale.
Hammertown Barn
3201 Route 199, Pine Plains; 518.398 7075
Tent Sale in Pine Plains Only
September 4: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
September 5: 9:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Tent Sale Early Bird Buying on Saturday, September 4 (8 - 9 a.m.) with $40 tax-deductible contribution to the Pine Plains Fire Department
Hammertown Rhinebeck
Montgomery Row; 845.876.1450
Hammertown Great Barrington
325 Stockbridge Road; 413.528.7766
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 09/01/10 at 08:06 AM • Permalink
A Redone Ranch House is Finally Ready for its Close-Up
Two years ago, Jack Thomasson, producer of the TV show “Blog Cabin” on the DIY Network asked Millbrook architect James Crisp to come up with a plan to transform a dreary 1970s ranch house, left, that happened to be in a wonderful location (overlooking the Bethel Arts Center on the very land in Sullivan County where the Woodstock Festival took place in August 1969), into something fresh, gracious and up-to-date. Ever since construction began, it’s progress has been tracked in small segments on the DIY blog, and it also has been filmed and edited into a six-episode television series. The first episode premieres this Thurday, August 19. At the conclusion of the last episode, the deed and keys to the house will be handed over to a lucky winner of a drawing that anyone can join, as long as they don’t work for any of the companies involved in the project. (To enter on or after August 19, visit the DIY Website.) In other words, here is a chance to own a James Crisp-designed house for free. (Too bad it’s not in the Rural Intelligence region.) Rural Intelligence spoke to James Crisp about his involvement in the project.
RI: Why did they ask you, a Millbrook architect well-known for doing stylish, upscale work, to tackle this dreary 1970s ranch?
JC: The producer, Jack Thomasson, travels all over the country scouting. Driving through this region once, he had seen my sign, and stopped. He came inside and picked up a brochure. Then, six months later, he came back and said, “We’re looking at a property across the river.” He took me over to look at it and asked, “Do you think we can make something out of this?” And I said, “Of course.”
RI: What exactly did the producers ask you to do?
JC: They didn’t really give me specific directions; they trusted me to come up with the ideas. They just asked me to take this dark, low, uninteresting house, and give it some life—some big spaces, some curb appeal—make it a place that someone would find really exciting and fun, and to do it on a reasonable budget.
They introduced me to Sullivan County builder Chuck Petersheim, and he and I bounced ideas back and forth. A few were too elaborate for the project, so we settled on this.
RI: On the DIY blog, where the whole design and building process was covered as it was happening, I notice that readers were given a voice in which finishes would be used—which tiles and kitchen cabinets, for example. Was there ever a moment when you said to yourself, uh-oh?
JC: We picked out the windows, controlled the floor plan, the kitchen and bathroom layouts, the roof planes. We were also consulted on roofing materials, windows, garage doors. For finishes, yes, the blog readers got to pick from a range presented to them by the producers. But fairly consistently, the people chose nice things. Like any job, there might be one color I would prefer over another, but none of the finishes were objectionable.
RI: So how do you solve what’s fundamentally wrong with a house like this?
JC: The problem with ranches is they tend to look like doublewides. We needed something to break up that long, low roofline. So we raised the roof of the center portion, which allowed us to gain some ceiling height in the living room. We then raised the ceiling up to the underside of the rafters. We changed the entrance, relocated the fireplace to an interior wall. Originally, it had been on an exterior wall, where it blocked the view.
RI: And what about inside? The show won’t permit us to show interiors, but can you tell us how you might typically upgrade the interior of a house of this sort?
JC: With ranches, you tend to get an overabundance of sheetrock inside. What’s lacking is detail. So on another project unrelated to the show (shown here), we made some very simple changes that made a huge difference in this living 
room: we added some very simple paneling, an applied grid, to the fireplace wall, and put in some built-in shelving. But the biggest difference was even less expensive: we painted the wood ceiling white. We also upgraded the fire surround with slate and changed the lighting. And that’s it: we made no architectural changes at all, yet it looks completely different.
RI: No wonder the Blog Cabin producer chose you. Can you show us some other houses you’ve transformed?
