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LAST JULY, WHEN I DID A POST about my friend Debre’s Victorian farmhouse on Shelter Island, her dining room was conspicuously absent. That’s because it looked like this:
Now, though, after a whirlwind pre-Thanksgiving effort, it looks like this:
Part of the project was revamping the credenza, below, from a $150 thrift shop find to something Design Within Reach-worthy. The piece had a bulky plinth on the bottom the full width of the base. “While it held stuff,” Debre says, “it was a heavy, dark blot against the wall.”
So she painted the top and sides white, then knocked the plinth off, used it to reinforce the base, and attached IKEA metal legs that raise the piece up about 8″ from the floor.
As Debre was finishing the job, she noticed the words “KNUD ERIK-JENSEN” on the back of the credenza. Genuine Danish mid-century modern, vastly improved by a clever gal with power tools.
A YEAR AGO TODAY, on the parlor floor of a Brooklyn brownstone, I started this blog. Sitting next to me was web designer Ken Smith, whom I’d hired to show me the ropes. I had a vague notion I ought to start a blog as a way to use the photos of apartments and gardens I’d scouted for magazines, and the notes for stories that never came to be. I didn’t want all that effort to go to waste.
Also, I had just published an article in the New York Times Escapes section about my weekend pastime, looking at old houses for sale. I wanted to keep writing about old-house real estate, and other things, without the hassle of pitching and selling the stories to an editor.
Ken steered me to WordPress.com, then to the Tarski ‘theme’ (design template), and then he opened a blank window called New Post and said, “Type something.” I could have written dfghjklytriuytrdcvbnm,lkjhgfrtyuiopl. Instead, without thinking too much about it, I typed what was top of mind at the time, “ISO The Perfect Beach House,” and casaCARA was on its way.
I invited readers to come along on my beach-house quest. Many have. Down the left-hand column of this page, there’s a number approaching 200,000. That’s cumulative hits, or clicks, over the course of the year, not individuals — but it’s still a lot of people, and I’m grateful to all of you for your readership and support (whoever you are).
My house search ended in May with the purchase of the East Hampton cottage where I now reside in happy exile, but my blog kept going. I’ve learned a lot in the past year, about blogging and about myself. I don’t need to live in New York City, for one thing. I’ve met a lot of creative, interesting, thoughtful people “out here,” and anyway, I like the quiet life. At 3:30PM today, determined to wrest all I could out of the fading afternoon, I spent an hour filling up a giant trash bag with twigs and rotting lengths of wisteria vine. I had so much fun, I vowed to do it every day, weather permitting, from now until springtime.
I realize that pleasures that simple do not a very exciting blog make. Not to worry. I’m going to Spain in January (it was 63 degrees in Seville today), blogging all the way. I pledge to start a Hamptons Voyeur series ASAP, snooping inside people’s homes to see how they’re decorated — continuing what began back in Brooklyn as Brownstone Voyeur. And I’m still forever looking at old houses on the market, because I can’t stop.
I’ve learned not to obsess over stats. My biggest day was back in March, when Brownstoner linked to casaCARA for the first time and I got 1,700 hits. Now I average 600-800/day. Granted, a lot of them are people looking for something on raccoons (my all-time top post is “Midnight Intruder,” about a raccoon break-in.)
Frequently, my motivation flags. At least once a day, I wonder, “Why am I doing this? There’s no money in it.” Then I tell myself, “Just keep going; it’s not yours to wonder why.” Some people enjoy my blog, and that makes me feel good. But it’s not as if I have voices in my head screaming to be heard. It’s more that having a blog keeps me on my toes (literally, trying to peek over gates and fences). It keeps my eyes open, gives me a reason to carry a camera. It’s a platform, structure, communication, fun.
I recommend it.
HERE I THOUGHT I WAS HOT STUFF, owning a few ordinary properties. Then along comes an e-mail from Tyler Hays, who thinks in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of square feet, and acreage in the hundreds as well.
Tyler, who owns a furniture company called BDDW, recently moved his manufacturing operation from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, where his new workshop is a 100,000-square-foot tannery in the Port Richmond section, and his family’s new home, in Fishtown, a 30,000-square-foot former Catholic school (BDDW still has a Manhattan showroom on Crosby Street in NoHo.)
He also owns an 1844 inn in Shandaken, N.Y., in the Catskill region, as well as the subject of this post: a pair of old stone horse barns on 147 acres 15 minutes north of New Paltz on the west side of the Hudson River.
It’s hard to believe such an elegant turn-of-the-20th-century complex exists in this part of the world. It looks like something out of Brideshead Revisited. Built originally for Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, a “wealthy industrialist and philanthropist,” it was later used as a Utopian school for boys.
Tyler bought the barns about 4 years ago to use as a workshop. Since moving to Philly, which he “absolutely loves” (he and I have a lot in common), he also became a father for the first time, and those long car rides “aren’t as much fun as they used to be,” he says. “I hate to sell it, but I can’t justify carrying it just to look at it once in a while.”
There’s also a 19th century farmhouse, which is itself a charmer. I’d take just that; wouldn’t know what to do with the barns. But perhaps someone out there does?
YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING at this 20′x25′ backyard with its battered brick wall, which is attached to the rear unit of the double-trinity house I own in the Old Kensington section of Philadelphia, that the garden is a source of great pleasure for the person who lives there.
It wasn’t me who put in the colorful annuals or hung the wind chimes; it was a tenant who enjoys the garden to the fullest.
This is how the garden looked when I bought the house in 2007:
And here’s how it looked during clean-up:
It took me just a couple of days to clean up this neglected disaster area shortly after I bought the building. Here’s what I did:
- Pulled and bagged up weeds, which were three feet high and everywhere
- Gathered and disposed of broken chairs and other garbage
- Created a simple framework of planting beds, outlined in salvaged brick and terracotta tile, all found in the backyard, on three sides of a squarish patio
- Laid down landscape fabric in the patio area to prevent the weeds from coming back
- Ordered a load of pea gravel delivered. It was dumped on the sidewalk in front and then carted by wheelbarrow through the alley to the backyard (that was the largest expense, about $120)
- Provided some planters with hostas and the French blue chairs
- Brought in few bags of compost to get the beds started
A pink-flowering hibiscus tree in a far corner was the sole existing plant; the tenant filled in the beds with marigolds and coleus. Voila! A garden at its most basic, but no less enjoyed for that.
View looking down from top floor
I’M MOSTLY KIDDING ABOUT THE ‘OY.’ CHANUKAH IS WONDERFUL, even if, midway through my first Chanukah here in East Hampton, it’s a far cry from the days when my kids were young and we sometimes had eight consecutive nights of festivities (cue the klezmer fiddles).
I started the holiday on an architectural high note, attending Friday night services at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, below, an extraordinary synagogue designed by Norman Jaffe in the mid-1980s. It synthesizes elements of Old World wooden synagogues, the shingle vernacular of the Hamptons, and Jaffe’s wedge-shaped modernist residences, which he built prolifically for clients in this area before his premature death in 1993.
The interior is built up of vertically etched pale wood pilasters, oddly angled in repeating layers, that create a literally awesome experience, warmer and more intimate than I would have imagined from the outside.
I made the traditional potato latkes the other night for my neighbors across the road. They came out delicious (it’s hard to mess up fried potatoes). I served them with homemade applesauce (secret ingredient: apricot jam), roasted Brussels sprouts and garlic, and a salad with blue cheese.
Three nights to go. Three more latke ops.
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