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Diane Love & Robert Frye’s Modern Mountaintop Farmhouse
Photographs by Åke E:son Lindman
It looks more like a house of self-restraint than self-indulgence, but Diane Love designed her pared down-country retreat in southern Columbia County to be her all-purpose personal haven. Blessed with self-awareness, Love knows that her happiness depends on her ability to be many different people at the same time—painter, photographer, playwright, actress, hostess, wife and grandmother. Brimming with self-confidence, she was determined to design the house herself and to only consult an architect to refine her concept and do the technical drawings.
As the author of a book called Yes/No Design (Rizzoli, 1999), which helps people delve into their psyches to determine their own taste, Love was crystal clear about her own desires. A hyper-active Manhattanite—she’s just written a play called Twin Sweets—she wanted the weekend house to be simultaneously a place of activity and tranquility, and she wanted it to take advantage of the breathtaking mountaintop site that has panoramic views of Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Catskill Mountains.
She knew the plot of land very well, because it’s just up the road from the 18th century farmhouse where she and her husband, Robert Frye (a documentary filmmaker whose latest feature, In My Lifetime, focuses on nuclear proliferation), had been spending weekends for nearly two decades. “I would sit at our Arts and Crafts dining room table and make scale drawings of this dream house,” says Love, who was a pre-HGTV lifestyle guru: In the 1970s and 1980s, she had an eponymous shop on New York’s Madison Avenue, where she sold antiques, jewelry, her own home fragrance and extraordinary silk flower arrangements that were de rigueur for the beau monde. “I worked on the design of this house for several years,” she explains. “I was very aware of how we like to live, what would work for us.”
Naturally, she was extremely concerned with aesthetics—she loves to create still-lifes on tabletops with seasonal flora—and how the house would relate visually to its surroundings. It can be seen from more than a mile away in several directions and from the distance it reads like an old barn. “There’s a dairy farm across the road, which we love,” she says. “We watch the seasons pass and the cycle of the crops. It seemed only right that the house fit into the landscape. That’s why the color of the house was really important. It’s a green-y brown color and there is no season that this house sticks out.”
However, it’s the timeless, bucolic views from inside the house that reflect both Love’s reverence for nature and her perfectionist streak. “It was important that every window would frame a wonderful scene, so each window is in effect like a painting,” she explains. “We used to come up here with stakes and string to determine how to site the house. It was very important how we angled it.” (The final elevations and technical drawings were done by New York architect Larry J. Wente.)
The choice of windows became paramount to Love’s plan—and Wente found a window manufacturer to fulfill her vision. “I wanted metal windows,” says Love, who decided most of them should be very large: 8 x 7 feet. (The clerestory windows upstairs are 2 x 7 feet.) “It’s the windows that have established the sensibility of this house.” Once she located a fabricator of metal windows in Ellenville, NY, she was told that they could not make windows in which every pane was the same size. But Love, who apparently does not understand the word “no,” went back to the dining room table with her ruler and figured it out. “The windows are made in three sections,” she explains. “There are two side panels and one center section.”
The geometry of the windows echoes the design of the house, whose center section contains the staircase, bathrooms and other utilities, which is flanked by two equivalent sections. On one side of the first floor, there’s a combination living room/kitchen with a cathedral ceiling; on the other side, there are two guest rooms that double as Love’s studio. “I’m a strong believer in rooms that are multifunctional,” she says.
The galley kitchen is fully one wall of the living room, and there isn’t an island or bar so it is fully exposed to the room. She painted the cabinets and appliances a sage green that compliments the surrounding landscape in every season, and she mirrored the back wall so she can see her guests even when she’s at the sink. “I didn’t want a kitcheny-looking kitchen. I guess this is a glamorized interpretation but we haven’t sacrificed any function,” she says, opening a door to reveal a large pantry with all her pots and foodstuffs. Instead of opting for modern furniture, Love mixed Art Deco upholstered pieces that she already owned with metal lamps and tables (from shops in Hudson) that work in concert with the metal windows.
The upstairs is basically two rooms: there’s a mezzanine office/TV room that overlooks the living room and has its own spectacular views from a window high on the living room’s southern wall. Down the hall, there’s a large master bedroom with an unusual bathroom configuration: Love and Frye each have their own entrances, sinks and toilet areas, which are linked by a large shared shower. The master bedroom has two long window seats that look like cozy places to daydream or read a book, but they were actually designed to be extra beds. “We have five grandchildren, and I worked it out so that there would be a place for all of them and their parents if they all came to visit at once,” she says. Without compromising any detail, she’s created a house that reflects and nurtures her idiosyncrasies, where her family and friends are meant to feel at home, too.