JC: This is a house built into a hill, so the back was very damp. The first thing we did was to dig around the house and waterproof it properly. Then we gutted both floors and changed the traffic flow. Before, you parked on the lower level, then climbed up to enter the house on the upper floor, where the living room and the bedrooms were. Meanwhile, the kitchen was downstairs. We flipped everything around, moving the kitchen upstairs to be 
near the living room. We left the master bedroom up there, but moved all the other bedrooms downstairs, where we added an entryway/mudroom. Parking is still at the lower level; but now when it rains, you don’t have to go so far to get to the front door. We opened up the whole place by installing much bigger windows, and, in the living room, took the ceiling full-height to just beneath the rafters. Without exceeding the original footprint, we made a big difference. By keeping the bedrooms small, we got a big space where it matters most, in the living room.
RI: Do you ever think, maybe we should just tear it down, as they are so quick to do in Los Angeles?
JC: Yankees are too thrifty for that. For example, the owners of this house had some old growth plantings and improvements they had made that they wanted to keep—beautiful stonework in back, a patio and some walls, that, had we bulldozed the house, would have been lost.
The original one-story house was faced with painted brick, which we removed. Then we took the roof off, reinforced the ceiling joists, and added a second story. In a brickyard in the Bronx, I found 200-year-old brick, which we used to reface the exterior. Thanks to those old bricks, plus the period mortar joints, and the limestone lintels we put over the windows, the house looks as if it has been there forever.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/16/10 at 10:29 AM • Permalink
George and Suzy, an Avant Garde Pas de Deux
The on-going ArtBerkshires exploration of the enduring influence of 20th-century modernism on 21st-century architecture, art, and crafts puts a well-deserved spotlight put on the Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio in Lenox. The first modernist building in New England, the house is only part of the story there. The couple who built it, Suzy Frelinghuysen, an accomplished opera singer and painter, and George L.K. Morris, an artist and among the earliest champions of modern painting in the United States, were American aristocrats, every bit as glamorous and fascinating as Gerald and Sara Murphy, yet far less well-known, even here in their own backyard.
They both came from a class that no longer exists, a stratum of society, founded on statemanship, that predated—and peered down upon—the robber barons and New York’s 400. Suzy Frelinghuysen grew up at Oakhurst, her family’s estate in Elberon, New Jersey. George L.K. Morris’s family country seat, Brookhurst (left), is here in Lenox, a location his mother had chosen over Newport expressly because she believed it to be a more wholesome environment in which to raise three boys. Having thus struck a blow for sound child rearing, Helen Schermerhorn Morris departed for Paris, seldom to return. Her sons were sent to boarding school at age 7, and would return home to Broadhurst for holidays with their father, Newbold, or, if they preferred, join their mother in her travels.
As a young man, George, the middle son, joined his mother in Paris to study painting with Fernand Leger in a studio designed by LeCorbusier. It would be a turning point in his life. In his search for an authentic American cultural tradition to inform his work, George had only to recall the Lenox woods that surrounded his childhood home, where evidence of native American life was rife. In some of his paintings, the primitive past merges with the (then) futuristic look of abstraction.
Back in the states, George continued to paint. Through friends, he and Suzy found each other and began to navigate their way through the no-exit maze that was the New York art scene of the 1930s. At the time, the art-buying public snidely referred to abstract painting as, “Ellis Island art.” At the Whitney, where it was essential for an artist to be American, abstraction was viewed as an alien enemy. At the Museum of Modern Art, where abstraction was an artist’s ticket in, no one believed Americans capable of doing it right. George was accustomed to rejection. Early on, his mother had made her feelings about his work clear. “You may not put any of these terrible paintings in my house.” With no pressing need to earn a living, he soldiered on.
Fortunately, George’s father was somewhat more indulgent, permitting his son to built a studio in a remote corner of the Brookhurst estate. The first avant garde building of any kind in New England, its design was inspired by the one by LeCorbusier at which George had studied in Paris. Much later, he and Suzy would add an International Style house to the studio. For the remainder of their lives, Suzy and George spent summers and weekends there.
Today, the Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio is open to the public, and it is where most people are introduced to Suzy and George. We get to see their taste in furnishings, the frescos George painted in the living room, the murals Suzy did in the dining room. We see the couple’s art and their enviable collection, filled with the best in early abstract painting, including many Cubist masterpieces. We learn of Suzy’s gifts as an opera singer, a career cut short by choice because of chronic bronchitis and a reluctance to endure the rigors of “the road.”
