Cabin Fever

GUEST CABIN, SHE SHED, WRITING ROOM, LOVE SHACK…whatever it’s called, it’s the latest project to be (nearly) completed at my Long Island, N.Y., beach house, and I think it turned out pretty cute.

Here’s what the 14’x17′ cedar structure looked like a month or two ago:

In the two years I’ve owned the property, the shed had become a very handy storage unit for leftover lumber and bits and pieces of furniture I didn’t know what to do with. I had a yard sale in June and got rid of most everything. Then, the same two-man team who painted the house last spring and whipped up bookshelves and a closet for me removed the trio of aluminum windows, above, replacing them with a pair of French doors left behind by the previous owner.

A casement window went into the side of the building where no window had been before (above). In this photo the French doors are merely primed; I later had them painted brown to coordinate with the house. I was going to have the shed painted Aegean Olive to match the house as well, but after it was power washed, I decided I liked the look and would keep it that way, at least for now.

Naturally my little folly ended up costing a lot more than expected; the shed required a whole new roof, not just a patch job, including replacement of some rotted rafters. (The two skylights were salvageable, happily.) I sacrificed a deck for budgetary reasons, but I had the guys build three four-foot-wide steps leading to the French doors, using stringers from Home Depot.

The furnishings are all things I had on hand, including a rustic hutch from my previous house that had no place to go. It was all done in a feverish couple of days at the end of June, as the house is rented out for July. I hear the shed — no, cabin — was a great success with young visitors over the 4th.

   

Bottom Fishing in Upstate New York

LIVING IN THE HAMPTONS, as I do part-time, I’m often floored by the low prices of real estate in breathtakingly beautiful upstate New York. Around here, mean little ’70s houses are often priced at upwards of half a mil (they may not sell, but that doesn’t stop their owners from trying).

The Catskills and Hudson Valley abound with opportunities to buy a vintage country place cheap. I mean cheap. Real cheap. Did I say cheap?

For $400/month, give or take, you can have a place to garden. A place to commune with nature. Hell, a place to go. And quite possibly a good investment.

The 1930s year-round cabin, top, is in a lake community near Bethel (the real Woodstock, so described when it was was featured recently on the ingenious blog Reclaimed Home). The price tag is a mere $54,900. I see nothing bad about it, inside or out. Go here for a dozen more pictures. You will be impressed.

Meanwhile, the blog Upstater has been getting down, with a new feature called “Five Figure Fridays.” Yep — every Friday, a selection of houses under the 100K mark.

Last week’s installment featured the c. 1900 Pine Hill house above, and a front-porch Victorian in Wurtsboro of similar vintage, below.

Today’s bottom-fishing expedition spotlights Sullivan County, with five properties starting at 39K. Most of them look quite workable to my see-potential-in-almost-anything eye.

We’re heading into the best house-hunting time of year: dead of winter, when the dilettantes stay in the city with a good book. That’s when prices go even lower, and negotiating with sellers is doing them a big favor.

Another thing you can be sure of: what looks unpromising under wintry skies, surrounded by bare trees, is going to be resplendent in June.

Deskey-Designed Montauk Surf Shack $1.1M

WHAT’S A DESIGN PEDIGREE WORTH? Quite a bit, in the case of this 500-square-foot bungalow just sent to market by fashion designer Cynthia Rowley (who bought another mid-century Montauk house recently for 820K and probably doesn’t need two of them).

The pedigree is not Rowley’s, A-list celeb though she is. It’s that the house was designed in the late 1930s by architect Donald Deskey, best known for his elegant Art Deco contributions to Radio City Music Hall, for the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. He called it the “Sportshack,” declaring his intention to “overcome the public’s aversion to factory-built homes by using open spaces, new materials, and practical decor.”

Kitchen cabinets look original

In 1940, a Sportshack was exhibited as part of an industrial design show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, kitted out as a hunting cabin with rifles and duck decoys. This particular one was erected in the Ditch Plains area of Montauk in the ’40s. As it stands, the house has just one bedroom and one bath, but it sits on a lot of nearly an acre and could be expanded.

For the official listing and many more pictures, click here.

Amagansett Flipper: Before & After

AN ITEM ON CURBED HAMPTONS, the real estate gossip site that is the Brownstoner of the East End, caught my attention this week: a 4BR, 4 bath Amagansett house on 3/4 acre, newly on the market for $2.2 million. It looks attractive enough, with its French doors and patio, but it would not have drawn my scrutiny if the address hadn’t sounded familiar: 1 Cranberry Hole Road, near the intersection of the new and old Montauk Highways — rather too close to the intersection if you ask me <sniff>, but set well back from the road.

I remember well the long driveway, because I went to a yard sale there when I first bought my house a few miles away in ’09. Back then, the house looked like this:

The interior was dark and dreary, and I recall stressed but kind people dealing with overflowing boxes of videotapes and other junk, who gave me a rusted wrought iron bench which now sits on my front deck. I offered a few bucks, but they insisted on giving it to me, so eager were they to get rid of things. That’s why I remember the house at all.