Every object in the house has a strong aesthetic presence.
Love is a master of the tabletop still-life.
Love’s most recent paintings are watercolors.
Love and Frye on the front porch with its views of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The house complements the rural landscape.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/24/12 at 10:07 AM • Permalink
Hillsdale Tour of 19th-Century Rural Houses
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This Saturday, the Hillsdale Preservation Committee will sponsor a pedestrian-friendly tour of historic houses.
Some of the houses on the tour originally had been home to farmers, others to farmworkers. But, though all have grown and changed over the years, their 19th-century character has been retained and all, miraculously, still overlook broad green fields.
The largest house on the tour, from the early 19th-century Federal period, was built by the Van Deusen family and remained in Van Deusen hands for several generations. The building, which started as just a kitchen was added to gracefully over the centuries.
The next house up the road is a colonial style farmhouse that was, in the Van Deusens day, their “tenant house” for a hired hand on their farm. Although it has been expanded, it retains the characteristic steep staircase and it oldest rooms still have their original floors.
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This elegant Italianate Victorian with floor-to-ceiling windows and a graceful center stairway probably started out as a one-room house. Expanded at least three times, it now has an inviting porch with a balustrade above, added in about 1860.
Two of the properties also have small barns, both of which were restored by Michael Carr, a local timber-frame carpenter who will be on hand to answer questions
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Greek columns frame the front door of a country federal with small rooms, original floor and interesting woodwork and architectural detailing throughout. Modern improvements include a big screened porch off a large country kitchen.
The tour culminates with the 1860 eyebrow colonial, once home to a wagon maker. Several additions have masked some of the original architecture on the outside, but the upside is a sunny interior that still reveals its old bones. Speaking of which, visitors may also explore an historic cemetery, where some of the original owners of these houses are buried.
On Sunday evening, the owners of the houses on tour will be honored guests at a patron’s cocktail party to be held at a house that is among both the oldest and the newest in Hillsdale. Its core, a Dutch timber frame built in 1780, was extended in 1801, then again just recently. Now the broken-back saltbox has an open plan, original wainscoting that has been re-purposed, and old posts and beams, well marked by the original builder with how-to diagrams, that have been left exposed..
The Hillsdale Historic House Tour
Saturday, August 13, 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.
Tickets/$35, includes box lunch.
For advance tickets visit Tour website; day of tour, at Passiflora and B&G Wine, both in Hilllsdale on Route 23 just west of Route 22.
Patron’s Party
Sunday, August 14; 5 - 7 p.m.
Tickets/$100
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/06/11 at 11:29 AM • Permalink
Florence de Dampierre’s New Book on Walls that Talk
If they were less witty and exuberant, it might be tempting to describe the books written by Florence de Dampierre (her 5th, Walls: The Best of Decorative Treatments, has just been published by Rizzoli) as reference works. Thorough and intelligent, rich in history and anecdote, they are rarities—“coffee table books” that are as valuable for their text as for their stunning photographs. Which may explain why, in a world where such books are wont to come and go in a season or two, de Dampierre’s are perennial bestsellers. Her first, The Best of Painted Furniture, published in 1987 and still in print, is a must-have for anyone who aspires to be well-versed about interior design.
Born and raised in Paris, Florence de Dampierre attended a now-defunct, famously rigorous all-girls lycee on the Rue des Invalides. “We were taught by nuns,” she says “Nearly all of us did the baccalauréat,” the secondary school curriculum that screens students bound for university. De Dampierre went on to study medicine, before abandoning academia to decamp first for London then New York.
Nothing about her flamboyant life thereafter would suggest such an earnest start. In the mid-80s, Florence de Dampierre Antiques in New York, specialized in 18th- and 19th-century painted furniture and was famous for the conviviality of its proprietor and for its Pompeian red walls. When I interviewed de Dampierre around that time for New York Magazine at her stylish upper east side apartment, she epitomized young French chic—pretty, vivacious and au courant in her size 2 Chanel. Shortly thereafter, Eleanor Lambert named her to The Best Dressed List.