What the tour of the house alone fails to make clear is how history now views Suzy and George. For that, one must view a beautiful and riveting documentary, Park Avenue Cubists, that plays on continuous loop in the Classroom at the edge of the woods. (It is long and as every minute of it counts; allow an extra hour for the film alone.) Suzy, a skillful painter who had little interest in showing her art, did early work that is now considered too familiar—it speaks a language fluently, that was, alas, invented by Braque and Gris. Later, after George’s tragic death in a car crash, Suzy’s brushwork loosened up and her paintings became more original, her talent as a colorist more evident. For his part, George L.K. Morris, while not in the first rank of modern painters, is nonetheless considered art historical, as he may have been the first American abstract artist (though certainly not the last) to connect modernism to native American art. Their work hangs in many major museums, including the Metropolitan, the Carnegie, the Philadelphia Museum, the Smithsonian, the Naples Museum of Art and the Whitney.
Perhaps more significant, George’s tireless efforts to further acceptance of abstract art led him to the Partisan Review, which for three decades was the politically and artistically progressive chronicle. In this publication, George finally found a platform where he could champion abstract art and capture the attention of an influential audience. He also kept the chronically impoverished periodical afloat with infusions of cash. It is through Partisan Review that George L.K. Morris cements his place in history as a key figure in American intellectual life.
Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio
92 Hawthorne Street
Lenox; 413.637.0166
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/11/10 at 09:11 AM • Permalink
A House Grows in Gallatin: Susan Orlean and John Gillespie
On Sunday the writer Susan Orlean (“The Orchid Thief” and a biography of Rin-Tin-Tin that is in the works), will be among the featured authors at the weekend-long Berkshire WordFest, at The Mount in Lenox. Orlean and her husband John Gillespie recently gave Rural Intelligence a tour of their amazing property. Photographs by David Winton.
It could have been a cake or a casserole, but as luck would have it, the cover of Sunset Magazine that month “in 2002 or 2003,” as best John Gillespie can recall, featured a house by the Bainbridge Island, Washington architecture firm Cutler Anderson. At the time Gillespie and his wife, the New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, were living in Boston, where he was gradually winding up a career in financial services, while she was completing a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard. A year or two before, they had purchased fifty-five spectacular acres in southern Columbia County and by the time Gillespie spotted the Sunset cover in the Salt Lake City airport, they were actively seeking the right someone to design a weekend house for them.
That someone turned out to be the architect James Cutler, who is famous for designing exciting yet minimally-intrusive houses in spectacular settings, such as the one he did for Bill and Melinda Gates in Medina, WA.
Cutler describes the land in Gallatin as “a collage of rolling hills, forests, pastures.” But what particularly struck the Pennsylvania born-and-bred architect when he finally saw the quintessentially New England site were the old stone walls that not only mark the boundaries of present pastures and planting fields, but also snake through woodlands—a pentimento of former farmland, long since reforested. These inspired the gesture Cutler used to root the house firmly to its place: Stone walls begin at the road and follow the contours of the drive through the woods, gaining height and authority as they approach the house, where a narrow stone-walled passage leads from the car park to the front door. A first-time visitor might wonder, how small is this place? Is it buried in the woods? Stone continues into the small, subdued entry. Only in the adjacent space, a burst of height and light that contains the kitchen-dining-living room, does the stonework and the cool, woodsy feeling it imparts give way to expansiveness, indoors and out. A high, warm, wood ceiling angles even higher to meet a wall of glass overlooking massive sky and an idyllic fifty-mile view.
Built by Prutting & Company of New Canaan with stonework by Mark Mendel of Monterey Masonry in Sheffield (who recessed the mortar so deeply, the results appear to be dry wall), the house is at once magnificent and cozy, with public and private wings separated by a courtyard that serves as an outdoor living room.
It’s the sort of place that would be difficult to tear oneself away from at the end of a weekend. “Every Sunday, I found myself hating to leave; wishing we could spend more time,” says Orlean. Fueling that feeling, in part, were changes in what architects call “the program.” When the house was designed, it was to be a getaway for two adults with offices elsewhere. But, when he sold his company in 2006, John, who while at Harvard had been an editor on the Lampoon, began writing again. After co-authoring with his wife a script for a romantic comedy (as yet unproduced), he went on to write a well-received business book Money for Nothing with his friend David Zweig. But even given all that, Gillespie’s career switch was the least of it. “By the time construction was underway,” says Susan, “I was pregnant.” Before their son Austin turned three, the couple had given up fighting those Sunday afternoon blues and moved to Gallatin full time.