At the time, I most definitely did not think, “Ooh, I’d love to buy this place, fix it up, and flip it for 2 million dollars!” But Katie Brown did, and did, paying $500,000 for it in March 2010, banging out a reno in a mere 15 months, and putting it right back on the market. That’s why she’s Katie Brown.

Katie Brown is a “lifestyle expert” and TV personality, a smaller-scale Martha Stewart, with long-running cooking and decorating shows that have been on Lifetime, A&E, and PBS (I’ve never seen them — as with Oprah, I know her career only through print media), several books, and a line of bedding and bath linen for Meijer, a chain of Midwest department stores. With her husband, William Corbin, a digital media exec, she’s renovated several houses on the cheap and a shade too trendily, including a Brooklyn brownstone, which I’m guessing is their primary residence; a Berkshires cabin that was written up in The New York Times; and another couple of places in the Hamptons which have been covered in sadly now-defunct decorating magazines.

Whether they originally bought the Amagansett house as a flipper is unclear. I’m guessing that was always the intention. In Katie’s own blog from the early spring of 2010, she called it a “weekend retreat” — but apparently not for her own family.

This is how I remember the house looking from the yard sale (these pictures are from Katie’s blog, with temporary furnishings– you can now see the dining table and chairs outdoors on the patio in the current real estate listing):

Here’s what Katie saw in the c.1980 ugly duckling: “Although its grey exterior might appear to be a little drab, I think its what lies inside that matters most. Decades of history embedded in dated wallpaper, beautiful wood paneling in the main living room, sliding doors galore, and a backyard that looks like extends to the depths of eastern Long Island. As the weeks progress I plan on remodeling the entire house, and transforming this place into a summer retreat.”

This is the newly whitewashed, vastly improved main living space as styled for sale:

The enterprising couple hit all the Hamptons real-estate tropes with their reno.

Set down a long private driveway…a chef’s gourmet kitchen with serious appliances…open living room, beamed ceilings with a fireplace… surrounded by French doors… garden courtyard…charming outbuildings, one an art studio…heated gunite pool… lush lawn….

Well, really, what could be bad, when you put it that way?

Former master bedroom, below

New master

Kitchen before

Kitchen after. I just have to go on record saying I don’t like the kitchen at all. Shiny black tiles combined with rustic wood? No! And the placement of the refrigerator looks plain wrong.

New dining room, below. I recognize the farmhouse table and graphic poster from another house.

New bath

Do I sound a little sour grapes? I don’t mean to. I’m full of admiration for clever, energetic, talented people who don’t give a damn about the received wisdom that ‘it’s not a good time’ in the real estate market, and hope they make a tidy sum.

What’s a Hamptons house without a pergola?

I just wonder whether they know anymore: What is real life and what is staging?

BOOK REVIEW: A Very Modest Cottage

THIS SWEET LITTLE BOOK attests to the power of the idea of ‘cottage’ — the emotional pull four walls and a roof can exert.

Tereasa Surratt, author of A Very Modest Cottage (Hearst/ Sterling), went to great lengths to rescue and lovingly restore a broken-down 1920s shack that sat on her grandmother’s property  in rural Illinois. The cottage was Surratt’s childhood playhouse in all its “twelve-by-twelve foot glory.” Then thirty Midwestern winters took their toll, and it was abandoned for decades by all but mice.

With the help of her handy husband, David Hernandez, and her brother Sam, whom she coaxed into the project with “homemade cookies and sisterly guilt trips,” Surratt moved the diminutive dwelling to a Wisconsin lakefront and, over a period of three months, turned it into something worthy of Country Living magazine (whose imprimatur is above the book’s title).

An advertising creative director in Chicago when she’s not saving derelict cabins, Surratt documents the move, the renovation, the decorating, and the landscaping (mostly with hostas) in great pictorial detail. Graphically, the book is a charming  product, with endpapers in a 1940s floral barkcloth design, even an ersatz library card in a pocket. Inside, it has a scrapbook feel, with sketches and swatches, inspiring quotes (the book’s title comes from Thomas Jefferson), and information-packed sidebars.

The book is also a high-spirited how-to, with instructions for refinishing wood floors, hooking up a potbelly stove, and what Surratt calls “the fun part”: shopping for period-appropriate furnishings and accessories like a junk-store mirror and dresser, camp blankets, fishing reels, and paint-by-number pictures.

Later, when Surratt got around to research, she discovered the cottage had several prior lives. A tourist cabin in the early days of the automobile, it was booked by the hour in the 1930s for the “hot pillow trade.” In the ’40s, a rod-and-gun club used it for Friday night card games. In the ’50s, it served as the office for a trucking company. Then it was a storage shed before being finally abandoned. Now it’s a guest cottage once more, on property owned by her husband’s family.

A Very Modest Cottage would make a fine gift for anyone embarking on the hands-on renovation of a house, which — no matter how modest — has got to be grander than this one.

Go here for a video of the cottage’s history and much more.