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So how did this French glamazon end up in Litchfield? De Dampierre, normally chatty, disposes of the topic with a quick, “My husband [investor Sean Mathis] had some property near here,” as if no further explanation were required for such an obviously propitious move. The mother of three, her two youngest grew up in this seat of apple-pie Americana. Son, Cameron, 21, now at the University of Pennsylvania, played soccer at Taft, then did a post-grad at Hotchkiss (not coincidentally, his mother strongly implies, the very year they won the soccer championship). Her daughter, Valentina, 13, attends the public school. De Dampierre, a self-taught interior designer, has clients in Connecticut, New York, and around the world. Somewhere in all of this, between her business, attending distant soccer matches armed with snacks, and whipping up a mousse au chocolat for a Saturday-night dinner party, she manages to write worthwhile books.
“I write at night, in English,” she says. “I like doing books that have meat.” In Walls, her concern is not with the ordinary walls most of us live with—“a solid-colored backdrop blending in with furnishings and paintings,” rather with decorated walls—murals, wood paneling, stenciling, and wallpaper—that make a substantial contribution to ambiance. The book starts with antiquity and gradually brings us into the present, with countless amusing stops along the way. Drawing on a 1437 treatise on egg tempera, she paraphrases the Italian author’s earnest advice: “Country eggs are redder and better suited to making the color blue. Towns eggs are whiter….He suggested painting young faces with town eggs, while country eggs were preferable for painting old men.” She tells how the poet and artistic visionary Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) fell short when it came to practical concerns: His pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood failed to properly prepare the walls of the Oxford Union Society’s Debating Hall before painting them with murals depicting Arthurian legends: “Sadly,...the brilliantly colored works dissolved almost immediately.”
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The principal photography in Walls is credited to top interiors specialists Pieter Estersohn and Tim Street-Porter, both of whom have extensive archives. De Dampierre drew up lists of the rooms she needed. “I kind of know the subject,” she says. For images that could be gotten no other way, such as this close-up of the remarkable stenciling at Olana, she and Street-Porter hit the road. “Tim took many of the pictures expressly for this book.”
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A dressing room with Etruscan-inspired painted walls, above left, designed by Robert Adam (1728 – 1792) shares a spread with a contemporary Parisian study, above right, with walls adorned with a charming adaptation of Adam’s design. This contemporary room, alone, would be enough to satisfy the most skeptical reader that we do, indeed, need a thorough knowledge of these old-fashioned, often antique, labor-intensive, decorative effects. “They’re very good on sheetrock walls in new construction,” De Dampierre points out. “They give age and instant nobility to a room. You don’t need much art—just wallpaper or stenciling and curtains, and a room is immediately cozy.”
This Saturday, Florence de Dampierre, along with many other local authors, will be at Trade Secrets in Sharon between 10 and 11 a.m. to answer questions and sign copies of her book at a special table sponsored by Johnnycakes Books .
Trade Secrets
Saturday, May 14
Limerock Farm, Sharon (Route 44 on the Salisbury/Sharon line)
10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Admission/$35
Book signings from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/09/11 at 12:55 PM • Permalink
Annie Kelly’s “Litchfield Style”
Anyone who has ever driven through Litchfield County and been mesmerized by its magnificent 18th- and 19th-century houses (which is to say, anyone who can see), can now satisfy the longing to snoop around inside some of the best of them. Litchfield Style, by the decorator Annie Kelly with photographs by her husband, Tim Street-Porter, who live part-time in Bantam, is a memoir of houses the couple has visited and loved. Some of the interiors Kelly features will satisfy the voyeur because they are everything those drive-bys promise. Others will fascinate and surprise because they are not at all what anyone other than their owners could have possibly imagined.
The first few houses featured are owned by people who are intent on keeping things authentic, such as George Schoellkopf, whose Hollister House (right) is but one of the properties featured whose gardens will be familiar to denizens of the Garden Conservancy Open Days tours. These homeowners take their interior cues from the exterior of the house. Reverential toward Litchfield’s aesthetic legacy, they have put considerable resources and resourcefulness into choosing furnishings and finishes that are as historically authentic as 21st-century practicality will permit.
A new entry (left) seamlessly blends the original Hollister House with an 18th-century-barn addition, containing a new kitchen and living room, that Schoellkopf and his partner, the French artist Gerald Incandel, had moved to their property.