Built-ins beneath the windows—book-and-wine storage and cushioned window seats with backrests—extend the length of the dining-living room. The beech cabinet at left divides the kitchen and dining area.
These days Susan, John, five-year-old Austin, who goes to Indian Mountain School in Lakeville, Austin’s Columbian au pair, a Welsh springer spaniel, two cats (plus a stray who hangs around outside), seven chickens, and a small herd of young black angus cattle share the property. This population explosion has occasioned a building boom, including a couple of additions to the former weekend house—a tv room now bumps out on the non-view side, a carport has been converted into a mudroom, complete with dog shower. There have been developments outdoors, as well. John and Susan now each has an office (John’s, above) in a separate structure away from the house. Near the pond, there’s a “folly,” an outdoor room with a built-in fire pit where they grill or, as they did last winter for Austin’s birthday skating party, have a bonfire. The chickens are housed in a structure of their own, and there’s now talk of a guesthouse. In the meantime, Cutler Anderson is working out the details of a tree house in the woods.
A gargoyle, the head of a dragon, spews rainwater clear of the house.
For more on the Orlean-Gillespie house, see Elaine Louie’s 2006 piece in The New York Times
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/19/10 at 05:03 AM • Permalink
The 63rd Annual Litchfield Open House Day
The collection of antique houses that line Litchfield’s North and South Streets are so impressively well-kept that you cannot help but wonder whether they’re historic homes or merely facades constructed for a movie set. They are very real indeed, and this weekend you have an opportunity to peer inside five of the best. The 63rd annual Litchfield Open House Tour benefits Connecticut Junior Republic, a private non-profit organization dedicated to helping at-risk, special needs and troubled youth become productive members of their communities.
The five architecturally distinguished houses on this year’s tour include the Ardley, a superb example of Colonial Revival style; the Victorian Italianate Holmes Morse House that dates to 1874; and the Lyman Smith House, a high-style Federal, superimposed on an older Georgian center-hall, double-chimney Colonial from 1833. Points of interest on the 2010 Tour include the Oliver Wolcott Library, and Lourdes of Litchfield, a shrine built in 1954 by the Montfort Missionaries as a replica of the famous Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in France. The Litchfield History Museum and the Tapping Reeve House and Law School, recognized as the first law school in America, will also be included in the admission price of the tour.
63rd Annual Open House Tour
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Self-guided Tour
10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. rain or shine.
Advance Tickets: $30
Day of Tour Tickets: $35
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/06/10 at 03:37 PM • Permalink
Matthew White’s La Dolce Vita in Columbia County
You don’t normally hear people talk about Hillsdale, NY, and Venice, Italy, in the same breath, but Matthew White has never been interested in what’s normal. An interior designer whose whose work is classical, eclectic, and widely published ( Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, House Beautiful, Metropolitan Home), White has a passion for historic architecture, which explains his devotion to both Venice and Hillsdale, where he and his life life partner, Thomas Schumacher, built an Italian-style villa (left) as their weekend house a few years ago. “I didn’t really know much about Hillsdale at first,” says White, whose firm, White Webb, works mostly in New York and California. “We had friends in Columbia County, but we really fell in love with a piece of land with fantastic views. When I started to pay attention, I discovered that Hillsdale has amazing historic buildings. My fantasy is to restore every one of them. I am always interested in making things more beautiful.”
White has jumped into civic life the way few weekenders ever do. He is a member of the Hillsdale Hamlet Committee and the Hillsdale Historic Preservation Committee. At one of the first meetings he attended, he saw drawings for a proposed veterans’ memorial on Route 23, and he thought it needed some tweaking. He came up with an alternative design (right) and brought it to the local veterans group, which embraced White and his concept. “They’re the greatest guys in the world,” says White, who was a professional ballet dancer before becoming a designer. “When you mix someone like me with veterans, you know something special is going on.”
Special is White’s speciality. He and Schumacher (president of the Disney Theatrical Group who brought The Lion King et al. to Broadway) live as well as any Italian noblemen, and they are both self-made success stories. White has humble roots, growing up in a trailer park in Amarillo, Texas, which he details in his eloquent coffee table book, Italy of My Dreams (Pointed Leaf Press; $65), which is both an enthusiastic history lesson about classical architecture and Italian style as well as a poignant memoir. “I can still picture the neon and metal sign that announced our home,” he writes about his youth in the introduction to his book. “It was huge and had letters cleverly angled, topsy-turvy style, to suggest the ever-present rolling dried weeds of the panhandle. Tumbleweed Trailer Park.” The book includes chapters on the Italian-style houses he and Schumacher have shared in Pasadena, CA, and New York City, as well as the construction of their fantastical Hillsdale country house (above and below), which was designed in collaboration with green architect Dennis Wedlick, who has an office in Hudson.
