FSBO: 1830s Huguenot House in New Paltz 360K

A READER alerted me to this very vintage cedar-sided cottage on 9+ acres, five miles from the town of New Paltz in Ulster County, N.Y. It’s on the market with an asking price of 360K.

Built for tenant farmers in the 1830s, the original deed has the names of early Huguenot settlers on it (the Huguenots were French Calvinists, many of whom settled in the New Paltz area in the 17th and 18th centuries).

The house has 2BR, 2 baths, hand-hewn beams, wide-board floors, and a barn with an upstairs studio. There’s a beehive oven in the basement, as well as an ice house.

According to legend, slaves were smuggled along the creek at the base of the property during the Civil War, and in the 1920s, locals say, the place was used as a brothel.

Sounds worthy of an archaeological dig.

The current owner is Diana Salsberg, a onetime puppet builder for Jim Henson, who purchased the house in 1991 and lived there full-time for 14 years.

For further information: dsalsberg@earthlink.net

Stone Barns, 147 Acres near New Paltz $1.9M

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?