But as the book progresses, so does the sense of adventure. “I wanted to show what Litchfield County was in the past but also what it is today,” Kelly says, whose own Bantam living room is featured on the book’s cover. And one thing Litchfield is today is a magnet for aesthetes of irrepressible originality.
Robert Couturier, a French interior decorator, and his partner Jeffrey Morgan, an architectural historian, sketched a series of neo-classical garden pavillions one Sunday afternoon, then had them built. The results (above and left), while contemporary with Litchfield’s 270-year-old architecture, owe more to English and French traditions than American.
Annie Kelly, an Australian, and Tim Street-Porter, who is British, met and married in Australia while Kelly was an art student and Street-Porter was there on a working vacation. “When people from different countries meet and marry, the question arises, which one shall we live in?,” Kelly says. “Rather than his or mine, Tim and I chose the States.” They settled in Los Angeles, where Kelly began to establish herself as an interior decorator even as Street-Porter, who had studied architecture, cemented his position at the top of the interior- and architectural-photography field.
The couple still live part-time L.A., in what is arguably the most beautiful historic house in town (left). But since much of their work is on the east coast, they had long felt the need for a base near New York City. “We both grew up in the country,” Kelly says. More drawn to the country than the city itself (“I grew up on 3,000 acres,” she explains), they began their inquiry into Connecticut in Greenwich and Westport, where their work often takes them. Since the towns on the sound felt more like L.A. than the country, they started driving north and west until they reached Litchfield County, where they—and their hearts—stopped.
Annie Kelly will sign copies of Litchfield Style and answer readers’ questions at Hickory Stick Bookshop, Washington Depot, CT, on Saturday, April 23, at 2 p.m. She will be joined there by fellow Litchfield designer-authors, Matthew Patrick Smyth and Florence de Dampierre.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/19/11 at 08:40 AM • Permalink
At Home with Interior Designer Matthew Patrick Smyth
Like the rooms he designs for his city and country clients, Matthew Patrick Smyth is easy-going, tailored and unpretentious. The interior designer, who divides his time between homes in Manhattan, Paris, and Sharon, CT, has built an enviable career by combining his good taste and sense of appropriateness with a genuine concern for his clients’ needs and happiness. In his new book, Living Traditions: Interiors by Matthew Patrick Smyth (Monacelli Press; $50), he details his decorating rules in carefully chosen words and lush photographs by John Gruen (who lives in Lakeville, CT.) “I’ve never doubted that rules exist for a reason,” he writes. “In design, they are essential and must be taught. Right and wrong do exist in matters of planning, scale, proportion, the proper height relationship of chairs to tables.”
One of his favorite rules is One Mirror Per Room. “What I love about it is that it directs my thinking: it tells me to stop and weigh all the options from every angle before making a decision,” he says. “Of course you can have more than just one mirror in a room. Practically speaking, though, it’s imperative to consider what the first mirror will do before even contemplating adding a second. Then it’s critical to analyze what effect that second—or third, fourth or fifth—will have. Will it reflect something it shouldn’t? Will it create visual chaos? Will it add more light?”
Smyth became a household name in northwestern Connecticut when he oversaw the renovation and redecoration of The White Hart (“Salisbury’s White Hart Inn Gets a Makeover”, RI April 14, 2010). When it abruptly closed last fall amidst much finger-pointing (“Say It Ain’t So!” RI, November 2, 2010), nobody blamed him for the inn’s downfall. Indeed, the owners, Roxanne and Scott Bok, found no fault with his work. “I’m working on a project with them right now,” says Smyth, and the farmhouse he renovated for them (“A Cinderella House Makes Its Debut for Charity” RI, September 4, 2008) is featured in his book.
Smyth has had a house (see below) in Sharon for eight years. “I used to spend weekends on the other side of the Hudson, but then I came to Connecticut to work with Carol and Richard Kalikow and fell in love with the area,” he says. “I love living here and have made so many friends here because of parties at Dan Dwyer’s,” he says, referring to the sociable owner of Salisbury’s Johnnycake Books, who will be hosting a book signing for Smyth on April 30 from 5 - 7 p.m.
