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Interior designer Greg Feller of Hudson Home hired artist Richard Prouse to paint a mural echoing the local landscape for a house overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir RENOVATION PROFILE, PAGE 46
A guide for those seeking to build or renovate within their financial and practical constraints—both to meet their own needs and do as much for the planet as possible.
46 RENOVATION PROFILE: MURAL SUPPORT
By Joan Vos MacDonald
In Woodstock, interior designer Greg Feller reimagines a historic Adirondack-style house overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir, commissioning a mural that brings the surrounding landscape— and its hidden history—indoors with painterly depth and charm.
56 HOUSE PROFILE: X MARKS THE SPOT
By Mary Angeles Armstrong
Architects Mimi Hoang and Eric Bunge of nArchitects design a sustainable, cross-laminated timber lake house in Dutchess County, shaped by years of paddling the shoreline they now call home.
64 COVER STORY: SILVAN SANCTUARY
Designer Mari Mulshenock of EvolveD Interiors Design + Build transforms a dilapidated Saugerties craftsman into a light-filled modern home, preserving character while maximizing flow, function, and connection to nature.
Sponsored House Feature
68 HOUSE PROFILE: FARMLAND BAUHAUS
By Lindsay Lennon
Artist Miranda Fengyuan Zhang builds a serene, Bauhausinspired home and studio in Germantown with architect Koray Duman, blending minimalist design, Asian architectural references, and eco-conscious features into a rural retreat.
6 MARKETWATCH: REALITY CHECK FOR SELLERS
Tight inventory, realistic pricing, and strategic upgrades keep the region’s real estate simmering, not scorching.
9 SOURCE: PIDGIN
Pidgin is Kostas Anagnopoulos’s shop in the Greene County hamlet of Oak Hill where antiques and oddities converse across time and meaning.
14 HOME SERVICES: COOL COMFORT
From passive design tweaks to efficient heat pumps, experts share sustainable strategies to keep homes cool and comfortable.
18 BOOKS: LIVE WITH WHAT YOU LOVE
The latest volume in Mary Randolph Carter’s beloved celebration of soulful spaces, following earlier titles like American Junk
22 BUILDING SCIENCE: LET’S GET INSULAR
Builder Jeff Eckes explains how homeowners can design smarter, drier, more durable walls—without losing their minds.
30 GARDEN: BUILDING A DIY CONTAINER GARDEN
A Stone Ridge homeowner constructs a backyard oasis.
42 AREA SPOTLIGHT: BEACON
Beacon blends politics, culture, and community in a thriving small city.
44 AREA SPOTLIGHT: RHINEBECK
Rhinebeck rewrites its future with a plan for inclusive growth.
80 BACK PORCH: STATEMENT PIECE
The Antiques Warehouse in Hudson houses some singular finds.
78
By Anne Pyburn Craig
Real estate markets in some parts of the US, particularly in Sunbelt states like Florida and Arizona, have been undergoing drastic downturns on a level not seen since the 2008 housing market crash. Factors specific to those places— natural disasters and the resulting prohibitive insurance costs, a reversal of the migration trends that happened during and immediately after Covid—are driving a decline that seems unlikely to change anytime soon, with prices still inflated while supply balloons. Nationally, a .01 percentage drop in mortgage rates in the last week of April didn’t seem to be convincing buyers to jump on in. Even with interest rates considerably down from last year, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index indicated just a three percent year-over-year increase in originations at that point.
That doesn’t translate to a major correction in the Northeast, or in the Hudson Valley and Catskills, where tight inventory and the steady flow of people who tire of city living are keeping prices high. Analyst Nick Gerli, CEO of the Reventure app, has noted on X that while Florida has the highest number of homes on the market in its history—177,000—the Northeast is at an all-time low, with just 79,000 homes for sale.
Still Hot in the Hudson Valley
Nevertheless, local realtors are saying that things continue to loosen just a bit, with inventory ticking slowly but steadily upward. Municipalities facing an overall affordability crisis in both real estate prices and rental costs are revising dated zoning codes and comprehensive plans and looking at permitting reforms that may help to ease things, but particularly in the face of overall economic uncertainty—tariffs impacting materials prices in as-yet-uncertain ways, volatility on Wall Street—it will be a while before the impact on supply is felt.
Across the region, sellers whose heads are full of hot-market dreams of wealth will find themselves disappointed if their prices don’t reflect current realities, says Dan Mahar of Mahar Real Estate, who specializes in Columbia and Greene Counties, the farthest reaches of the commuter belt. “Places over $600,000 that aren’t done are sitting on the market, specifically in rural locations,” he says. “Your buyers who ‘missed out’ during the Covid rush are looking at the things in the $300 to mid- $400s, but if those are finished and priced right, they’re gone when they hit.”
Mahar says that inventory has been growing in his region, and prices should continue to stabilize. “A lot of buyers say ‘there’s nothing out there,’ but that’s no longer true. It may not be what they are looking for, but inventory rose from 2023 by 123 percent and to 2024 another 144 percent, with a total of 449 units on market right now in Columbia County and a median range of $465,000 to $570,000.”
In Ulster County, Greg Berardi of Berardi Real Estate says properties in “hot” locations like Uptown Kingston are still seeing multiple high-dollar offers, but he shares Mahar’s perception that some sellers need to adjust to a more balanced reality. “I’m seeing properties priced in the $700,000 to $800,000 range that I believe are just too high,” he says. “The prices reflect the last couple of years of an escalating market, and that’s eased up. So those places will just sit.”
For the first time in recorded history, the median sale price in every county in the Hudson Valley is above $300,000. Average days-on-market stats, compiled by Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty, rose a bit yearover-year in the first quarter in some locales, going from 68 to 75 in Dutchess County, 57 to 76 in Greene and 70 to 87 in Ulster, but declined from 80 to 74 in Columbia and stayed level in Sullivan County, as did sales.
Some of that longer time on the market may be reflective of the aforementioned starry-eyed sellers, but Megan Rios, top-producing agent at Berardi, says higherpriced homes are sitting a bit longer even when the price is right. “It all depends on the location, the amenities, and the upgrades,” she says. “Sellers who put the energy and money into a good presentation, even if it’s just a cleanup and a fresh coat of paint, are being rewarded by buyers who are really looking for move-in-ready places. And anything under $400,000 that’s remotely decent is gone in a day. There’s just no inventory at that price point, zero.”
On the west shore of the Hudson, Berardi and Rios agree, bargain hunters should check out rural areas around places that have been slower to gentrify, such as Ellenville and Catskill. (Catskill has developed its own lively Main Street scene, raising prices within the village, but that may be less true of the countryside to the north and west.)
Overall, we’re still talking about a seller’s market—but the slight and gradual cooling taking place means that those sellers need to be at least a bit more realistic.
Sandi Park, a realtor with Coldwell Banker and founder of her own firm, Hudson Valley Nest, writes in her real estate newsletter The Brick that nine Dutchess County communities, including Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Red Hook, and Wappinger, saw overall year-over-year sales increases as of March 31, while other places saw slight declines.
Bottom line, it will take major increases in inventory— which many areas are striving to create, given the ongoing affordability crisis—before any major shift in favor of buyers comes about. As always, working with a local expert who keeps their ear to the ground and knows your wants is your best bet; many desirable properties in popular communities sell before they even hit the market when the listing agent knows exactly what a buyer’s after.
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By Elias Levey-Swain
At Pidgin, in the Greene County hamlet of Oak Hill, esoteric antiques commingle with contemporary oddities, huddled together around a single shared principle: longevity. From two-dollar rubber eggs, writing implements, and local honey, to mammoth artifacts like a six-foot-tall tree trunk previously used for limewashing buildings, store owner Kostas Anagnopoulos is interested in objects with staying power. Not only bent on finding “forever homes” for singular relics, he is fascinated by how new objects, touched by time, will become antiques themselves. “In 50 years,” he says, considering one example, “someone will find it and think, ‘Oh wow, that’s a really old pencil sharpener.’” In this way, the contents of Pidgin are ghostly, sitting in tension between past and future.
A pidgin is an informal, simplified mode of communication, improvised between entities who share no common language. Objects converse in a pidgin; wordless, they are nonetheless imbued profoundly with meaning and implication, memory and sensation. For Anagnopoulos—a poet, salesman, and son of immigrants—language sits at the crossroads of intersecting interests and identities. But rather than thinking with words, he prefers “thinking
with the objects. And thinking about how they riff off each other, finding humor within the relationships. Making little tableaux, little still-lives.”
Pidgin is thus a complex ecosystem. “When something sells, it throws off the whole equilibrium of the store,” Anagnopoulos says. Restoring order is “not always so simple as just putting another piece of furniture in its place.”
Anagnopoulos, a collector, pilfers much of Pidgin’s inventory from his own archives. “I’m collecting,” he says, “but I’m also detaching.” He recalls an instance, a few months ago, where he brought something out to the floor only momentarily before regret washed over him. “Oh God,” he remembers thinking, “I don’t think I’m ready for this.” He brought it back upstairs, where it now sits on his desk. The object in question? An oversized and quite weathered darning egg with an accompanying stand. “I just couldn’t part with it,” he admits.
Though reverence occasionally interrupts detachment, it’s the very thing that makes the store work. “Affection, I think, is infectious,” Anagnopoulos explains. “I have to love what I’m selling, because otherwise my patrons won’t.”
A curated collision of past and present, Pidgin’s interior is a living still life where antique darning eggs share space with contemporary ceramics, forged knives, and rubber novelties. Every surface invites inspection—each object part of a carefully composed, ever-shifting dialogue.
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Anagnopoulos grew up in and around his mother’s tailoring shop in Chicago, and as a traveling sales rep, he spent years working with merchants of all kinds. He always imagined opening a store in his old age, graduating from his career into a working retirement. But, during the pandemic, “life became more immediate and pressing,” he reflects. Priorities and ambitions shifted underfoot, and his timeline moved up.
He was tipped off by a friend about an available storefront in Oak Hill, a Greene County hamlet with a population below 300, not far from his home in Rensselaerville. Known as “Ford’s Store,” the two-story Italianate building dating from 1870 was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. Over the years it has accommodated businesses selling plants, antiques, books, and records, and for a time was home to the local post office. An eclectic history befitting of the store Anagnopoulos had in mind.
In 2020, he moved in, seeking to restore the interior “to feel as though it hadn’t been touched.” He reinstalled the original transoms, put up beadboard, and added dividing walls to support the second story. “I feel obliged to be a steward for these buildings,” Anagnopoulos explains. “When the time is up for me, I want to pass them on in good working order.” Speaking in the plural, he’s referring
both to Pidgin and the new store he’s opening down the street, in a space previously occupied by Norman Hasselriis, an interdisciplinary, idiosyncratic artist who passed away in 2006.
“An assemblage artist, a sculptor, an antiques dealer, a poet,” Anagnopoulos explains, Hasselriis was a local fixture whose legacy looms large in Oak Hill. The forthcoming store, named after Hasselriis, will include some of his assemblages. Selling primarily table-top and kitchen items, it will celebrate “gathering, breaking bread, and the great ritual of communing around the table.”
Also nascent is an online marketplace for Pidgin—a response to growing demand from afar. This is an addition, not a transition. “I still want people to come visit the store in person,” Anagnopoulos urges. “There’s nothing like that tactility.” Anagnopoulos describes Pidgin as “part self-portrait, part love letter.” Both are expressed through the objects within, painstakingly assembled in ornate, deliberate compositions that varyingly emphasize, subvert, or obscure their intended uses, assumed meanings, and particular histories. They speak in a pidgin best understood in immediate confrontation, unmediated by screens and unmitigated by distance.