“We didn’t dream of a cabin with a stone fireplace or a farmhouse filled with folk art, nor did we want a picturesque barn refitted for modern living,” he writes. “Those are wonderful notions but they aren’t right for us. Our dream was to build a country villa inspired by Rome and Palladio—a place that would recall the ancient houses of Italy but be constructed with an eye for conservation and life today.” While guests gasp at the palazzo’s jaw-dropping splendor (the three guest rooms are named Florence, Rome and Venice), they’re also impressed that it is heated and cooled by a sustainable geo-thermal system and that solar panels on the roof heat the hot water. The furnishings (right) are relatively low key so that the surroundings and views are the real focal points. “Given the various colors of the forest, from verdant greens to reds and golds, I decided to keep the rooms fairly neutral,” he writes. “Any color in the living room itself comes from our tapestries, paintings and antiques.”
Though it will be at least a century before the house can ever be on an Hillsdale Historic House Tour, White and Schumacher will open it up for a patron’s party as they did last year as a thank you to all their neighbors who are organizing and supporting the 2010 Hillsdale Historic House Tour on July 31. “We’re closing down an entire street for the tour!” he says enthusiastically. “I’ve been amazed how many people here share my passion for preserving and beautifying the town. There is a great sense of community.” Even as he becomes more enmeshed in Hillsdale, he is always thinking of Venice, too. “I was elected president of Save Venice USA this year,” he says. “I feel very fortunate to be involved with two very different but unique historic places.”
Matthew White signs Italy of My Dreams
at Tom Swope Gallery
June 19; 5 - 7 p.m.
307 Warren Street, Hudson, NY; 518.828.4399
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/16/10 at 07:42 AM • Permalink
How to Sell a House: Scenes from a Staging
“I don’t like the word ‘staging’,” says James Male, one of two Columbia County agents with Mark Phillips Realty, a boutique agency headquartered across the river in Durham, NY (Greene County). “It implies fakery; I prefer to say ‘editing.’ ”
Call it what you will, Male has made a name for himself as a go-to guy for sellers looking for an agent with a hands-on approach. “A good house will sell itself,” he says, “if you allow its virtues to shine through.”
It’s that process of “allowing” (more like “making” or “helping”) a house look it’s best that Male is known for. A couple of years ago, days after he had thoroughly “edited” a house in Hudson that had been listed for a year with another broker, it sold. “The owner had gotten a lot of advice—fix the cracks, paint everything white, freshen it up,” says Male. “My advice was, don’t paint anything white, or it will make everything else look dirty.” Instead, Male moved out most of the owners’ possessions, moved in a few pieces of his own, just to suggest what the house would look like furnished. Then he restained the ebony floors himself, and put on a coat of wax. “Suddenly all the other distressed surfaces looked wonderful.” Then Male gave one of the Hudson Opera House’s Moveable Feasts there, a sit-down dinner for 24 in the ballroom. “It had been such an incredible evening. The space really came to life,” he recalls. “Afterward, it was hard to put away all the Georgian silver, the stemware, the napkin rings, so, I just washed them and stacked them there on the table. I think they brought out the romanticism of a large space that might have otherwise baffled a buyer.” Apparently so. The house sold within days.
Male’s latest challenge is a house that was built in 1760 by a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Originally sited on Main Street in Claverack, where at some point, the downstairs rooms served as a tavern, the owner, in 1987, moved it out of town to a rise in a field (actually a 90-acre parcel of prime Livingston farmland) with a stunning Catskill view. He then proceeded to thoroughly renovate the place—new foundation, new wiring and plumbing. Later, the owner sold it to a family who, after years of living there and loving it, put it on the market. That was over a year ago. When Male recently assumed the listing, it was with the understanding that he be permitted to make what he viewed as necessary adjustments to the way the house presents. The budget: $250 for materials such as paint and labor for such things as window washing. Male throws in gratis his own contributions, which apart from good taste, include applying said paint (that’s him in the photo above).