What makes Smyth’s book especially enchanting is his honesty, explaining how a tuxedo model at an upstate New York mall became a globetrotting decorator with clients in places like the Hamptons and Palm Beach. Although he originally envisioned the Sharon house as a retreat, he keeps getting jobs that keep him busy on weekends. He says it is so much less frustrating to work on a house than an apartment. “It’s especially easier for the tradesmen,” he notes. “They can work past five o’clock if they want . They don’t have to wait for service elevators. They don’t have to worry about parking tickets!”
He explains that creating a coffee table book about your work has become a right of passage for top tier decorators. “It used to be the Kips Bay Show House,” says Smyth, who will be participating in the prestigous show house that raises funds for after-school programs for underprivileged children in New York City. “But now all the clients expect to see a book. It’s important to be on the shelf with your peers.” With Living Traditions, he’s now officially part of the interior design canon.
A room off the kitchen in Smyth’s Sharon house boasts original beams and a fireplace with a new stone surround.
Many of the pieces in Smyth’s living room are leftovers from Kips Bay Show Houses.
Smyth turned his upstairs landing into a light-filled reading room.
Living Traditions: Interiors by Matthew Patrick Smyth
Book signing April 30, 5 - 7 p.m.
Johnnycake Books
12 Academy Street
Salisbury, CT; 860.435.6677
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/13/11 at 10:06 PM • Permalink
Splendid Peasant Antiques: A Modern Approach to Folk Art
Martin Jacobs stares into the fireplace at the house he designed in Sheffield, MA.
Kitty and Martin Jacobs understand if you’re just as interested in their stunning contemporary house as their museum quality collection of antique folk art. After all, they built this house on a dirt road in Sheffield two years ago not only as their home but as a destination for aesthetes like themselves. “We wanted to live with all these things we love,” says Martin, a one-time psychoanalyst who is jolly and cerebral—a haimisha Santa Claus of a man. “Yes, almost everything is for sale, but we get such pleasure in enjoying these objects every day,” he says while tossing another log on the fire. Their hallways and staircase were designed as galleries with niches and natural light so you feel like you have arrived at a small but serious museum.
For two decades, the Jacobs’ Splendid Peasant antiques store operated out of an 18th-century blacksmith’s shop in the heart of Egremont, which was a popular destination for serious collectors as well hosts whose weekend guests wanted to go antiquing. “You always need outings for house guests, and we were a good place to stop,” says Martin. Having lived for many years in Oyster Bar, Long Island, Martin always yearned to be near the sea, and a few years ago they moved to a condominium in a converted factory in Bristol, RI, and opened a shop downstairs. “We didn’t like it. The people and the place were too glitzy,” he says. “We realized how special the Berkshires are and decided to come back.” In Rhode Island, they discovered that they liked living in a loft-like environment and wanted to live that way but in a rural setting. Thus, the interior of their new house looks almost exactly like the photographs of the Bristol condo that was featured in Rhode Island magazine in 2006. They have the same matching desks and steel dining room table by John Haas of Amenia, NY, and the same cherry sofas by Boyd Hutchinson of Sheffield, MA, which flank the fireplace. They even have the same custom interior window dividing their kitchen from the dining room.
The couple’s passion for folk art parallels their own late-in-life relationship. “I had an MBA from Columbia, but I was pretty much adrift until I met Martin,” says Kitty. “We’ve done this together.” For a couple who are experts in their field and display their collection with curatorial rigor (“Martin is a lighting master,” Kitty says adoringly), they do not take themselves too seriously. How could they when what appears to be an important abstract sculpture hanging over the fireplace turns out to be a rusty bedspring? “Martin calls it the poor man’s Calder,” says Kitty. “You would be surprised by how expensive it was.”
Part of the mystique of folk art is that it was not created to be collectible. The game boards, decoys and fairground art they sell were once utilitarian objects. “We have a definite point of view. We like bold, graphic pieces, and we like objects with texture,” says Kitty. “We’re not generalists. We don’t sell painted furniture. Quilts and hand-hooked rugs don’t do much for us. Our specialty is weathervanes.”
Like all antiques dealers, they now do much of their business online. “We have a reputation so collectors can trust us based on photos,” says Kitty. But then you’d miss the delight of experiencing their serene house, seeing the Indian clubs displayed in a niche, or the hand of a particularly well-painted checkerboard. “We love things with ravaged surfaces.” Martin mentions that when he first got into the antiques business, he made the mistake of buying fine English furniture. “One of the best things about folk art,” he says cheekily, “is that it never has to be polished!”