Workers install a Mitsubishi mini-split system for Hot Water Solutions—bringing efficient, all-electric comfort to a Hudson Valley home.
The first step to keeping a home cool is air sealing and insulation, otherwise you’re just adding electric load to a still leaky building.
By Ryan Keegan
With summers growing hotter and energy costs on the rise, many homeowners are seeking smarter, more sustainable ways to stay cool. When the weather turns sticky, our first instinct is often to reach for the thermostat. But staying comfortable doesn’t have to mean blasting the AC and watching your energy bill climb. Instead of relying solely on traditional air conditioning, more people are turning to practical strategies like passive cooling and improving the ventilation design of their homes. Across the Hudson Valley, designers and builders are helping residents renovate their homes— whether through upgrades, retrofits, or small design tweaks—to stay cooler naturally and more efficiently.
Start with the Foundation
The first step to keeping a home cool isn’t adding new equipment—it’s preserving the cool air you already have. “Air sealing and insulation should be your first step; otherwise, you’re just adding electric load to a still leaky building,” says Melinda McKnight of Energy Conservation Services. “Once a home is properly sealed and insulated, any cooling—passive or mechanical—becomes significantly more effective.”
Air sealing means finding and closing the small cracks that let cool air escape or hot air seep in. Many of these leaks hide in plain sight. Common problem areas include the rim joist (where the first floor meets the foundation) and attic top plates. Leaks also occur where plumbing or electrical systems pass through the building envelope, such as behind kitchen sinks. “Basically, anywhere wood meets wood or wood meets masonry, there can be leakage,” McKnight says. Even if gaps aren’t visible, drafts, pests, or uneven temperatures often suggest their presence.
To locate leaks, professionals perform a blower door test—a diagnostic using a calibrated fan and pressure monitor to measure air leakage. While required for new construction under New York State energy code, McKnight says it’s just as valuable for existing homes. “Buildings professionally air sealed and insulated can use much less energy to cool,” she notes. “In the last nine months, our sealed homes showed an average 32 percent drop in air infiltration— translating directly to energy savings.”
Simple design choices and habits can also keep indoor temperatures comfortable. On hot days, closing curtains or blinds can reduce heat gain.
For better results, McKnight recommends energy saving drapes, which reflect heat and insulate windows. “My house is well insulated, and I still close my drapes when it’s warm,” she adds.
Small details in the home can impact temperature more than you might expect. Recessed ceiling lights, for instance, can act as thermal bridges, letting heat into your living space if not properly sealed. “We install covers for those to help reduce heat transfer,” McKnight explains. Similarly, older double-hung windows with sash pulleys—common in historic Hudson Valley homes—can be drafty. Installing pulley covers helps block unwanted airflow.
Dan Arket of Tekra Builders emphasizes the value of passive solar design, which uses natural elements to regulate indoor temperature. A prime example is strategic landscaping. Planting deciduous trees near the sunniest sides of your home—especially around south-facing windows—can provide natural shade and reduce solar heat gain. “You get shade in the
summer when you need it most, and in winter the leaves drop and let the sun warm your house again,” he says.
He also cautions against dark colored exteriors. “Black homes are a nice trend and look great, but dark surfaces absorb a lot of heat,” he notes. “Lighter, more reflective colors can be more practical.”
Cross-ventilation is another low-tech cooling strategy. “It’s about creating a cross breeze to move air through the house,” Arket explains. Ideally, that means having a lower window open on one side of the home and a higher window open on the opposite side to create a stack effect that draws warm air up and out.
This technique works best when outdoor air is cooler than indoor air—typically early morning or night. “You don’t want to run your air conditioner while cross-ventilating, since you’d be pulling in warm air,” Arket adds. “Use cross-ventilation early in the day and at night, then close windows and switch to AC during the hottest part of the day.”
For an extra cooling boost, Arket also suggests installing a whole-house fan—especially in older
homes. These fans, typically mounted in the ceiling of an upper floor, draw cool air through open windows and push warm air up and out through attic vents.
When mechanical cooling is necessary, heat pumps— especially ductless mini-splits—offer an energy efficient option. These systems can cool (and heat) individual rooms or entire homes, using far less energy than traditional AC units.
Unlike conventional air conditioners or furnaces that cycle on and off, heat pumps modulate their output, running at lower speeds for longer periods to maintain steady indoor temperatures.
“The biggest difference is comfort,” says Matt LeFevre of Hot Water Solutions. “Heat pumps remove humidity more effectively and keep temperatures more consistent.”
Despite the name, heat pumps are excellent at cooling. “We size them for winter heating needs, so when summer comes around, they’re more powerful than necessary and can operate on lower settings,”
LeFevre explains. “Adding a heat pump also means you’re adding central air.”
Heat pumps can reduce cooling bills by 30 to 60 percent due to their steady operation. “They only use the energy needed to temper the space,” LeFevre explains.
Additionally, New York homeowners may qualify for rebates through the Clean Heat Program, offering up to $1,000 per unit if removing a fossil fuel system. Federal tax credits of up to $2,000 for qualifying installations are also available under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Transitioning to a heat pump system is often straightforward, especially for homes with existing ductwork. “We just replace the equipment and reuse the ducts,” LeFevre says. For homes without ducts, ductless systems—like mini-splits—offer room by room control. And for homeowners using solar panels or considering renewables, heat pumps are an ideal match. “When you go electric, you can power your heating and cooling with your solar system,” LeFevre says. “You use less electric and do the environment a favor.”
By Brian K. Mahoney
Opposite:
Surrounded by the lovingly layered objects that fill her home, Mary Randolph Carter lives her design philosophy: embrace the imperfect, celebrate the sentimental, and let your stuff tell your story.
Above:
The front parlor of Mary Randolph Carter’s Millerton home is a typically eclectic hodgepodge of items she has collected over the decades, the green “MOE” table and the teddy bear on wheels.
Let us now praise glorious junk.
Not garbage, mind you. Not the flotsam of our throwaway age. We’re talking about stuff with soul: the busted chair you meant to fix, the chipped teacup you can’t quit, your grandmother’s needlepoint of a moody owl. The things you didn’t buy at West Elm but inherited, tripped over at a yard sale, or couldn’t stop yourself from dragging home from a roadside barn. The things that tell your story.
No one has done more to elevate this gospel of glorious, sentimental clutter than Mary Randolph Carter. “Carter,” as she prefers to be called, has made a life—and a cottage industry—out of convincing the world that a house full of stuff is a house full of life. Her latest book, Live with the Things You Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After (Rizzoli), is both culmination and call to arms. The message is simple, radical, and deeply comforting: If you love it, live with it.
In person and on the page, Carter exudes the warmth of a Southern aunt crossed with the sharp eye of a New York editor. Which is to say, she is both storyteller and stylist. Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Carter was the eldest of nine children
in a house filled with commotion, color, and the occasional tragedy—two house fires in her youth destroyed many family belongings and taught her early on that objects carry memory. That loss sharpened her eye and deepened her commitment to honoring the past, one beloved relic at a time.
After moving to New York, Carter began her career as an editor at Mademoiselle and later at Self, eventually landing at Ralph Lauren where she served for nearly four decades as a creative director. She helped shape the brand’s storytellingfirst design ethos: weathered wood, plaid everything, layers upon layers of implied history. In other words, Carter’s home life and professional life were never all that far apart.
Her bibliography reads like an ode to the anti-Marie Kondo. Books like American Junk, Kitchen Junk, and Garden Junk turned her penchant for flea market treasures into a fullfledged philosophy. In A Perfectly Kept House Is the Sign of a Misspent Life, she argued that beauty and order aren’t the same thing—and, if forced to choose, she’d take beauty every time.
In Live with the Things You Love, Carter trains her eye on the homes of artists, antique dealers, stylists, and eccentrics
whose interiors are not decorated so much as narrated. There’s her old friend, Joan Osofsky, owner of Hammertown, who has crammed a cozy Connecticut cottage with a lifetime of collectibles and antiques. Another old friend, art director Paula Grief, opens up her Cobble Hill home to reveal treasures like a painting of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by the late Hudson outsider art legend Earl Swanigan. Clothing designer Janet Russo offers a tour of her Bristol, Rhode Island house, brimming with floral accents—and actual flowers.
These chapters overflow with what some might dismiss as clutter but what Carter redefines as biography in three dimensions. There are rooms layered with art and ephemera, books stacked in every corner, toy collections lovingly displayed on mantels. The throughline is love: love of memory, love of story, love of the imperfect. “What makes life astounding is not the things we’ve collected and lived with but the people and the memories
we associate with them,” Carter writes in the introduction.
The book is a feast, heavy on images and light on preachiness. Carter isn’t telling you what to buy, or even how to arrange it. She’s asking you to look again at what you already have. To remember why that weird lamp from your first apartment still matters. To let the busted chair stay busted. To make peace with the joyfully unresolved.
Carter lives this life in stereo. She splits her time between a rambling apartment in Manhattan and a home in Millerton—both maximalist wonderlands stuffed with old toys, paper ephemera, and flea market miracles. Photographs in the book were taken by her son, Carter Berg, and illustrations are by her sister, Cary, making the project a family affair in both spirit and execution.
She doesn’t pretend to be a minimalist’s reformed cousin. “It’s not about clutter; it’s about creating a space that resonates with your soul,” she writes. That
space might be piled high with vintage fabrics or lined with old LPs. It might be messy. But it’s yours.
In a cultural moment still in thrall to the sleek and the sparse, Carter’s work feels almost revolutionary. It suggests that the road to happiness might be paved not in clean lines and neutral tones but in messy shelves and mustard-yellow ashtrays.
So open that closet. Call your aunt. Dust off the high school yearbook and the ceramic frog from your trip to Montreal. Don’t purge. Reclaim. “I once read that every single object has a god inside, and that’s why we cherish them,” Carter writes. “Each object in our homes—passed on, gifted, or collected— also has a story that reveals not only how it came to be and how it came to us, but how it shares who we are and where we’ve been.”
As Carter reminds us again and again, your things are trying to tell you something. Are you listening?
By Jeff Eckes
In a recent political ad for a Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Mike Meyers answered the question: “What are the two seasons in Toronto?” with “Winter and construction.”
Never have truer words been spoken on behalf of all builders! This year has seen no exception.
This spring started off with a bang but seems to be cooling off quickly, due in most part to the looming economic difficulties we all see in the coming months and years. This made me think: How can we try to keep the momentum in the region for improving our housing and making it more attainable? How much can a homeowner realistically do themselves to improve their home?
Generally, homeowners have two paths to choose from: hire a contractor or DIY. Further sorting of projects would reveal the fact that most homeowners can take on and tackle small things when needed, like painting or replacing a bathroom faucet, but do not have expertise in the majority of skills needed to do major projects to improve the envelope of our homes, like removing and replacing the insulation, or sealing the house and replacing windows. But even if homeowners do have those skills and the courage to take them on, what about the science? How do they know they are making the right choices in the basic design of the systems like walls and roofs, insulation, and windows? How do they do their due diligence on
recommendations from contractors, for that matter?
The good news is that there are resources.
As a high-performance builder, I spend as much time “building” my projects on paper (well, in the computer these days) as I do on-site building the home. When prospective homeowners approach me with a new custom project, I advise them that, realistically, it’s a year to design and permit, and a year to build, so planning is the most important aspect of any project.
In this, I use a wide array of advanced tools and calculations, which involve hours and hours of
training, testing, and certification to utilize. But homeowners don’t need that, they just need to know if they are on the right path. Is the approach likely to undermine the long-term performance of the home, or is it scientifically sound—even if not ideal? Sealing and insulation—or wall assembly design—is one such place, and the one we will deal with in this article.