Exterior Before
The house is painted “historic colors”—light-gray with darker gray trim.
Exterior After
Male said, “I’d like to warm it up.” Instead of recommending an expensive paint job, Male tweaked the facade, removing a new lourvred door that had obscured the original antique front door, and painting the fabulous Dutch double-door a brilliant persimmon (Benjamin Moore’s “Warm Comfort” in semi-gloss). He then tore out a couple of unmatched plants that had been cringing against the foundation (see photo above) and replaced them with a matching pair of clipped boxwoods, positioned to frame the front steps. “It needed a little something to anchor the house to the ground,” he says.
Living Room Before
The paneling in the living room is new. Installed after the building was moved in 1987, it is an exquisitely rendered, line-for-line reproduction of the original, antique paneling in the bedroom above it. Because the fireplace is centered, the current owners followed convention and also centered their sofa, facing the fire. Alas, the entrance to the room is also on axis with the fireplace, so, instead of the paneling and the wideboard floors—two of the house’s greatest assets— the first thing a visitor standing in the entry hall saw was the back of the sofa sitting on an oriental rug.
Living Room After
Male rolled up the rug. Nicole Vidor, his colleague at Mark Phillips, waxed the floor to give it a soft, low-luster sheen. Male then rearranged the furniture, removing several pieces, so that the paneling and floors stood out. “When people buy a house, they are not buying a rug or a sofa, they are buying a floor and paneling,” Male says.
Dining Room Before
The present owner had covered the dining room windows with sheers.
Dining Room After
With the curtains down, the beautiful, freshly-washed antique 12-over-12 windows and the view of rolling farmland immediately brought the room to life. Male banished all extraneous furniture and accessories, but he set the table, which, along with flowers, gives the room an obvious sense of purpose without distracting from its other virtues. “I’m a proponent of undressed windows, whenever possible,” he says. “My whole approach is, show the house; not the stuff that’s in it.”
Family Room Before
The family room, a modern addition put on after the house had been moved, has a practical propane stove against one wall, that, out of season, looks forlorn.
Family Room After
Using the stove as a table top, Male set a dollhouse, a replica of the house that he found in the cellar, on top. Before putting it in place, he first took a moment to paint the front door persimmon and then stapled fabric to the base so it would conceal the now out-of-season stove. “It is so charming; it’s the house! It reenforces the charm and homeyness of the room.”
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/24/10 at 06:52 PM • Permalink
The Queen of Mid-Century Modest
Photograph by Erica Berger
When Pam Kueber and her husband David Fisher bought their 1951 ranch house in Lenox in 2001, it was not because they were devotees of the mid-century modern style. Their previous house, in Michigan, had been a 1912 Colonial Revival/Arts and Crafts pastiche, and through renovating that, they had learned that, as Pam says, “The way for us to go with any house is to take it back to its original bones.” In pursuit of that end in their new place, she became a mid-century design aficionado—of a sort. Unlike the many who focus only on the elite end of that movement, Pam has also become a specialist in what she calls Mid-Century Modest. She began blogging on the topic in 2007 and, since then, RetroRenovation.com has become a go-to site for owners of both the relatively few architect-designed mid-century modern houses extant and the millions of tract and tract-like houses that were built all across the United States in the decades following World War II. To date, the blog averages nearly 100,000 visitors per month, a number that will double within the next year if growth continues apace.
RI
What do you suppose you’d be doing now if you’d bought a farmhouse when you moved to Lenox, instead of a mid-century ranch?
PK
It is true that I am an accidental modernist. Had we bought another kind of house, I would have become a huge fan of some other era. But there is something very special about these postwar houses. That period was so tremendously transformational. With it came the first true material wealth for most Americans, and many of them are still around to tell us about it. We can buy their ‘time-capsule’ houses yet still live in the modern world, a world they created. My interest isn’t just in the design. It’s the stories behind it all, the social history.
RI
That is evident from your Midcentury Modest Manifesto, which I found both riveting and moving. And apparently I am not alone. Your blog has a huge following.
PK
I attribute that to the fact that this class of mass housing has a lot going for it right now. Development occurs in concentric rings around cities. The first ring always has lots of Colonials Revivals and Arts & Crafts bungalows from the early 20th century. The next ring has post-war tracts. The ring after that, the exurbs, is where the McMansions often took root. The kids who grew up in McMansions look at these tract houses that are for sale today and say, “Great, we get the pink bathroom” which their mothers may have loathed, but which they think is really cool “and we’re closer to work.” They like the efficiency of the layouts, and that a small mid-century modest house can use a lot less energy and be comparatively green. There are also plenty of them, so they are relatively cheap. I estimate that there were just one million mid-century modern houses built in this country, compared with 29 million mid-century modest ones.