Splendid Peasant
992 Foley Road, Sheffield, MA; 413.229.8800
Open most weekends, but call first to make sure.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 03/30/11 at 01:40 PM • Permalink
Real Estate: Summer Rentals, a Ripple Runs Through It
The good news for buyers: there’s a lot of property to choose from and prices are down 20 - 30% from their 2007 peak. The good news for sellers: there are plenty of eager prospective buyers out there. The troubling news for both: though prices are soft, they could get even softer—some industry observers predict an additional 10 - 15% erosion. For would-be buyers and would-be sellers for whom the present news is not nearly good enough, the alternative, of course, is to rent.
Renting is like dating. “You get to dip your toe in the water,” says Andrew Gates of Sotheby’s International Real Estate’s Litchfield Hills office, “to find out if you prefer Litchfield to, say, Water Mill.” Renters enjoy many of the pleasures of ownership while suffering few of its pains. So what if someone else got to pick out the bathroom tile? That same someone also got to take sponge baths for six months, while waiting for the installer to appear. Water in the basement? Who cares?! It’s a rental!!! Pop quiz: Who spends more time in the hammock? Owners or renters?
Waterfall House
To get to the house on this 26-acre property, you must first cross rushing Stony Kill on a rustic stone-and-wood bridge, then pass by this cascading waterfall. Soon you will come upon a 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath, stylishly furnished farmhouse (below) with exposed, whitewashed beams, wide-board floors, plaster walls, and two fireplaces.
What to look for in a summer rental? Of course, everyone wants it all, but if forced to choose between architectural distinction/charming decor and recreation, renters are wise to choose recreation. It’s not as if they’ll be held accountable for any lapses in mien; after all, it’s just a rental.
Besides, if the weather is good, you won’t be spending that much time inside. If it isn’t, nice furniture will offer scant consolation. It’s also wise to make sure that a garden-and-lawn care person is in place and to be clear on whether this expense is part of the deal. It would be impossible to exaggerate how difficult it can be to find something so simple. By the time you’ve asked around and around and around, the lawn could be up to your knees.
Waterfall House, available July - September, $9000/month, one-month minimum through .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
On Hatch Pond
This 1,300-square-foot three-bedroom cottage, with two new full bathrooms, is located on 18 acres overlooking Hatch Pond in South Kent. There are five other buildings in the compound. Hatch Pond is a haven for fishing, kayaking, canoeing, and bird watching. Boathouse privileges are extended to the renter.
The property is the one-time headquarters of the Southern New England Ice Company, who, in the early part of the last century, were purveyors of harvested pond ice that they shipped around the world.
Today, this interesting pond-side property has an “ultra-cool” owner, according to realtor .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), who has finished rehabbing the house, and is currently re-doing a former bunkhouse. There’s also a rustic boathouse right on the pond. The Hatch Pond property is available July through August, $1,100/week.
Lakeville Arts-and-Crafts
On the banks of Lake Wononskopomuc in Lakevillle, nestled amongst ancient maples, this property has 50 feet of lakefront all to itself.
The 1930s arts-and-crafts-style bungalow with four bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths is presently for sale; though it is also available to rent August 1 - Labor Day for $6,000 through .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Gates says, “It’s a buyer’s market so there are very fewer rentals available this year, which makes this lakefront property a real find.”
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/15/11 at 06:52 PM • Permalink
How We Live: A Cool Cottage Heats Up the Chatham Countryside
“I left New York City kicking and screaming,” says the photographer Laura Resen (left). “Now there’s no way I would go back. I don’t want what it is; I miss what it was.”
The story of how a sophisticated, Manhattan born-and-bred artist, interiors and still-life photographer ended up living in the Chatham countryside begins, as so many stories of drastically altered lives do, with falling in love.
Originally from Montana, Cloud Devine, an art-and-fashion photographer, came to Manhattan when he was young enough for the city to help shape his identity. Still, he longed for some wide-open spaces, so after he met Laura, they bought a weekend place together, a small tenant farmer’s house outside of North Chatham on the edge of a beautiful field (top photo) that the Old Chatham Hunt rides across throughout their season. “It was perfect for two people,” Resen says.
Then eight years ago, along came a daughter, Tess. For a while, all continued as before, going back-and-forth on weekends. Then time came for Tess to go to school. Faced with two (to Laura and Cloud) untenable options—New York City private and public schools—they opted for Chatham, instead.