A wall assembly is not sexy. It’s utilitarian, but very important to the ability of a home to provide comfortable shelter for an extended period of time, at a reasonable cost. There is a lot more science in a well-designed wall assembly than even
most builders understand. Fortunately, today we have internet calculators and processing engines available to help us.
If someone is the “math type,” they can access the formulas, do the calculations, and apply those results to a model. But even my Passive House modeler doesn’t do that. He uses a tool designed by the Passive House community to handle it—homeowners need something simpler and easier to learn. I recently discovered one online. Unfortunately, it’s designed for European climate zones and building materials (some of which are
available here), and in the US, we don’t yet have a comparable calculator. Still, it’s truly simple (and fun!) to use, so it will do for now.
We entered the materials we chose (listed under Figure 1), described the sizes and dimensions, and hit enter. This is the graphic from the calculator described above, which shows an actual wall assembly we designed for a deep energy retrofit in Sullivan County, modeled in the colder months, when condensation is an issue.
Without going too deep into the science, the things that jump out for most folks are the blue water droplets, which represent moisure as condensation. This is vapor-generated moisture that actually begins in the home and migrates outward in cold weather, which then cools and appears as condensation somewhere in or on the wall. This is the science in a “heating” climate in the winter, the evidence of which we have all seen as frost on poorly performing windows on a cold winter morning. What we need to do is make sure that this “condensation plane” remains as close to the exterior of the wall system as we can get it, where it can’t really damage anything and has an oportunity to dry. In this instance, the condensation forms on or under the exterior sheathing, but only at very low temperatures (about 10 degrees F) with a humidity of 20 percent inside, and 50 percent outside, the typical readings for a winter day in the region. This is a well-designed wall, using the best specialty materials, installed per manufacturer specifications.
Now, look what happens when we remove item number two, the Intello vapor barrier (Figure 2). Notice the additional condensation that shows
as more water droplets, forming deeper into the wall assembly in the graphic on the right, while the graphic on the left illustrates that the wood sheathing will now accumulate this condensation on the inside of the house! Over time this will rot that sheathing, and create conditions for extensive mold growth, and that’s bad. All we did was remove one thin vapor barrier on an otherwise welldesigned wall assembly!
So we see that vapor barriers are important, but if you peel back the layers of the average home’s wall, you would find missing or uneven application of the vapor barrier as in Figure 3.
Right away the differences jump off the page, which is what a well-designed calculator should do. There is obviously a lot more condensation, what we call “wall rain” when it’s bad, which is a function of less insulation, no exterior insulation, and a poor or missing vapor barrier. But this is a common wall assembly in older homes throughout the valley! Cleverly, it also shows the thermal bridge by filling the space in the graphic on the left with wood instead of insulation. That’s the value of exterior insulation.
So many times we open a wall in an older home, especially on the sunny side of the house which has the widest temperature swings, to find water damage. When we explain to the homeowner that this damage was caused not by a leak from the outside, but from vapor condensing on the inside of the wall, it’s understanbly difficult to swallow. This makes it visible and understandable to anyone.
But what if all this still feels overwhelming?
Even homeowners with the means to hire a contractor have several money-saving (and homesaving) options available. One approach is to engage an architect, engineer, or informed builder to design high-performance systems, then provide those plans to a contractor with clear instructions to follow them. (See previous article on how to scope a project in the summer 2024 issue of Upstate House.) A project calculator can help track progress and maintain accountability. It’s not necessary to implement every recommendation immediately—once a roadmap is in place, it’s easier to determine how far to travel at each step. And this is just one of many resources available to homeowners; others include Buildingadvisor. com and Greenbuildingadvisor.com. The former is a wonderful full spectrum advice and education site for homeowners to figure out different aspects of working on a home. Not always the latest and greatest, but no ‘bad’ information. Greenbuildingadvisor is a much geekier site, used best for perfecting a particular assembly, like a roof or a wall.
In these times of economic challenges, where advice and funding options for homeowners trying to do the right thing for their families and the environment are being removed for some unfathonable reason, it’s important that we have the ability and the encouragement to carry on with our goals. My column is and always will be dedicated to helping to make that a reality for as many as possible, but now I’m going to dig deeper into the “how to” and “what to use” subjects that can help even more. Let’s make this happen!
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By Brian K. Mahoney
What began as a solution for accessible gardening became a full backyard transformation: four custom-built raised beds, framed in wood and steel, encircle a central patio—part vegetable patch, part outdoor living room, and all DIY.
Standing in his backyard on a crisp spring morning, Tim Ayers surveys the fruits of last year’s labor: four raised garden beds framed in wood and corrugated steel, arranged atop a crushed stone patio. The planter boxes are not just handsome—they’re a lifeline. Built tall enough to eliminate stooping and close enough together to form a social space, they’ve brought gardening back into Ayers’s and his partner Steven Bock’s lives after a progressive mobility disorder made traditional in-ground planting a challenge for Bock.
“Gardening was something we always loved, and I didn’t want that to end,” says Ayers. So he set out to create something functional, beautiful, and deeply personal: An outdoor living room that just happens to be bursting with tomatoes, lettuces, squash, and flowers.
Steven Bock and Tim Rich assemble one of the raised beds using pre-cut lumber. Careful planning and teamwork helped speed up construction, even on a pair of rainy build days.
The project began with a simple but urgent goal: Make gardening accessible again. Though Ayers had a long history of DIY home improvements (he jokes that he bought the “crappiest house on the block” 20 years ago and has been fixing it ever since), this was his first true groundup build. It would also be his most ambitious.
Determined to marry form and function, Ayers spent weeks researching designs that would complement his modernized farmhouse-style home in Stone Ridge. He found inspiration online in raised beds clad with corrugated steel and wood—and took the idea a step further. Instead of stand-alone boxes, he envisioned a full garden “room,” where he and his partner could sit at a central table, surrounded by the lushness of growing things.
Not content to wing it, Ayers pulled out graph paper and carefully mapped the layout: four eight-foot-long planter boxes forming a square, with four-foot paths between them for easy access. He drew the design from multiple angles, calculated materials, and factored in critical details like rodent-proofing with wire mesh.
He also chose his materials thoughtfully. Cedar would have been ideal for its rot-resistance—but wildly expensive. Instead, he framed the boxes in pressure-treated wood, added cedar anywhere wood would touch soil, and lined the interiors with food-grade plastic and landscape fabric to ensure no contaminants would leach into the organic soil. Corrugated metal panels added durability and a touch of industrial chic without compromising the organic ethos.
A year later, the total material cost—including lumber, steel, crushed stone, soil, and compost—ran about $1,500, a fraction of what hiring professionals would have cost.
Construction began with leveling the site, laying down landscape fabric, and building a shallow wooden frame to hold a base of crushed stone. Pre-cut lumber made assembly fast—an essential move considering two of the build days were rainy and miserable.
Ayers credits his angle grinder (for cutting metal and mesh) and his compressor and nail gun (for framing) with saving countless hours of labor. “Doing it all by hand would have taken forever,” he says. “You don’t have that many arms to hold things while you’re banging a hammer.”
• Plan first: Draw your design and material list carefully.
• Use standard sizes: Eight-foot lumber and metal panels minimize waste.
• Mind your materials: Pressuretreated framing, plus cedar soil contact, plus food-safe liners equals safe growing.
• Think long-term: Build tall enough (around counter height) to avoid future mobility issues.
• Prepare for pests: Install mesh at the base to stop burrowing animals—and steel wool to block wasps.
• Fill smart: Hugelkultur saves soil costs and enriches plants naturally.
Below: Instead of costly fill, Ayers used a hugelkultur method—layering fallen logs, branches, and organic matter to promote slow composting and long-term soil health.
One year later, the raised beds have settled into their role as both a thriving garden and a backyard sanctuary—proof that thoughtful design and hard work can grow more than just vegetables.
Once the frames were assembled and the metal cladding was attached, the real workout began: filling the beds. Instead of trucking in expensive fill, Ayers turned to a resource on hand: piles of fallen trees and branches, which he layered into the bottom two-thirds of the boxes—a method known as hugelkultur. Over time, the organic material will break down, enriching the soil above and sustaining the garden naturally.
Square Foot Gardening, Elevated Planning didn’t stop with construction. Before the first seedling went in the ground, Ayers mapped the planting layout using square-foot gardening techniques. Each planter box was assigned a theme:
Box 1: Tomatoes, peppers, marigolds, and rosemary
Box 2: Leafy greens—lettuce, spinach, kale, and chard
Box 3: Vining crops—cucumbers, watermelons, squash, and zucchini
Box 4: Cut flowers for home and their adjacent Airbnb rental
He also carefully considered plant compatibility to optimize growth and minimize pests. “I had about five pages of drawings,” he says, laughing. “It made the build and the planting so much smoother.”
Lessons from the Build
Reflecting on the process, Ayers says the key to success was doing the heavy mental lifting upfront. “Draw everything out,” he advises. “Use standard measurements like eight-foot lengths of wood to minimize waste and cost. And research everything— materials, plants, compatibility.”
In terms of physical labor, the hardest part wasn’t the building—it was moving tons of stone, dirt, and logs by hand. “Shoveling stone sucks,” he admits, but quickly adds, “It’s all part of the adventure. I built something we love, and that’s incredibly rewarding.”
If he were to do it again? He’d plumb an
underground irrigation system. Last summer, handwatering was peaceful but time-consuming— and metal-clad planters tend to attract wasps looking for cozy nests. This year, he’s preemptively stuffed crevices with steel wool to deter them.
One year after completion, the planter boxes are thriving. The soil has settled slightly, as expected, and Ayers plans to top it off with a few more yards of compost. Structurally, the frames remain solid and square, now freshly stained to match the house’s exterior.
The best part? Gardening is joyful again. No more stooping. No more battling rocky soil. Just the satisfaction of working amid vegetables and flowers, with a glass of wine close at hand.
“This project gave us back something we thought we might lose,” Ayers says. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever built.”
ARC h ITE ct: kevin b AxTER
b UI l D e R : pete R jens EN
Situated on land that was conventionally farmed for over a century, Spring Wind Farm is a Buddhist retreat center unlike any other in the Hudson Valley—or anywhere in North America, for that matter. Designed by architect Kevin Baxter in collaboration with natural building expert Peter Jensen, the two-building, 10,000-square-foot complex may be the largest structure in the United States constructed using structural high-density straw panels. It’s also one of the most quietly radical. Commissioned by the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom, the project serves as both a spiritual refuge and a prototype for a new kind of carbonconscious construction. The group’s move from New York City to a 100-acre property in Columbia County marked a turning point in its mission—toward regenerative farming, ecological stewardship, and deep sustainability. “They wanted a building that spoke to those values,” says Baxter. “No drywall. No paint. Just the most natural modern structure we could deliver.”
That structure came together using prefabricated straw panels manufactured by EcoCocon, a European firm pioneering low-carbon, high-performance building systems. Far from rustic, the panels are engineered for structural strength, thermal mass, and airtightness. “It’s like an igloo of straw,” says Baxter. “You’re not relying on mechanical systems for comfort. The building itself is the system.”
Straw’s performance goes well beyond insulation. As a crop, it’s a carbon-sequestration powerhouse—capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil. When harvested and compressed into building panels, straw effectively locks that carbon away. Even accounting
for transatlantic shipping (from Lithuania to New Jersey) and truck transport to the site, the building maintains a net negative carbon footprint. “You end up with a carbon bank account,” Baxter explains. “And if you’re careful, you spend less than you’ve saved.”