©Kit Latham
RI
The plastic flamingo, two of which you have on your front lawn, is usually valued for its irony. Plastic flamingos are cheap; kitchens are not. Your turquoise kitchen with all those recycled metal cabinets and boomerang Formica countertops; is that a camp gesture, as well?
PK
I think a lot about why I am so into this style of decor. I definitely like the whimsy in the colors and iconography. But I don’t think it’s ironic. My grandmothers’ salt shakers and granny square afgans are my most precious possessions. I think I made my choices out of joy and reverence for the period, not to make fun of it. Also, when houses get updated, as this one had over the years, they end up with styles that are in conflict. I am thrifty, so my goal here was longevity. This is a contemporary kitchen, with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a Bosch dishwasher. But I wanted it to look as if it had always been there, so we would never need to update it again.
RI
Which goes straight to the heart of your blog’s philosophy to “Love the House You’re In.”
PK
My husband came up with my blog’s tagline, Love the House You’re In. I like it because it recognizes that we sometimes end up in ‘unexpected’ houses, so it’s probably wise to make peace with that. It also goes along with my belief that it’s wise to work with the original bones of the house, to let it tell you what it wants to be.
Collage by Melissa Kolstad
RI
My understanding is your blog is in the black. When you started, did you anticipate it becoming a business?
PK
No. I tried to approach it with a Buddhist mindset: to have no attachment to the outcome. I also thought that for someone in my line of work, freelance corporate communications, first-hand experience with how to use this new tool would be useful—that blogging would be a good new skill to have.
RI
You’ve been blogging seven days a week since 2008. How do you keep coming up with fresh topics?
PK
Well, my readers contribute a lot, and sometimes there’s breaking news, like a great estate sale. But most days aren’t like that. So every morning when I turn on the computer, I ask myself, how can I surprise and delight them today?
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/05/10 at 02:22 PM • Permalink
A Chatham Architect Designs a Prize-Winning Poolhouse
By day, it appears to be a cluster of nicely maintained farm buildings, just as the Chatham architect James Dixon intended. This is but one of the aspects of this poolhouse project that impressed the jury at the Eastern New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which, on February 22 of this year, granted it a Design Excellence Award—one of just three to be presented in 2010.
Photographs by John Kane
Dixon’s firm designed the adjacent garden sheds in conjunction with the Litchfield county landscape architect Dirk W. Sabin, who oversaw the pool design and developed a master plan for the 200-acre Litchfield County estate. A stone fireplace and pergola provide a windscreen and a shaded sitting area at one end of the pool. During the day, the structure captures daylight from every direction; it is only at night that the plan of Kent, CT lighting designer Matthew Preston kicks in. Outside, his choices are suitably barn-like. Indoors, he specified dim-able overhead halogen fixtures that resemble old-fashioned streetlamps and used concealed beam lights to highlight the upper portion of the frame. According to Dixon, the owners also use lots of candles at night.
Inside, an exposed, custom-designed timber frame, fashioned from reclaimed beams, reinforces the farm vernacular in an otherwise surprisingly streamlined, modern pavilion, open to light, air and views, a design the AIA jury cited for its “lovely clarity of form.” The steel-and-glass doors, some as tall as sixteen feet, were handmade by the Kent, CT fabricator Peter Kirkiles.
The focal point of the kitchen—what Dixon calls “the millwork cube”—is one side of a box containing all of the water and electricity required for the kitchen, bathroom, laundry, and water heater. On the kitchen side, the cube is faced with patinated stainless steel, the same material Dixon specified for the minimalist island counter. “We wanted it to have an industrial feel, not too shiney,” he says. The floor is polished concrete, stained a warm gray. Like all of the surfaces in the structure, it is utilitarian (water-dog-and-kid-proof) yet beautiful.
Instead of protruding in its own separate shed, as is usual, the screened porch shares a roof with the rest of the structure. When the doors between the porch and the interior are open, the entire house becomes, in effect, screened.