And Chatham is all the better for it. Far from yielding to the old ye-olde when they moved to the country, the couple brought their urbane sensibility and loft furnishings with them, making a serious contribution to the phenomenon that has earned this region the sobriquet “Brooklyn North.”
Books piled on their sides in stacks between the windows of the 1 1/2 story living room reinforce the horizontal lines of the modernist furnishings, which include chairs by Alvar Aalto and Gio Ponti. The large end wall is thus free for hanging art, much of it is by Cloud and Laura, both of whom sell their artwork through Aero Studios in Soho.
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An artist’s eye comes in handy when three people live in 1000 square feet. The coats and hats surrounding Cloud Devine, right, seated on a boot bench just inside the front door, may appear to be decorative, but they are there out of necessity. The two-level cupboard at the end of the dining table (below) has presence but looms far less than a uniformly tall piece would have.
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In 2005, Tess started school at Hawthorne Valley, a highly-regarded Rudolf Steiner School in nearby Harlemville. “It would have been a perfect school for me,” says Laura. “But Tess is more traditionally academic.” She recently switched to the Chatham public school, where she appears to be thriving.
Tess and her mother have been collaborating on a project, Fairy Garden, a series of photographs of Tess’s found treasures. “Beaver Skull”, 2010, (a.k.a. “Toothy”), right, hangs in the living room. “I love that she’s growing up in nature,” says Laura. “I’m not sure I’d have been so enthusiastic about her city finds.”
In a bold decorating move, the couple counteracted the oppressive low-ceiling in their bedroom by papering it with a gold print whose iridescence is amplified by the white-painted floor.
The all-white porch says summer with a minimum of visual clutter.
Some of the photographs in this story, all taken by Laura Resen, appeared previously in Domino and in Livingetc, an English magazine.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 01/07/11 at 04:34 PM • Permalink
Urban Intelligence: Road Testing Hudson
From the city, to the country, then back to the city again; this seems to be a growing trend hereabouts. People leave New York for greener pastures, then come to realize that they miss some of the simple pleasures of urban life—taking a morning stroll to get the paper and a cup of coffee or sharing a bottle of wine over dinner in a restaurant without risking a DWI arrest on the way home. So they decide to give city living another try. Only this time, Hudson is the city of choice.
For those who find themselves on the town-vs.-country fence, the present stagnation in the real estate market may be a boon. “The trend seems to be, if your house won’t sell, rent it,” says James T. Male of Mark Phillips Realty. Which means that a waffling Hudson wannabe can put a toe in the water before taking the plunge.
Peggy Anderson had her house on Union Street (above) on the market for months without a bite; now she’s marketing it as a furnished, short-term rental. She calls the enterprise Beaux Esprit, and it is so new that the ink on her website still is not quite dry. (It all goes as planned, it will be up and running by Friday, December 17.) Meanwhile, her terms are these: she will let the house for as few as two nights at $380 per or for up to 2 months for a negotiable price. A search of the website VRBO.com (Vacation Rentals By Owners) yielded several similar deals.
Belinda Breese, ambivalent about selling and wary of testing the real estate sales marketplace right now, instead has made her stylishly appointed Warren Street house (left) available to rent through Peggy Lampman Real Estate for $2100 per month. “I’ll consider any offer from one month to six months,” she says. Her place is stunning, as our story on it nearly three years ago amply attests.
“New York City wears you out,” says Sally Helgesen, a writer and Manhattan emigre, who has lived in the Chatham countryside with her husband, the artist Bart Gulley, for over a decade. “I go into the city 2 or 3 times a month, and I love it, but it’s exhausting. I’m forever climbing subway stairs with too many packages.”
Though she admits that her husband is unlikely to trade in his beloved chainsaw for a handy cappuccino any time too soon, Helgesen finds herself drawn to Hudson. “When I went on the Historic Hudson house tour this year, what struck me was the wonderful combination those houses have,” she says. “The best of them are very sophisticated and urbane, yet they have these cozy, casual-living gardens in back.” She finds that the street life there strikes just the right balance between small town and large. “When you walk, you always run into people you know, but you can only stop for a moment because you are both headed somewhere else. Then, in the evening, you can go out to dinner or to a festive club.”
A house on the recent Historic Hudson tour may be rented through Gary DiMauro Real Estate for $3100 per month.