The straw panels are finished with clay plaster inside and lime plaster outside—materials that are not only breathable and nontoxic, but also fire- and pest-resistant. Beneath the bare concrete floors, radiant heating is fed by rooftop solar thermal panels. Triple-glazed windows and high-performance membranes from 475 Building Supply in Brooklyn complete the airtight envelope. The result? A building that exceeds Passive House performance, even if it doesn’t carry the certification. “They’re Buddhists,” Baxter says with a smile. “They didn’t need the plaque.”
The architectural expression of the retreat center is modest but intentional. Two volumes—one residential, one communal—face each other across a courtyard where vegetables are grown and meals are shared. The restrained material palette (clay, lime, wood, straw) creates a meditative quietude, while skylights and carefully placed windows bathe interior spaces in natural light. “It’s a blank canvas,” says Baxter, noting that the residents—many of whom are artists—have begun filling the space with murals, sculptures, and everyday life.
In its union of low-carbon technology and spiritual intentionality, Spring Wind Farm demonstrates that high performance isn’t just about energy—it’s about aligning materials, design, and purpose. As Baxter puts it: “This isn’t just a building. It’s a belief system, made tangible.”
— Brian K. Mahoney
Above:
Workers install prefabricated straw panels during construction at Spring Wind Farm in Clermont. Manufactured by EcoCocon, the panels provide insulation, structure, and carbon sequestration—all in a single high-performance system.
Opposite: The straw-panel walls at Spring Wind Farm are finished with lime plaster, forming an airtight, breathable envelope that resists mold, pests, and fire—while maintaining a netnegative carbon footprint.
Straw panels used at Spring Wind Farm are currently manufactured in Europe by Ecococon, but efforts are underway to establish North American production—an essential step toward scaling this carbon-negative building technology.
Architect Kevin Baxter designed Spring Wind Farm as two separate structures—one residential, one communal—to accommodate differing spatial needs and improve structural efficiency, creating a courtyard-like layout at the heart of the site.
A RC h ITE
ct: R yAN ENS che D e
b UI l D e R : b RA c E EN te RPR i S e S L l C
ph OTO g RAphy: A l ON kO p PE l
Tucked into a south-facing meadow in Hillsdale, the Meadow Passive House is a quietly radical expression of what it means to live well—and lightly—on the land. Designed by Brooklyn-based architect Ryan Enschede as a speculative development with collaborators Clemens Bilan and Nick Warren, the single-story, 3,500-square-foot home meets the rigorous Phius+ 2018 standard for energy performance while pushing back on the aesthetic cliches of boxy, highperformance design.
“We didn’t want to just plunk a house in the middle of a clearing,” says Enschede. Instead, the home nestles into the slope of the site, stretching low across the landscape and drawing the meadow in through a long, open central room with floor-to-ceiling glazing front and back. There are no sills to interrupt the view—just uninterrupted planes of glass, letting the landscape slip through the architecture like wind through tall grass.
As a certified Passive House, the building functions like a thermos—highly insulated and airtight, with a Brink ERV system supplying constant fresh air. But for Enschede, passive doesn’t mean passive-aggressive. “It’s a benchmark, not a style,” he says. “We have a huge north-facing glass wall. That’s not typical for Passive House, but we just paid for it elsewhere— with more insulation.”
He’s emphatic that high performance doesn’t require heroic feats of construction, just coordination. “Passive House isn’t hard,” Enschede insists. “You need good consultants and a team that’s on board, but it’s just quality control. You can’t BS your way through it.”
He worked with Phius consultant Kramer Silkworth and
verifier Aidan Maynard, alongside mechanical engineer John Lorchard—part of a tight-knit, capable community that helped smooth the way through certification. For windows, Enschede chose IKON, a Brooklyn-based importer of high-performance units from Poland. “The value you get from that part of the world is incredible,” he says. “The door hinges alone are amazing.”
The construction itself used familiar methods—two-bysix walls with ZIP sheathing and truss framing—to keep tradespeople comfortable and reduce the risk of costly mistakes. One unusual feature: the frost-protected shallow foundation, which eliminates footings in favor of an insulated slab that keeps ground temperatures stable without a full basement.
Because the house was built on spec, finishes were intentionally restrained—simple wood floors, clean detailing, and minimal adornment. “We didn’t want it to be too idiosyncratic,” Enschede says, “but we still wanted it to feel modern and warm.”
Beyond the energy performance and architectural finesse, the project also marked a turning point for Enschede personally. It was his first architect-led development project— and he’s already planning another. “There’s a level of juice when it’s your money, your decisions,” he says. “You’re not answering to a client in the moment. It’s direct, and it’s fun.”
The result is a home that’s as grounded in its site as it is forward-thinking in its performance—a meadow-made modern house that’s easy on the eyes and even easier on the environment.
— Brian K. Mahoney
Above:
Architect Ryan Enschede designed Meadow Passive House to meet Phius+ 2018 standards without sacrificing architectural ambition—balancing airtight construction, solar orientation, and visual openness in a highperformance envelope.
Opposite, above: Floor-to-ceiling IKON windows blur the boundary between indoors and out while delivering the airtightness and thermal performance required for Passive House certification.
Opposite, below: The one-story design stretches wide rather than tall, emphasizing horizontal flow.
Above:
The low-slung, single-story form hugs the natural slope of the meadow, minimizing site disturbance and reinforcing the home’s quiet integration with the landscape.
Below, left:
During construction, exposed ceiling ductwork reveals the home’s highefficiency ventilation system—a Brink ERV that ensures constant fresh air with minimal energy loss.
Below, right:
Technicians conduct a test to verify the home’s airtightness—a key step in achieving Phius+ 2018 Passive House certification.
HOT WATER SOLUTIONS HAS BEEN A LEADING HVAC SPECIALIST FOR OVER 25 YEARS
In recent years, air source heat pumps have gained significant popularity as a reliable, energy-efficient heating and cooling solution for homes and businesses. With everyone hopping on the bandwagon, however, Matt LeFevre, owner of Kingston-based Hot Water Solutions (HWS), says it’s more important than ever to make sure that heat pump installation is done by a local expert in the field. “There’s a lot that goes into installing heat pumps the right way,” he says.
Since the company was founded by LeFevre’s father in 1996, HWS has been the area’s go-to specialists in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical services. When LeFevre took over as owner in 2016, he began focusing on growing the energy-efficiency end of the business while prioritizing the smalltown feel that the company has always been known for. He has invested in growing a knowledgeable team that now serves Ulster, Dutchess, Greene, Columbia, and Albany counties, and a new 3,500-square-foot warehouse in Saugerties that houses their expanding operation.
“We’re local people that believe in green energy initiatives,” he says. “As the business has grown, we’ve been able to provide ‘big company’ kind of service. It’s the best of both worlds.”
One of the things that the HWS team is known
for is their expert approach to guiding home and business owners through the heat pump installation process. They take a whole-house approach to designing the system—inspecting the installation and windows, and even doing research on the building ahead of the first site visit. “We take everything into account before we size any system,” LeFevre says.
Their primary goal is to ensure that the system is properly sized for the building. Oversizing is the number one installation issue LeFevre says he sees. Not only are larger units more expensive to install, they’re unable to maximize energy efficiency—resulting in an increased electric bill and unnecessary wear on the unit. “Having a heating system that’s sized correctly is 80 percent of what makes it efficient,” he says. “A lot of people have this fear that it’s not going to get hot enough in their house in the winter because it’s too cold here, but over the past 15 years there has been significant development of cold-climate heat pumps that work well in the Northeast.”
HWS’s dedication to getting things right shows in the service their customers get from day one—and in their almost 500 five-star reviews on Google. LeFevre is always the first point of contact for customers, walking them through the process, and
providing cost estimates on the same day as the first site visit.
“After doing extensive research and interviews with various HVAC firms, we chose Hot Water Solutions for our Mitsubishi Heat/Cool mini-split system,” says homeowner Joanne Iodice. “From initial evaluation to final installation, Matt and his crew were top notch. The team is extremely knowledgeable and efficient, stopping to answer any questions we had along the way, as well as an indepth tutorial once the units were up and running.”
“We go over the top to make sure people feel comfortable that they’ve chosen us,” LeFevre says. “We offer a three-year labor warranty, which is the longest in the area.”
Because of the expense and the changing landscape of state incentives, the HWS team is also well-versed in available rebates and tax credits, and they stay up-to-date with energy-related grants and loans offered to businesses by local governments throughout the Hudson Valley. “We’re constantly looking for the next leg up to make sure this is always affordable for people in our area,” he says. “We’re always going to get you the most money back for your heat pumps as possible.”
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Sandleraia.com
An award-winning firm with more than three decades of experience shaping distinctive homes and commercial spaces throughout Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. From new builds to historic preservation, each project reflects the firm’s commitment to sustainability, craftsmanship, and creating spaces with joy for clients.
New Paltz (845) 255-4774
Alfandre.com
Alfandre Architecture designs ultra-energy-efficient, sustainable buildings that uplift communities and honor the planet. Specializing in adaptive reuse, they navigate complex regulations and offer full architectural services. With a focus on collaboration and resilience, their mission is to create meaningful, inspiring spaces that support human well-being and environmental stewardship across diverse project types.
Port Ewen (845) 338-3864
Ecsbetterhome.com
Architects, builders, and homeowners across the Hudson Valley rely on Energy Conservation Services—the Building Science Experts—for creating comfortable, efficient, and healthy indoor environments. Every component of a building affects overall performance, making expert analysis essential. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, a qualified building scientist can help identify and resolve issues such as moisture, drafts, rodent infestation, and poor indoor air quality—conditions that may lead to serious health concerns. Early intervention helps prevent costly repairs, enhances comfort and safety, and reduces long-term heating and cooling expenses.
RIVER ARCHITECTS
Cold Spring (845) 265-2254 Riverarchitects.com
River Architects is a full-service architecture and design studio based in New York’s Hudson Valley. Blending global insight with local context, they create sustainable, intelligent designs—from public projects to private homes—rooted in Passive building principles. Their energy-efficient spaces use low-emission materials and air-tight, ventilated construction. Defined by clean lines, natural materials, and abundant light, their homes balance beauty, function, and comfort. Each design responds to client needs and site potential, fostering strong indoor-outdoor connections and low-maintenance living. With a fresh, innovative approach, they craft thoughtful, inspiring spaces that support everyday living—whether for work, gathering, or quiet retreat.
By Anne Pyburn Craig Photos by David McIntyre
hen Molly Rhodes moved to Beacon in 2018, she didn’t anticipate getting into politics. “I was looking for ways to get involved, but I vaguely expected it would be more in the arts or social services bucket, since that’s my background,” she says. “And my husband’s in the performing arts. But I sort of lucked into politics and found that I enjoyed it.” Elected to city council in 2021, she won a second term in 2023 and has now set her sights on the County Legislature’s District 18 seat, where she’d be representing three-fourths of Beacon instead of just Ward 1.
What she’s found is that in a place like Beacon, people don’t tend to stay put in just one bucket. “If there’s something that interests you, if you don’t already know the person doing it, you probably know someone who does know them,” she says. “And people are fairly approachable, especially when you’re interested in what they’re doing. People come here and say, ‘Okay, this is a great place to get involved in this cause I support, or organize an event, or open my small business,’ and find allies. Things change— we used to love the Second Saturday art scene, and Covid ended it. But that spirit of creating something together hasn’t gone anywhere. Beacon is very
fortunate, both in the people from here and the ones who choose to come here and dedicate their energy to maintaining that.”