In season, the barn doors on each side are usually left open and, during the day, the inner folding glass-and-steel doors are, as well. At night, of course, the latter must be closed to ward off insects. “The magic of these doors is that each panel opens like a casement and has its own screen,” Dixon says. “Even once they are closed for the evening, you can still capture the breezes.” Of Peter Kirkiles, who designed and made the doors, Dixon says, “He’s a genius.”
“I designed the frame and a Canadian company that specializes in this sort of thing made it to measure out of reclaimed timber beams,” Dixon says. It is virtually the only part of the house that was not done by local designers or craftsmen. “They assembled the whole thing up in Canada, took it apart, put it on a truck, then reassembled it on site.”
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/02/10 at 07:40 AM • Permalink
Interiors: A Hands-On Couple’s Graphic Redesign
“The day I met him,” says Raina Kattelson of her husband, Robert Butscher, an architect with Wadia Associates in New Canaan, CT, “he was trying to shore up the porch.” For some women, that might have been an uh-oh, see-you-around-pal moment of truth but fortunately, she did not see things that way at all. Kattelson, a fashion and interiors stylist and location scout who now also writes a blog on design and life in the Hudson Valley, recognized a kindred spirit and saw the potential in his 150-year-old wreck of a house on the main street in Tivoli, NY. “One of our early dates,” she ruefully admits, “was me sanding the floors.” Photographs by John Gruen
The house, which in the 1940s and 50s had belonged to the local butcher, sat next door to another abandoned building that had been his shop. A year after Butscher bought the house, the shop burned down, so he was able to acquire that land, as well. Today, the only evidence of the property’s meaty history is the butcher’s outdoor smoker, which sits at the edge of the patio, serving both as focal point and fireplace.
The house has proved to be a receptive canvas for the couple’s adventures in interior design. Following a family trip to North Africa some years ago, for example, they did up the living room with finds from Morocco. Now, except for the rug they bought in Marrakesh, that incarnation, heavy on earth tones, has vanished. Raina acquires interesting objects as effortlessly as a sweater picks up burs in the woods. Flea markets, junk and antiques shops are both her business and her passion. She grew up in Woodstock among artists. Her father, Sy Kattelson, is a fine art photographer who also founded the movie theater in Woodstock that has just been acquired by Upstate Films. Thanks to the stores of photographs, art, furniture, and ceramics they already owned, when the re-do bug bit them, Raina and Robert had to do little more than sift and tweak.
“I wanted something different, more graphic,” Raina says. She started by painting the combined living-and-dining-room walls a brave shade of green. To find the ideal color, she and Robert bought five or six sample pots, brushing each color onto its own sheet of Masonite, then moving the patches around the room, to see how each looked in various lights. Finally, they settled on Benjamin Moore’s Grape Green (#2027).
“I collect pottery, both old and new,” Raina says. “I use it both for styling gigs and our daily life.” The Emeco chairs at the dining table typically have vinyl seats. Raina replaced them with thick industrial felt pads. The table is from Ikea. “I sanded the top, then whitewashed it. The picture is a scene of New York by my dad.”
A raised platform in the kitchen left over from the original house is now the family’s sunny breakfast nook. “I love the graphic quality of old signs, numbers and letters and have them throughout the house. I also have a weakness for chairs—the green Thonet chairs in the kitchen are the first I ever owned. I bought them when I was 15 and have been painting them different colors ever since. They now look great with the Saarinen table base, which presently which presently has a chalkboard oilcloth top.”
“My office is the only all-white room in the house but is so filled with colorful books, magazines, craft projects and props, it’s sometimes hard to tell. I have lots of collections—vintage knitting needles, old cameras, trays, bottles—all stuff that will end up in my work at some point.” The chair is one of two she found at the Brooklyn Flea Market and reupholstered. “I have always loved the Scandanavian look, so the fabrics on my office chair and lounge pillows are Marimekko. I chose this Ikea desk because it echos the Aalto stools in the living room.” Of the print by Anthony Burrill, Raina says, “Shouldn’t we all?!”
“I love Tord Boontje’s work and own several of his lights. For our daughters’ room (Maeve, 13, and Romi, 9), I did my own version of his style on the floor.”
Romi appears to be a style junky in the making. According to her mother, she requested the Panton chair for her 8th birthday. She also asked that her dresser be painted silver. “She loves to draw on the chalkboard-painted wall ,” says Raina. Colored chalkboard paint available exclusively through Hudson Paint.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/11/10 at 10:32 AM • Permalink