Fayal Greene seems to have been inching toward Hudson for decades. She and her late husband bought “a little old farmhouse” in the county in 1967. Years later, after she was widowed, she moved into an exquisitely detailed center-hall Colonial on an acre of land in the hamlet of Claverack, where she lived and gardened for a dozen years “Just one small person in that enormous house,” she says. “I spent all those years making that wonderful garden, but it got to the point that I couldn’t maintain it any longer, so we put the house on the market.” By then remarried, she and her husband Dave Sharp had their sights set on Hudson.
“We had so many friends there, we were in almost every night, driving back and forth in all kinds of weather. That seemed kind of silly,” she says.
The vaulted ceiling of Beaux Esprit’s attic master suite—bedroom, bathroom, sitting room—is covered in 200-year-old beadboard.
Their Claverack house had been on the market for many months when Greene “decided to open the garden one last time for a Conservancy tour. It took 4 people 6 weeks to get it into what I considered okay shape. For the tour, we had a perfect June day and that was the day the people who ended up buying it first saw it.” Unlike that garden, Green’s garden on Union Street in Hudson is a manageable 25 x 40 feet. “I thought I was going into my minimalist period but then I realized I don’t have a minimalist period. I stuffed all kinds of crazy stuff in there. But it’s just one bed instead of an acre. I love it.”
The artist and designer Frank Faulkner, famous in these parts for buying, fixing up, and selling property, has tried both city and country living. “I bought a weekend house in Hudson in 1982,” he says. “Then, after I sold it, I was persuaded by a real estate broker that, if you live in Manhattan during the week you must live in the countryside on the weekend. So I bought out in the country. Then, after a succession of country places, I finally realized that, unless you have a houseful of children or are madly in love with your significant other, living in town is preferable. So I moved back into Hudson, and I absolutely love it.”
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 12/15/10 at 12:36 PM • Permalink
The Dominick Dunne Estate Auction at Stair Galleries
Dominick Dunne the author of best-selling novels such as People Like Us and The Two Mrs. Grenvilles who became a household name as a television commentator during the O.J. Simpson trial— always liked being around famous people. He liked being famous himself, so he’d no doubt be pleased with the star treatment his estate is getting at Stair Galleries on Warren Street Hudson. It’s the kind of celebrity auction that used to be commonplace in Manhattan more than a decade ago before Sotheby’s and Christie’s got so grand—the type of sale that Dunne might have written about in Vanity Fair, where he was a longtime contributing editor and wrote about everyone from Claus von Bülow to Jackie Collins.
“Stair Galleries is terribly clever to have assumed the mantle of the now extinct Sotheby’s Arcade sales,”
says Pete Hathaway, a longtime Sotheby’s executive who now runs Enterprise New Life in Salisbury, CT, a post-rehab extended-care facility for men who are recovering from alcoholism or drug addiction. “I can tell that Stair killed themselves recreating room settings [photo right], which, take it from me, isn’t easy when you’re dealing with someone’s zin-zin.” Dunne and Hathaway traveled in the same rarefied social circles and bonded over their having conquered their addictions. “As with any dead friend’s estate sale, I had a mix of emotions—sadness, amusement, shock and fond memories. and, naturally, I will be getting my check book out.”
The Dunne display at Stair is like a diorama that captures a bygone Manhattan era when it was common for tweedy writers (think George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Truman Capote as well as Dunne) to live in Upper East Side townhouses or midtown doorman buildings. Dunne (who knew all about WASP style from his days at Williams College) lived in a cozy penthouse apartment decorated with chintz-covered furniture, stacks of books and assorted bibelots, which is where I interviewed him when I wrote a profile called “On the Inside, Looking Out” for The New York Times in 1993. He also had a gentlemanly country house in Hadlyme, CT, where he kept his 1994 Jaguar convertible (estimate: $4,000 - $8,000) that is one of the highlights of the sale, according to last week’s story in The New York Times.The great thing about buying a piece of Dunne’s past—whether it’s a George III-style carved mahogany wood tripod table or a Victorian-style upholstered club chair and ottoman—is that whatever you purchase comes, appropriately, with a celebrity backstory.
Dominick Dunne Estate Sale at Stair Galleries
549 Warren Street, Hudson;
November 20 at 11 a.m.
Preview
Monday – Thursday, November 15 – 18,10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Friday, November 19, 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 20, 9 a.m. – 11a.m.
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