As a council member, Rhodes has wrestled with the issues generated by that powerful magnetism, and helping pass the Good Cause Eviction law a couple of years ago, getting state funds opened up for homeowners who want to build accessory dwelling units, looking at ways for the city to improve its communication around both the constant flood of current events and the supports available to struggling folks, and letting people vent their frustrations about Saturday traffic on Main Street. “Housing costs aren’t going to revert back unless there’s a major financial crisis, in which case people would still be unable to afford homes,” she says. “We need to keep getting creative.”
The Scene
Beacon Bonfire, says actress America Olivo Campbell, was an idea that first sparked to life around socially distanced backyard campfires in the chill of the pandemic. “We were dreaming of a day when we could really get together again, and Tim Parsaca—he worked at Madison Square Garden for decades and knows how
to build stages—was so antsy during Covid that he just immediately said, ‘Yes, yes!’ and started drawing things up,” she says. “It was so much fun conjuring it up.” A stellar group came together and started throwing “baby bonfires” to practice; the resulting Main Street music and art bash has, at this writing, been nominated among the five favorites in the Hudson Valley by readers of our sister publication Chronogram. The 2025 event will happen in November.
Campbell, like Rhodes, has found that cultural and political issues in this little city are interwoven and rootsy. “My husband Chris really likes to be involved, so he found the Beacon Dems and was knocking on doors right away, meeting a ton of people,” she says.
“In the city, at a meeting or a demonstration, you’re part of a huge crowd. In the arts, you hear ‘no’ a lot and you feel like a little kid trying to walk around in Mommy’s high heels. Here, we’ll walk down Main Street together to meetings because every voice counts so much, and the support for projects is so generous. It just feels like everybody’s up for figuring stuff out together. We didn’t necessarily intend to be here full time at first—we both hold multiple passports, and we’ve been all over. But wherever we go, we just always find ourselves eager to get back to Beacon.”
ZIP CODE: 12508
POPULATION: 15,025
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $93,347
PROXIMITY TO MAJOR CITY: Beacon is 60 miles from New York City and 90 miles to Albany.
TRANSPORTATION: Beacon has its own MetroNorth Station. It’s a little over an hour to get to Grand Central Station by train. I-84 runs across the north end of Beacon, Route 9D runs through the city’s west end, and Route 9 is about a mile to the east. Stewart
International Airport is 14 miles west in New Windsor.
NEAREST HOSPITAL: Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall is 5.6 miles away in Newburgh.
SCHOOLS: The Beacon City School District has four elementary schools (Glenham, Sargent, JV Forrestal, and South Avenue), one middle school (Rombout), and the Beacon High School. Independent schools are Hudson Hills Academy Montessori (Pre-K-7) and New Covenant Learning Center (Pre-K-4).
POINTS OF INTEREST: Dia:Beacon, Long Dock Park, Beacon Sloop Club, Denning’s Point, Madam Brett Museum, Mount Gulian Historic Site, Bannerman Castle, Mount Beacon, Howland Cultural Center, Hudson Beach Glass, Towne Crier, Beacon Movie Theater, Savage Wonder Gallery & Theater
The Market
Emmanuel Jiminez, an agent with Upstate Curious, says that while inventory is still tight, there’s a bit of healthy cooling in progress. Not a lot, mind you. “Beacon has become a premium destination, and you do see homes past the million-dollar range,” he says. “And you still see some homes getting multiple offers and bidding wars. But in other neighborhoods—maybe not as close to Main Street, but still close enough— you’ll find properties under $500,000. And if you’re a first-time homebuyer who’s serious about Beacon, but can’t quite afford it, I’d recommend looking at condos for a start.”
As is the case throughout the Hudson Valley, properties that are prepped for market and realistically priced don’t last long. “Houses that don’t need a lot do get swallowed up pretty fast, because there’s a line of buyers waiting. You need to have your financing all set, and it’s a really good idea to work closely with someone who knows the local market well. I think that Beacon, with more residential properties coming into the pipeline and more condos being built, has found the right formula for growth. Beacon real estate
isn’t hot because it’s a prestigious zip code—it’s hot because people get sold on being part of the community and fall in love, want to make a life here. Beacon has transformed from a hidden gem to a full-on destination, and the real estate market reflects that.”
At press time, there were seven Beacon condos offered on Realtor.com, ranging from under $500,000 (four choices) to a threebedroom on Main Street at $1,390,900, featuring all the modern conveniences amid original beams, exposed brick, original steel fixtures, soaring ceilings, and 12-by-12-foot windows. A move-in-ready two-bedroom Cape Cod on a dead-end street “minutes from Main Street” and dating to 1872 was listed for $385,000; a 2,570-square-foot three-bedroom, in need of “a little” TLC but close to Main Street, was priced at $475,000. A “meticulously maintained” four-bedroom Victorian, a block from Main Street and walkable from the train, featuring original 1900 crown moldings and floors along with a chef’s kitchen and yard full of flowering trees, was pending at $749,000 after just 11 days on the market.
By Anne Pyburn Craig Photos by David McIntyre
fter a three-year process that included 15 public meetings and involved about 1,000 people, the Village of Rhinebeck passed a new comprehensive plan in September of 2024, replacing one that had been developed in 1993. In April of this year, the village learned they’d been awarded the distinction of Best Comprehensive Plan by the New York Planning Federation at its annual meeting. The awards committee cited “an outstanding commitment to smart growth, sustainability, and civic engagement” and an “exemplary” level of community engagement, leading to “the foundation for a sustainable and prosperous future.”
Now the real work begins. “We’re working on the implementation,” says Village Trustee Lydia Slaby, “and revising our zoning, so there will be a lot more conversation to come. One of the things we identified was that we lack a solid mix of housing options. We have nothing in-between starter apartments and large single-family homes; we have lots of older folks alone in large single-family homes that aren’t ideal for their needs, but they don’t have anywhere to move within the community and don’t want to leave. So with the comp plan and zoning, we’re looking to allow and support people who want to create suitable housing for those residents.”
Adding housing in a densely packed, 1.5-square mile space is a challenge, but Slaby says fresh thinking leads to fresh possibilities. “We have an old schoolhouse in the village center that, until a year ago, could only have been torn down and replaced with two units. So we’ve reworked the code to allow that particular building to be redeveloped as 10 units, one income-restricted and five of them ADAcompliant. It’s beginning.”
Even in 1993, affordability was identified as a potential issue, but the zoning at the time was exclusionary by nature, requiring large lot sizes and banning multi-family housing. “So for the last 25 years, we’ve been dealing with zoning that’s made housing in the village difficult,” says Slaby. “With the comp plan and new zoning, we’re trying to make sure we don’t make that mistake again.”
The goal, Slaby says, is “to bring the village back to its roots and away from the suburbanstyle development that was happening in the mid-20th century. We want a diverse, eclectic business community and a healthy mix of housing. Getting to this point took four years of conversations and a lot of respectful disagreements among neighbors; a big part of the job is making sure we don’t listen only to the loudest voices in the room.”
“When we opened, we were the only jewelry store in town, and now there are four,” says Bruce Lubman, who opened Hummingbird Jewelers with his wife Peggy in 1978. “And we’re thriving. When we first got here, there were two restaurants. I remember long lines just to get a cheeseburger when the kids were small; now, we have tons of international cuisine and there are no bad choices.”
When Lubman arrived, hay wagons were a common sight in the village on a Saturday; now, he says, Teslas and Maseratis prevail. “This was the first place of concentrated wealth in the Colonial era,” he says, “and it always had an upper-echelon community and a blue-collar community, wellintegrated and mutually respectful. We first came to Dutchess County as caretakers on a farm, worked our way into craft sales, and saved up $5,000 to open our store, which seems incredible now. But we were members of a collective, so by collaborating with talented people, we were able to fill our first store with beautiful things.”
Lubman, an environmental lawyer before he became a jeweler, remembers the pitched battles that stopped proposals like the one that would have placed a mall and 1,500 condos along Route 9, and fended off corporate chains that wanted a piece of
ZIP CODE: 12572
POPULATION: 2,502 (Village) 7,602 (Town)
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $75,075 (Village) $92,743 (Town)
PROXIMITY TO MAJOR CITY: Rhinebeck is 61 miles from Albany and 102 miles from New York City.
TRANSPORTATION: Rhinebeck is 20 minutes from New York State Thruway Exit 19 (Kingston) via the Kingston/Rhinecliff Bridge, 15 minutes from the Taconic State Parkway, and just under an hour from I-84. The Rhinecliff Amtrak station, a sevenminute drive, offers departures every hour or two to both Penn Station in New York City and to Albany/ Rensselaer, and train connections can be made to Newark International Airport. Closer airports include Stewart International in Newburgh (about an hour away) and Albany International (about 1 hour 10 minutes), and there are multiple airport car services connecting Rhinebeck to JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia airports.
NEAREST HOSPITAL: Northern Dutchess Hospital, an 84-bed, acute care community hospital with numerous specialty care centers, is located in the Village of Rhinebeck.
SCHOOLS: Rhinebeck Central Schools serve students in grades K-5 at Chancellor Livingston Elementary School, grades 6-8 at Bulkeley Middle School, and grades 9-12 at Rhinebeck High School. Progressive independent options nearby include Oakwood Friends School for grades six to 12 in Poughkeepsie; and Woodstock Day School and Zena Democratic School, both serving pre-K through grade 12 in Woodstock. Northern Dutchess Christian School in nearby Red Hook serves students in grades K-12. The nonprofit Astor Learning Center in Rhinebeck offers therapeutic and special needs educational and mental health services to grades K-8.
the Rhinebeck action. “So just about everything here is independent, and it shows,” he says.
Rachel Hyman-Rouse, founder and principal broker at Rouse + Co., says things are still tight and lively. “We don’t have enough inventory,” she says, “and of course, more buyers than sellers will support higher prices. Unlike during Covid or some other disaster, things that are overpriced tend to sit until the price is cut, but properties that meet the market’s demands and are priced right still move very quickly. A lot of sales happen offmarket, where a realtor learns that something is becoming available and already has just the right buyer who’s been waiting.”
The Hudson Valley, she says, is still “having a moment,” as evidenced by projects like the proposed One&Only property adjacent to the Culinary Institute of America in nearby Hyde Park. “They’re planning 40 or 50 ‘branded residences’ that will cost over $4,000,000 for two bedrooms,” she says, “and I don’t see the luxury market stopping anytime soon. Decent houses in the village are around a million, with higher-end stuff
costing three to five; it may not be 20 showings and 10 offers in two days anymore, but five showings and two offers still means a sale.”
People looking for something that’s relatively affordable, she says, may need to focus on compromise. “Look at everything in your price range, to get a feel for the market. People don’t want split-level ranches or houses on busier streets as much as they want the pristinely restored Colonial or the sleek modern in a secluded spot, but you still get a foothold in Rhinebeck.”
At press time, there was a three-bedroom 1805 home in the Village Historic District listed at $283,500; despite being in serious need of TLC, the sellers had multiple offers and had set a deadline for highest and best. A movein-ready two-bedroom farmhouse 10 minutes outside the village was listed for $495,000, and a three-bedroom ranch in the village was listed at $524,900. Most homes under $600,000 were “pending.”
For $1,175,000, one could consider a threebedroom on nearly 10 acres 10 minutes from village limits, with saltwater pool, passive solar and “vista views.”
POINTS OF INTEREST: Dutchess County Fairgrounds, Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, Wilderstein Historic Site, Beekman Arms Inn, Vlei Marsh, Ferncliff Forest Preserve, Poet’s Walk Park, Burger Hill Park, Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College.
