Wendy Wisbrun’s Addition to an Early 19th-Century Copake Connects Home to Landscape

For years, the view was there but effectively inaccessible: a rocky stream slipping through the woods behind Carin Berger and Max Merman’s Copake home, surrounded by mature maples, shade gardens, and moss-covered ground. The couple’s 1850 Greek Revival occupied an enchanting site beside conserved land, but the house turned little of its attention toward the forest. At the back, a deteriorating 1940s kitchen addition stood between the interior and the landscape.

“It was like a dilapidated shack attached to their house,” architect Wendy Wisbrun says. In winter, Berger and Moerman had to put on jackets before entering the kitchen. Built partly over a slope and in increasingly precarious condition, it was one of those improvised additions common to old Hudson Valley houses: useful when constructed, then tolerated long after its practical life had ended.

Berger, an award-winning designer, illustrator, and children’s book author, needed a studio. The couple also wanted a functional kitchen, a new bathroom, and an entry that could absorb the mud and debris of country life. Looking farther ahead, they hoped the addition might eventually allow them to live primarily on the ground floor. They hired Wisbrun to replace the failing kitchen with a compact suite that could answer those needs while opening the house to a part of the property they had barely been able to experience.

Based in Claverack, Wisbrun founded her practice in 2018 after working in New York City and Toronto. Her portfolio is divided roughly equally between new construction and renovation, with an emphasis on modestly scaled residential work and environmentally responsible design. Renovation appeals to her partly because extending the life of an existing building is itself a form of conservation.

In Copake, most of the Greek Revival was in good condition and required little intervention. Berger had refinished floors, cleaned up the rooms, and furnished them with vintage pieces and objects collected over time. The house was intimate and carefully composed, reflecting an illustrator’s eye for texture, proportion, and juxtaposition. “She has a really nice aesthetic,” Wisbrun says. “I tend to be kind of super minimalist, and having her beautiful collection of things layered onto it gives it so much more life.”

 Determined by the Landscape

The challenge was to design an addition that felt connected to that intimate historic interior without imitating it. Wisbrun kept the new construction under 1,000 square feet, controlling costs while protecting the modest scale of the original house. From the garden-facing approach, the Greek Revival remains the dominant form, with its symmetrical facade, broad porch, black shutters, and simple gable. The new work slips behind it, extending horizontally along the wooded slope.

From the stream, the relationship changes. The low addition presents a long, windowed elevation beneath a shallow roofline, appearing to hover at the edge of the woods. Its position was determined by the landscape. Berger wanted views of the stream and forest, and Wisbrun oriented the studio and kitchen toward them. The plan also relocated the parking area and established a new everyday entrance through a mudroom, eliminating the need to carry boots and outdoor gear directly into the living room.

The result reorganized the couple’s movement through both the house and the property. A new foyer, bathroom, kitchen, and studio unfold along the rear, with the historic rooms remaining largely intact. Crossing from the original house into the addition brings a subtle change in atmosphere. The materials and white-painted surfaces maintain continuity, but the ceilings lift, the rooms widen, and the windows expand.

“You have this super-cozy feeling in the old house because the spaces are so small,” Wisbrun says. “Then you cross the threshold and get a little more air and space around you.”

The kitchen occupies the social center of the addition. A bank of dark, flat-fronted cabinetry and honed black granite counters runs beneath windows looking into the garden. White-painted beams span the ceiling, while glazed doors open the room directly to a gravel terrace. The palette is restrained enough to accommodate Berger’s black table, vintage chairs, artwork, and collected objects without competing with them.

Wisbrun describes her work as minimal but never impersonal. Here, visual interest comes from texture and carefully controlled contrasts: pale maple flooring against black cabinetry, slate underfoot in the entry and bathroom, traditional wood trim beside expanses of glass. Reeded glass forms the shower enclosure and appears again in pocket doors and transoms, diffusing daylight while giving utilitarian spaces a tactile, almost watery quality.

“I like minimal and I like clean, but I don’t like bland,” Wisbrun says. “You need real materials that give you a sense of texture.” 

Budget-Conscious Design

Budget influenced nearly every decision. The smaller footprint reduced foundation, framing, and finishing costs. Prefinished maple flooring in shorter lengths delivered the warmth Wisbrun and Berger wanted at a manageable price. Built-in millwork kept the rooms visually ordered, creating a neutral setting for Berger’s more expressive furnishings. Builder Rich Van Alphen worked closely with both women to preserve the design’s details while holding the project within its financial limits.

Berger was deeply involved throughout construction. For Wisbrun, that participation was essential. Her practice is structured around a collaborative process in which clients bring their habits, associations, and visual instincts into the design. Berger’s experience as a designer made her an especially attentive partner.

“Custom design is real for a reason,” Wisbrun says. “People live in vastly different ways. I’m not a top-down architect with some big vision that I’m projecting onto people. I’m working with them to create something special for them in particular.”

That exchange is most evident in Berger’s studio. Her work involves cut paper, drawing, collage, and gathered ephemera, requiring broad surfaces where materials can be spread out and studied. Wisbrun wrapped long worktables beneath windows on two sides of the room, creating ample workspace and placing Berger almost within the landscape.

Because the studio faces primarily north and sits beneath a dense canopy of maple trees, securing enough daylight required large windows. Those windows also transformed the view into the room’s defining feature. From Berger’s desk, the land falls toward the stream, and the wooded slope rises around her. The sensation is of being suspended within the forest, with dappled light moving across the floor and ceiling throughout the day.

The garden is largely Berger’s own creation, assembled patiently from divided plants, contributions from friends, and moss collected on the property. Shade-loving plantings fill the ground beneath the trees, and stone, water, and greenery merge along the stream bed. A few unhealthy trees had to be removed during construction, admitting additional sunlight and giving Berger a rare opportunity to expand beyond the shade garden.

The studio has since become part of the creative cycle it was designed to support. After moving into it, Berger wrote and illustrated a book inspired by the garden—In the Night Garden—a fitting reversal in which the landscape shaped the room, and the room helped transform the landscape into a story.

Attaching the addition to a 200-year-old house also required work that disappears within the finished architecture. The old kitchen concealed damaged construction, gaps, and extensive animal intrusion. A squirrel family—its matriarch dubbed Roberta—had occupied the attic, while mice had found numerous routes through the building envelope. The contractor carefully sealed the perimeter and repaired the former exterior wall before it became part of the new interior. An old rubble wall at the connection between the structures was rebuilt and insulated, and the roof junction was stabilized and weatherproofed.

The project stopped short of a complete energy retrofit of the Greek Revival, which the budget would not support. Instead, Wisbrun concentrated resources on creating an efficient, durable new envelope while making targeted improvements where old and new met. It was a pragmatic approach to sustainability: retain the sound historic building, remove the failed addition, build only the space the clients needed, and make it capable of serving them well into the future.

Years after the work was completed, Berger still sends Wisbrun messages describing how much she and Moerman love the house. The renovation gave them a comfortable kitchen, an orderly entrance, an accessible ground-floor suite, and a studio tailored to Berger’s practice. More profoundly, it gave them a new relationship with a landscape that had always surrounded them.

For Wisbrun, that emotional utility is one measure of successful architecture. A home can provide the physical and psychological footing from which its inhabitants do their work, pursue their interests, and move through ordinary days with greater ease. “It just feels exactly right to her,” Wisbrun says. “She already loved her house, but now it’s so much more useful and comfortable to actually live in.”