By Joan Vos MacDonald
Perched on a wooded hillside in Woodstock, a four-story Adirondack-style home keeps watch over a century-old secret: it was built by the chief engineer of the Ashokan Reservoir, who chose the site not for its seclusion but for its sweeping view of the colossal public works project unfurling below. Back then, the vast reservoir—destined to quench the thirst of millions of New Yorkers—was still a muddy wound in the landscape. Today, a century of forest growth has swallowed most of the view. Most, but not all. One slender tower still peeks above the tree line, holding on to that original line of sight.
“At the time, you could see the reservoir from the top of the house,” says interior designer Greg Feller, who also co-owns Hudson Home. “Now there’s just a little tower in the back of the house where you can see the reservoir.”
To restore some of those reservoir views Feller did not need to eliminate any trees. Instead he commissioned a one-of-a-kind mural that brings both the pastoral landscape and the reservoir’s distinctive structures inside the home for year-round viewing.
The homeowner, a well-known author, had lived in the home for 30 years and, when she considered updating its interiors, she consulted Feller and his business partner/ husband, Richard Bodin. Bodin describes the home as “the kind of house you would have loved to live in as a kid.”
It’s perfect for hide and seek. “Because there’s a front stair and a back stair,” says Bodin. “There’s actually three sets of staircases.”
What the house did not have, however, is a foyer, and solving that design quandary ultimately led to creating its sylvan mural. In true Adirondack style, the home features an extensive wraparound porch, but the front door opens directly into a long narrow living room. To best organize the space, Feller placed an entry table at the center, separating the living space into two seating areas, rather than the single seating area that previously existed. “I wanted to create a sense of entry when you walked in,” says Feller.
The home’s refresh involved restoring favorite pieces of furniture, including pieces that belonged to the owner’s grandmother, but also adding some lighter-hued custom upholstered furnishings. The owner’s heirloom objects were ensconced in antique glass Italian curio cases. Texture was added with pottery, wicker pieces and small sculptures, but Feller felt the room really needed brightening.
“The room was very dark,” says Feller. “It had a dark wood ceiling, a dark wood floor, a stone fireplace, and dark wood trim on the wall. I wanted something to really brighten the room as much as possible. I explored other things, wall coverings, and it came to me: Why am I not paying attention to the surroundings and the nature and what’s important about the house?”
After thinking about the site, he proposed the idea of commissioning a mural. “The house is nestled in the woods,” says Feller. “The client has a strong affinity for nature and animals. I wanted to pay tribute to its location and its history by focusing on the reservoir, which is why we came up with this design for celebrating the reservoir on the walls of the living space.”
Above: Perched on a wooded hillside in Woodstock, this fourstory Adirondack-style home was built by the chief engineer of the Ashokan Reservoir to overlook his monumental project—its tower still offering a glimpse of the centuryold waterworks through the trees.
Opposite: Preliminary sketches and fabric swatches hint at the layered design process behind the reservoir mural, which blends architectural elements, wildlife studies, and a soft palette drawn from the surrounding woods.
blejerarch.com
To create the mural Hudson Home collaborated with Hudson Valley artist Richard Prouse, whose resume includes supplying decorative and scenic art for industrial and residential clientele, as well as painting scenery for Broadway plays. Prouse previously designed an installation for the garden that fronts the Hudson Home store, which Feller described as a “magical winter ice fantasy.”
The mural project began with the team asking the homeowner to share her favorite reservoir views, then Prouse set out to sketch some local flora and fauna. He even created a diorama to show the team how the mural might work. The mural surrounds the living room with romantic vistas of tree branches, flowing seamlessly over and softening the room’s corners. The muted green, blue, and wheaten landscape defines the room and at the same time visually knocks down the walls, making the living room feel like it’s actually set outside.
An existing pebbled stone fireplace was deftly incorporated into the mural landscape. “We played off that focal point and created a trompe l’oeil effect with the
walls adjacent to the fireplace so that it looked like the fireplace kept going into the mural,” says Feller.
The front door stands in the middle of the mural, as if inviting visitors to step outside and into the world depicted on the walls. A light switch was placed over the mural’s recreation of the reservoir pump house, looking unobtrusively like a structure door. The pastoral landscape includes depictions of bridges, smooth expanses of water, and even some waterfalls. There’s also a host of wildlife.
“Initially, animals were not going to be as prominent in the murals, but the client showed an interest in that,” says Bodin.
As a result, the painted woods are home to deer, a fox, an owl, a cardinal, and a heron. A painted squirrel seems poised to leap off the fireplace. One common misconception about murals is that they are always painted directly on walls. In this case, Prouse painted his scenery on canvas and applied the canvas to the walls. A canvas application means that if the homeowner ever moves, she can take the mural with her.
Feller explains the artist’s process: “He does all of his sketches on paper and then the paper gets laid down onto
ADIRONDACK DESIGN ARCHITECTURE
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the canvas and he has a wheel that has scoring teeth on it,” says Feller. “He traces all the outlines and it makes perforations in the paper. Then he has a sack thats filled with charcoal dust that he tamps onto his pattern and that transfers the pattern onto the canvas. Then he takes the paper away and he does his painting. The process that he uses is the same process that was used when they created the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.”
The mural’s natural hues resonate throughout. “The client gave us some direction in colors that she was attracted to,” says Feller. “And I intentionally wanted to use colors that were lighter and that would complement the dark wood tones in the room.”
The room’s lighter pieces include a powder blue velvet chair and a couch covered in a muted plaid, pale wood cabinets, and delicately hued rugs. The leopard print of a stool playfully mimics the circular shapes of the pebbled stone fireplace, while white chairs with a navy leaf print reflect the room’s rustic theme. A star-shaped light
fixture provides light from above.
The home’s new look is light, airy, and yet artfully textured, with a similar feel to the contents of the design firm’s store in Hudson, a lofty sun-filled space offering custom-upholstered furniture, distinctive finds and vintage pieces. The duo opened the Hudson store more than a decade ago to have a retail location, serves as a base for their interior design business, and as a source for other interior designers.
What Feller likes most about the home’s reservoir mural is the way it expands the room, both visually and in a viewer’s imagination.
“The room is long and narrow,” he says. “To me, this just takes your eye and continues out and creates a horizon line in the distance. And yeah, I think it’s lovely.”
It’s a room with more than one kind of view. The windows frame natural views in all their seasonal variations and the walls provide a panorama of the waterworks and woods, softly green in all seasons.
The backyard’s transformation into an extension of the home is complete. With shady pergolas for al fresco dining, swanky built-in kitchens, and more, outdoor living rooms have become as plush and inviting as any space indoors. Naturally, that means that discerning homeowners are looking for outdoor materials that match their design sensibilities and align with their values.
For almost 80 years, Williams Lumber & Home Centers has helped homeowners throughout the Hudson Valley make informed, lasting choices about their living spaces—indoors and out. A family-owned and operated business since 1946 with seven locations, including two kitchen and bath showrooms in Pleasant Valley and Rhinebeck, Williams has earned a reputation for offering trusted products that prioritize long-term value.
“Our customers rely on us to recommend brands that balance design, performance, and cost,” says Kim Williams, Senior VP at Williams Lumber & Home Centers. “As a family-owned company rooted in integrity, craftsmanship, and exceptional service,
we believe in partnering with brands that share our values—and Trex is no exception.”
Founded in 1996, Trex has long been a leader in the world of composite decking, offering materials that not only look beautiful but are engineered to endure. “It’s a product that delivers on durability, ease, and lasting value,” Williams says. “And for homeowners, that means a more enjoyable outdoor experience year after year.”
Sustainability-Focused from
Trex was founded with a commitment to making its decking from reclaimed and recycled materials. Crafted from 95 percent recycled materials— including reclaimed wood fibers and plastic film packaging—Trex’s composite material turns what was once seen as waste into long-lasting design. In 2023, the company sourced more than 320 million pounds of plastic film slated for landfill and nearly 516 million pounds of reclaimed wood fiber and waste from wood product manufacturers and orchards to make its products.
The company also offers NexTrex, a recycling
program for plastic film packaging like sandwich bags, cereal box liners, bubble wrap, and more, with community drop-off locations at hundreds of wellknown grocery and retail stores.
“People often don’t realize how much innovation has always gone into Trex’s composite material,” Williams says. “It’s the kind of smart design people are drawn to now: Sustainability that’s built in, not added on.”
While wood has long been the default for backyard projects, it comes with many long-term concerns— rot, splintering, weathering, and regular upkeep. Trex eliminates those issues for those who are tired of the annual maintenance treadmill. The composite material for its five product lines resists fading, staining, and mold, even in challenging climates.
“There’s a sense of relief that comes with not having to re-stain or replace boards every few years,” Williams notes. “You get to spend more time enjoying your space and less time maintaining it.”
With a baseline 25-year warranty for its most
Above:
Associates at Williams Lumber & Home Centers are highly familiar with Trex’s five distinct product lines, and can help with materials selection, personalized quotes, special-order colors and products, and more.
Opposite:
Crafted from 95 percent recycled materials—including reclaimed wood fibers and plastic film packaging—Trex’s composite material turns what was once seen as waste into long-lasting design.
budget-friendly option and a 50-year warranty on its premium lines, Trex offers peace of mind that its decks, railings, pergolas, and more will look and perform well for the long haul.
From cool-toned grays to rich, earthy browns, Trex offers a curated palette of colors and photorealistic woodgrain finishes that pair easily with a wide range of architectural styles. Whether designing a deck to complement stone, glass, or natural landscaping, the material adapts easily to homeowners’ visions.
“Design flexibility is one of Trex’s strongest qualities,” says Williams. “Homeowners want a space that feels personal and matches the tone of their home.”
The company’s range of complementary railing styles and boards also makes it easy to build a polished outdoor environment that feels complete from the start.
While composite decking does have a higher initial
price tag than pressure-treated wood, its longevity and minimal upkeep often make it the more economical choice over time. There are no recurring costs for sealing, painting, or replacing warped or damaged boards—just a deck that continues to look great with minimal effort.
“It’s really about value over time,” Williams explains. “When you invest in a material that doesn’t need constant attention or replacement, you’re budgeting smarter—not just for the project, but for the years ahead.”
Plan with Confidence at Williams
Building an outdoor space? Homeowners can bring their blueprints to any participating Williams location, and their expert associates will help with materials selection, personalized quotes, special-order colors and products, and more.
Stop by Williams to browse Trex decking displays, gather design inspiration, and speak with knowledgeable associates, and as Williams says, “Nail it right the first time.”
For more information, visit williamslumber.com/trex.
Architects Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang’s living room runs along the southern face of their open-concept design facing the nearby lake. Constructed from sustainably manufactured cross-laminated timber panels—or CLT—the home’s shell went up in a little over a week. The couple cut openings for windows and the sliding glass doors—but the extra CLT didn’t go to waste. “We actually design a lot of furniture too,” says Hoang. “The CLT is very strong. So we just asked the contractors to give us anything they had left, then designed pieces from all the scraps.”
Two architects went searching for their hearts’ desire, and found it in a friend’s backyard.
By Mary Angeles Armstrong
Photos by Michael Moran
Inspired by the home’s lakeside setting, the couple designed the two-story cube to maximize space for their family of four and minimally impact the landscape. Inside the cube a second-floor criss-cross, X-shaped volume conceals three private bedrooms and a study, with one arm opened to the floor below. Strategically sited circular skylights illuminate the first floor, creating an evolution of sunlight and shadow throughout the day and seasons.
Sometimes architecture starts with a material. Sometimes it starts with a landscape. And sometimes it starts with a paddle stroke.
Architects Mimi Hoang and Eric Bunge have been navigating the same Dutchess County lake for over a decade: They ’ve paddled along the same wooded shoreline, dived into the same deep water, and watched the same woods unfurl and shed through the seasons. The husband-and-wife cofounders of nArchitects regularly take on site-responsive projects across the globe. But no matter how far-flung the architectural commission, they always found their way back to the same fresh-water Hudson Valley microcosm to swim, kayak, or just relax with their children. “There’s just something magical about this lake,” explains Hoang. “It’s quiet, it’s peaceful—and it always felt like home long before it actually was.”
The couple did briefly consider buying property after starting their Brooklyn-based firm in 1999. “ We looked at several lots in the area but at the time concluded that we couldn’t afford it,” explains Bunge. After friends bought a shareable second home outside of Rhinebeck, they gave up their search to focus on growing both their firm and their family, content to visit the borrowed lake home regularly. “Since 2013 we estimate we’ve spent at least four months total in that house,” says Bunge.
“ We’d hike, explore the water, or visit our favorite restaurants and dream of eventually having a place of our own.”
Then the 2020 lockdown hit. With their firm’s projects on hiatus, the family decamped to the house and the couple revisited the idea of building a permanent weekend home.
“ We’d been mooching off our friends for years,” says Hoang. “ With time on our hands we wondered, ‘What if we built something nearby, something that could be ours?’”
Top: To blend into the woods, the couple settled on live-edged cedar shake siding for the exterior and left the wood to age naturally with the seasons. “We carefully calibrated the home’s position connecting it to the site,” says Bunge. “Each facade has one kink, either concave or convex, to pick up light in different ways and to create different views of the lake. “
Bottom: The 2,200-square-foot home sits on eight acres adjacent to a Duchess County lake that is the family’s longtime retreat. “At one point the home was about 15 percent bigger,” says Hoang. “We realized we couldn’t afford it so we pulled everything in almost three feet, tightening up the core.” Even with the reduced size, the cleverly planned interior leaves ample space for the family and their guests. Set back from the delicate lakeshore, the couple carved minimalist trails through the woods leading to a dock.
The home’s steel staircase, framed by slender, vertical steel rods that stretch from floor to ceiling, floats lightly between the first and second floor and adds a vibrant splash of green. “We wanted the stairs to feel really open,” says Hoang. “The vertical rods are like a veil, so you get a sense of enclosure without it feeling heavy.”
They decided to search online for buildable lots within a two-hour radius of New York City. Then they hit jackpot: eight raw, level acres with water access—all within their budget. The best part? It was straight across the lake. “ When we saw it we couldn’t believe it,” says Bunge. “ We’d been swimming and kayaking past that shoreline for years. It was a stretch we’d always returned to.” It wasn’t just the familiarity that appealed, the design challenge was also intriguing. “ We love projects that connect to place,” explains Bunge. “ We love the bravery of designing something totally new—it’s just like embarking on a journey.”
True North
Hoang, a Chicago native, and Bunge, who hails from Montreal, met while studying architecture at Harvard and quickly realized their creative sensibilities dovetailed. “ We try not to put things into compartments,” says Bunge. “ We both love thinking outside the box conceptually but we don’t want to stay there. Our work is very rooted in landscape, whether built or natural.” Their public-facing projects— including the redesign of Chicago’s Navy Pier and the
Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center, a net-zero building on Long Island--reflect their broader values. “ We utilize sustainable strategies in everything we design,” explains Bunge. “ We’re very interested in innovation and materials. “ When approaching residential commissions, the couple weaves the same core principals into every project.
“ We bring a lot of our values to the work,” says Hoang. “ We learn as much as we can about a place and enjoy understanding how people live, so we can make the most appropriate decisions.” Their design process is intentionally collaborative and open-ended, taking into account individual residents’ needs. “I think of it like a Ouija board,” explains Bunge. “ You never know which way it’s going to go. It has to do with all of us together—the client, their kids, designers. Somehow we all end up in a different place, but together.” They recognize the lakefront property ’s potential, even before stepping onto dry land. “ We had to move very quickly,” says Bunge. “Other than knowing the lake frontage well, we hadn’t spent any time on the property, but we knew it was right.” The couple bought the property in the spring of 2020 and began planning a nest for their own family ecosystem.
Opposite: The kitchen features northfacing views and is open to the dining area. The couple constructed a central kitchen island from CLT panels and aluminum framing, then topped it with white stone countertops. Because the CLT panels are solid, all electrical wiring had to either run along the walls or come from the floor. However, the couple rose to the challenge. “We had a lot of fun with the lighting,” says Hoang. “The surface-mounted light vines are like branches, crawling along the walls and ceilings.”
Above: In the kitchen, the couple elected to forgo upper cabinets and instead incorporated deep pantry shelves made from CLT panels. The couple hung a second floor-to-ceiling curtain created by Julie Newton of Curtains for You in the entryway, concealing a metal coat rack and shelves.
To design the house, the couple ditched their car and picked back up their paddles. “ We would kayak over, hang out there figuring where to site the house and what it should look like, and then kayak back to our friends,” says Hoang. “It was the best commute to work we ever had.” They wanted their design to sit lightly on the land, and to blend into the existing forest-scape rather than dominate it. “ We didn’t want a house that announces itself, blaring, across the lake,” says Bunge. “ We really wanted to pull back and be surrounded by the trees.”
Siting the home 200 feet from the shoreline, they chose a natural clearing for the building site to minimize tree removal. Then they settled on a simple, cube-shaped design, economically stacking 2,200 square feet of living space across two stories. The cube’s flat roof conceals solar panels and the couple incorporated slight convex and concave waves through the exterior walls. “Each facade has one kink in it,” explains Bunge. “ We calibrated those spaces to pick up light in different ways throughout the day and to capture different views so that the home was further connected to the site. “
The couple spent months paddling to and from the site, tweaking their designs with each new observation, and then re-paddled along the shoreline, imagining how the home would look from the water ’s edge. By 2022 they ’d finalized their plans and, once they ’d poured the concrete foundation, the wall and roof panels went up in eleven days. They decided to gamble on a new material, cross laminated timber—or CLT— throughout the construction. “It’s like plywood for giants,” explains Bunge of the one-inch thick engineered panels made from fire-resistant, fast growing spruce. “It’s been in the air for a while, but we thought we should try it ourselves before we recommend it to clients.”
They utilized CLT as both framing and finish, chopping cutouts for windows and panoramic, sliding glass doors along the exterior envelope. They elected to leave the interior walls unfinished to weather naturally, and have been pleasantly surprised by the results. “ We aren’t fans of drywall,” says Hoang. “But we love wood. The CLT interiors feel warm, like living inside a tree.” They chose live-edge cedar siding for the exterior, a technique pioneered by early colonial settlers. “Now
we have the newest wood construction inside and the oldest outside,” says Hoang. “It’s a traditional, historic counterpoint to the interior CLT panels. “
Like Clockwork
To maximize flexibility for themselves, their teenage children, and occasional guests, the couple designed the interior around a bold, two-story central core, creating a “ housewithin-a-house” in a cross shaped design. Playing with the cross pieces—the intersecting center, axes, and alternating extensions—they anchored and organized the interior spaces without sacrificing flow. “Everything happens around that central axis,” says Bunge.
On the first floor, the enclosed core conceals the home’s mechanics and a bathroom. From this center, the kitchen, dining area, living room and entryway extend along each axis opening outward in all four cardinal directions and the surrounding woods. Custom floor-to-ceiling curtains ensconce the living room for extra privacy. In another corner, double height ceilings accommodate an indoor basketball court for their kids.
Upstairs, the crisscross is inverted. Reached by a leafygreen metal stairwell, the second-floor landing is open to the downstairs, while the three other cross extensions enclose three bedrooms and a study. With basketball netting for safety walls the ad-hoc landing space is ideal for roughhousing or overflow guests. An enclosed shared bathroom and laundry sit at the center of the cross. Between the enclosed second floor arms, the negative spaces form four distinct double height first floor corners—three punctuated with skylights. “ We call it the clock house, explains Hoang. “Because the light rotates around the core throughout the day and lights up each corner. “ Outside, the couple remain committed to minimizing their impact on the landscape. To replace the trees they cut down, they ’ve replanted native species and replaced invasive species along the waterline with native plants and mushroom spores. Despite their deep connection to the lake, the family spends more time indoors than expected. “ We built it to connect to the setting,” says Hoang. “But we really love being inside the house.” When they ’re ready to visit friends—or revisit their old water haunts—they hop back in their kayaks, now permanently parked at the shore, and crisscross the water.
Left: In a second-floor bedroom, the couple utilized CLT scraps to create a built-in desk and floating bookshelf. “When you cut a window, you get a perfect rectangle,” explains Bunge. “We ended up using every piece. “
Right: Located in the structure’s central column, the home’s two bathrooms feature solar tubes and contrasting textured surfaces. On the first floor, the concrete shower floor is inlaid with leaves as a natural anti-slip design, aesthetically tying the interior design with the lake setting.
Designer Mari Mulshenock doesn’t shrink in the face of design challenges—she relishes them. “EvolveD Interiors is a full service, concept-to-completion firm,” explains Mulshenock, the founder and lead designer at EvolveD Interiors Design & Build in Woodstock. “Our team is not just decorators, we’re a design-build firm that oversees everything. What we do is more like reimagining architecture, but with an eye toward what it will be like to actually live in a space every day.”
With over 30 years of design experience, Mulshenock has developed a keen eye for a property’s hidden potential. She and her team often take structures down to the studs and then rebuild, with the owner’s unique requirements in mind. Along the way, she oversees every detail—developing plans, producing vision boards, collaborating with homeowners, and vetting and managing construction crews to ensure they make the most of a property’s potential. “Details can make or break a project’s success,” she says. “I shake people’s hands on the way in, and then shake their hands again on the way out. From inception through completion, the client can be involved as little or as much as they want to be.”
In 2023, when the redesign of a dilapidated Saugerties property came across her drawing board, she wasn’t daunted by the project’s demands. “The owners actually already lived next door and knew the property well,” says Mulshenock, of the ramshackle rambler. “They saw the home’s redesign as an opportunity to create something really special.”
Above: EvolveD Interiors Design & Build transformed a dark, cramped craftsman in Saugerties into an airy, open concept that captures picturesque views of the property’s wooded setting.
Opposite: EvolveD’s founder and lead designer, Mari Mulshenock, made the home’s distinctive seethrough fireplace a centerpiece of the new design.
Country Living.
However, fixing it up would need a lot of work. Previous owners had torn off the cedar shake siding and were using it as firewood. Inside, the rooms were dark and choppy, divided by an overabundance of interior walls. “It was like a warren,” says Mulshenock. “It was all little rooms and small spaces. There was no light and no flow.”
Still, Mulshenock saw great bones. While walking through the home, she’d caught sight of something else—a glimmer of design potential that could serve as the restoration’s North Star.
“There was a two-story, see-through fireplace—it was almost a Midcentury Modern-inspired element,” she remembers. “I saw the fireplace and knew it was going to become the centerpiece of the redesign.”
Over the course of just 11 months, Mulshenock transformed the neglected home into a sleek 3,000-square-foot contemporary, nestled in a bucolic six-acre setting. To realize her vision, she took the home down to its shell, leaving in place the original salvageable features. “First, we opened everything up by knocking down some interior and exterior walls,” she says. “After that, we took the home down to the studs, fully reimaging the floor plan.”
On the main floor, Mulshenock envisioned an open concept living room and kitchen space that offered more natural flow
between the rooms. The design took full advantage of the surrounding views. She paid special attention to emphasizing the beauty of the revamped see-through fireplace, one of the home’s only pre-existing notable features. To balance the rooms on either side, she bumped out the living room area, adding a 12-by-20-foot extension. To heighten the living room’s dramatic effect, Mulshenock incorporated a 22-foot vaulted ceiling and added exposed pine beams crafted by Woodstock Wood. Three walls of generously proportioned Pella windows with custom black grilles blur the line between the living room and the home’s streamside setting. “You can hear the water all the time,” says Mulshenock. “It’s just magical.”
By raising the existing kitchen ceiling, Mulshenock exposed the chimney column to the roof. Now the home’s focal point, she recovered the fireplace with a charcoal black ledgestone. “The fireplace is now the first thing you see when you walk inside,” she explains. “It has really become the heart of the home. It just draws you right in.”
Reimagining the home’s boxy kitchen was also key. As with the adjacent living room, Mulshenock wanted to expand the room to encourage flow. Here, instead of remaining confined by the home’s original footprint, she cleverly captured space from an oversized laundry room, carving out an alcove for the refrigerator and surrounding Shaker cabinetry. She reinvented the remaining laundry space as a new powder room, finishing
the walls with a distinctive black-and-white wallpaper selected by the homeowner.
A suite of GE Cafe appliances in matte white further streamlines the visual flow from living room to kitchen.
Mulshenock collaborated with the homeowner, selecting classic stone counters in a contrasting black leathered finish. She also added a kitchen island in the center of the newly expanded footprint, maximizing counter space and creating an additional eating area. Sliding doors lead from the kitchen to a covered porch. She added heating and raised the floor for easy access. The newly revamped screened porch is capped with a soaring vaulted roof featuring pine tongue and groove.
The ground floor’s overhaul was equally impressive. Like the main level, the space was carved up into smaller rooms. The home’s main entrance was previously cramped, opening directly into a small hallway and staircase that lead upstairs to the rest of the house. “There was a wall dividing it from the rest of the ground level,” she explains. “It was a dark space with unrealized potential.”
After knocking down the interior walls to create one large, flowing lounge, Mulshenock relocated the front door to a side of the house that offered a more inviting entryway and added a Rustica glass-paneled door. Inside, a new custom wood staircase was also crafted by Woodstock Wood, with metal railings by Matthew Weinberger that complement the airy redesign.
Mulshenock discovered the home’s second floor also had untapped potential. “I realized that if we raised the attic roof, we could create a bonus space for the owners,” she says. The room, now outfitted as an office and music studio, enjoys uninterrupted views of the property’s lush acreage. A new staircase leading from the kitchen connects the bonus room to the rest of the home while still preserving privacy on the second floor.
Mulshenock also refined the home’s exterior design, giving the structure a serene curb appeal. Instead of replacing the dilapidated cedar shake, she opted for crisp white board-andbatten siding that instantly draws the eyes to the clean, newly simplified lines of the structure even from a distance. A black standing-seam metal roof coordinates with the black trimmed windows. Sliding Pella glass doors lead to a newly constructed Zuri decking system overlooking the adjacent pond and stream.
Recently, working with Rich Vizzini of the Wolf Team Catskills at Corcoran Country Living, the owners decided to sell the property and handed the keys over to a proud new owner. For Mulshenock, satisfaction of a job well done not only came from the property’s quick sell-time: it is knowing she and her team had the vision to transform the once-dilapidated house into a welcoming home that the new owners would enjoy for years to come. “It is so rewarding,” she says, “When someone tells me years later how much they love living in their home.”
EvolveDinteriors.com
By Lindsay Lennon
Photos by Chris Mottalini
Like many New Yorkers, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s mind began to wander north during Covid. The full-time weaving, ceramics, sculpture, and film artist was isolating with her father in her Manhattan apartment, and the city was “kind of dead,” she recalls.
In the midst of researching and visiting locations upstate, Zhang initially toyed with the idea of buying property in Catskill, which her father found a bit “too rural, too raw,” she says. (Her dad, now retired, divides his time between China and New York, while her mother still resides in China and visits a few times a year). However, while exploring the east side of the Hudson, they found themselves sharing a meal at the now-defunct restaurant Gaskins in Germantown.
Zhang found the modest town center “very small, but cute,” and decided to browse available properties in the town on their way back into the city.
“Everything was coming naturally. We weren’t so crazy about a specific location—we were looking at a lot of different places,” says Zhang, who came to New York from Shanghai for college a little over a decade ago and has lived here since. “It was more about serendipity.”
Zhang ended up falling in love with a 20-acre parcel in Germantown comprising a swath of flat farmland, as well as a small, forested hill at the top of the plot, replete with deciduous trees. Destiny took over, and Zhang decided this was the place to build her residence and artist studio. (She has since sold 10 of her 20 acres to her mother’s business partner, who plans to build another house on the plot.)
The monochromatic exterior hues and gently curved structure were informed by homewoner Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s trip to China’s Huizhou province.
Above: The open-plan living and dining area is decorated according to Zhang’s Bauhaus-inspired taste. A vibrant woven throw by Zhang is slung over the couch.
Opposite, above: The inconspicuous nature of the house was born of Zhang’s desire to build “something not so intrusive to the landscape.”
Opposite, below: Zhang’s upstairs bedroom leads out to its own private terrace overlooking the wooded hill behind the house.
“It just has this very magical American landscape,” says Zhang. “It has a little hill that’s not super high altitude, and when you go to my plot, you have to go through this farming land—you see corn on the one side, fruit trees on the other side, and then you see a lot of farmhouses.”
For the build, Zhang enlisted Koray Duman of the Buro Koray Duman architecture firm, based in New York City and Istanbul. The two met through a mutual art world connection, Candice Madey, who hosted a show inside a gallery that Duman had designed.
Duman says he worked on plenty of residential renovations in the early days of his firm, but eventually he moved toward designing mostly arts and cultural institutions in New York City—including the Center for Arts and Advocacy, several Lower East Side galleries, and the Islamic Cultural Center, to name a handful. Along the way, Duman was charged with erecting and/or renovating various arts-related spaces in the Hudson Valley, including an award-winning storage and exhibition space for artist Richard Prince on a 250-acre plot.
Since Zhang’s biggest priority in conceptualizing the structure was having ample studio space—Manhattan, she admits, is “quite limited” in this respect—Duman was a natural fit for the job.
Duman sited the 2,500-square foot structure at the intersection of the plot’s flat farmland and forested hill, which provides views of both landscapes. The house has two distinct zones, with the weaving and ceramics studio on its north side. The living spaces are on the west side, including a modest kitchen; two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an open-plan living/dining room with a cozy wood-burning stove. The studio and living spaces are connected by a large deck, which Zhang cites as her favorite feature of the home.
“The scale of the [studio] space is not big, but the height of it gives you space to think and experiment with your thoughts,” says Duman. He adds that the studio, sitting at a right angle from the rest of the home and complete with a cutout window overlooking the farmland where Zhang’s desk sits, brings in ample northern sunlight, which he describes as “never harsh. It’s never direct, but there’s always natural light coming. It was important to bring that constant, continuous light without making it too destructive.”
Duman designed the house with several ecofriendly features, including geothermal heating and cooling; a super-tight envelope; a high-performing efficient glass door system from German manufacturer UNILUX; and building the storage garage into the earth of the hillside for passive climate control.
A sculptural wooden staircase anchors the interior of Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s Germantown home, flanked by built-in shelves displaying a minimalist, museumlike arrangement of books, art, and personal objects.
Additionally, the high-ceilinged living room was equipped with fans that blow in two directions to provide maximum cross ventilation.
The cozy high-ceilinged living room, also with Zhang’s artwork adorning the walls, boasts a sleek Nova 2 woodburning stove from MF Fire and an upright piano.
Duman says he and Zhang tackled the project as a play on the traditional A-frame barn vernacular design. In this sense, one of the home’s most striking features is its rounded curve shape that separates the living spaces from the studio. Duman says this divide was originally conceptualized as a sharp right angle, but in conversations with Zhang, the two decided “the home needed some softness to it, rather than almost cut-and-folded.”
The curved structure also serves as a cultural nod to Asian architecture, which greatly informed the exterior hues, as well. Aesthetically, Zhang—having recently visited China’s Huizhou province as the design and build of her home and studio commenced—was inspired by the monochromatic palettes of the ancient region’s architecture, which consists almost entirely of white concrete facades and black-stained cedar shingle roofs, a look echoed in the Germantown property.
“Miranda’s aesthetics are geared very much toward almost no color,” says Duman. This is also echoed in Zhang’s choice of interior furnishings, which Duman describes as “very restrained and modern.”
Bauhaus Girl
“I wanted it to be very minimal—leather, chrome, white, a little bit of wood,” adds Zhang, noting that she imported much of her vintage furniture from Brussels after visiting the
country with her mother. “I’m a Bauhaus girl, so everything is pretty much following that. I want the furniture to be almost serene, almost like an office space.” This was especially important to Zhang because her artwork, which adorns the walls of the home, is very “soft,” and thus she desired her furnishings to be a “quiet and serious” foundation for the art.
Zhang also fantasized about having a space where her father could maintain a vegetable garden, as she says her parents have never lived in a countryside setting before.
“In a way, I wasn’t so much focusing on the design aspect, but more on the functional side of it,” Zhang says. “I wanted the house to be low key—something not too showy. I wanted a modern house, but at the same time, I do want it to be almost like a blank canvas; something not so intrusive to the landscape, that I can gradually build something within.”
To that end, Zhang says the next phase she envisions for her home is to share it with others. This summer, she hopes to begin this process by collaborating with galleries in the city to curate shows and eventually open her home to fellow creators on the weekends.
“My goal, since I have a lot of space now upstate, is to use it as a platform to show something interesting,” says Zhang. “As an artist, I’m always so focused on my studio practice. But at the same time, I feel if you have a really good space, it’s important to know how to share the space, too. So, I think that will probably be the goal for this year—sharing the space with people and showcasing their works, building conversation, and giving context to the space, instead of it being purely private and residential.”
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Strolling down Warren Street in Hudson can feel like stepping into a cabinet of curiosities curated by an elegant, highly intelligent maniac. While the historic thoroughfare is renowned for its array of antique shops and boutiques, it’s the delightfully odd and unexpected items that truly capture the city’s eccentric spirit. Hudson offers a shopping experience that veers (or maybe careens) into the wonderfully weird. If you’re in the market for a statement piece or simply seeking the thrill of discovery, try the expansive Antique Warehouse at 99 South 3rd Street.
Taxidermy isn’t to everyone’s taste, aesthetically or morally, especially when it comes to exotic animals, but one of the most arresting items among the vendor stalls is a stuffed giraffe. On sale for $45,000, the animal was sourced by Devil in the Woods proprietor Ryan Lapoint. But here’s the real shocker: Lapoint actually has two giraffes in the shop, along with a hippopotamus, zebra, and moose. And those are just a few of the larger creatures that make up his massive, macabre menagerie.
“I end up with them because I have tall ceilings at the warehouse so I can display them,” Lapoint says of the giraffes. “They all came from museums and zoos. A lot of times when a big animal like that dies they feed the meat to the other animals and sell the skin.
“The bigger one is 19 feet and came from a zoo in California,” he continues. “I bought it at an auction and had it delivered here. The smaller one is 14 feet. They are both vintage. Probably from the 1970s or 1980s.”
Shoppers might gasp at the sight of all the rare stuffed animals but most of them were taxidermied in a different era and exist as museum-quality historical objects rather than hunting trophies. Still, visiting the Devil in the Woods stall, packed with preserved wildlife, feels a bit like being aboard Noah’s ark crossing the River Styx.
—Jamie Larson @DEVILINTHEWOODS
This 19-foot-tall taxidermied giraffe can be yours for $45,000. It’s available at Devil in the Woods inside the Antiques Warehouse in Hudson.
