Going Back in Time, in the Hudson Valley

As a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects who specializes in designing grand private residences, Randy Correll has been visiting and working in the Hamptons for decades. But when he and his partner, Paul Occhipinti, began thinking about a weekend escape of their own, they wanted something very different: a place that evoked the lush, mystical landscapes in the paintings of Hudson River School artists like Frederic Church and Thomas Cole.

“I said, ‘Let’s go out and see these places that are in these paintings,'” said Occhipinti, 68, a musician and artist.

They spent the next five years touring the bucolic hills of the Hudson Valley, driving north from the city to places like Kaaterskill Falls and Olana, Church’s breathtaking hilltop home (where Occhipinti is now a volunteer ambassador). In 2005, they finally decided to buy, and almost immediately stumbled upon the right property in Claverack, New York.

“The first weekend we went up to see houses, we saw a sign off Route 23: ‘house for sale,'” said Correll, 59. “We just randomly turned off and saw this house.”

It was a 7-acre property on the side of a hill with mature trees, old stone walls, a circa-1800, two-bedroom, cedar-shingle house of less than 1,000 square feet on one side of the road and a 1980s barn on the other. They could barely believe their good fortune when they bought it for $375,000.

“We liked that the house was kind of small, charming and quirky,” Correll said. “It was all the house that we ever wanted.”

But it wasn’t flawless. “There was the old-old, and then the 1960s-old,” he said, referring to the partial renovation by previous owners. Also, some parts of it hadn’t been well maintained.

So they began a 10-year process of updating the house, barn and gardens, seeking to fix the problems and add personal touches while preserving the character.

Curious about the muddy footpath leading to the front door, they dug it up and found a stone walkway underneath. Where there was a ramshackle deck off the upstairs bedrooms that resulted in a mosquito den below, they installed a new deck above a screened porch with a pea-gravel floor. When they found the kitchen lacking storage and work space, they tracked down a local woodworker who made new cabinetry with reclaimed wood and distressed paint, so that it looked like it had always been there. Displeased with a front door that opened directly into the living room, they added a small, enclosed porch with a bluestone floor to serve as a mudroom.

Across the road, they converted the barn into a garage and music studio that doubles as a guest room, and added a bathroom that required its own septic system and well. (There is also an attached chicken coop that houses the couple’s 11 hens.)

For furnishings, they sought out antiques: a rustic, 19th-century dining table, painted chairs with rush seats from Maine, vintage 20th-century painted-steel garden furniture, patchwork quilts and Audubon bird prints.

At the center of the living room, facing the fireplace, they installed a Campeachy chair from Monticello, a favorite of Thomas Jefferson’s. “We had always wanted one,” Correll said. “It was kind of frightening how quickly we could fill up the place.”

When they couldn’t find the pieces they wanted, they made them. For a second coffee table, they had a woodworker copy an antique piece, but at a smaller scale, and Occhipinti painted it. To create a pair of skater’s candle lanterns, they bought an 1860s original and had a tinsmith copy it.

The landscaping was a project of its own. Occhipinti transformed an existing stone wall into a waterfall and directed contractors with heavy machinery to dig a pit for a pond near the barn; within a couple of days, a spring had filled it with water. Correll planted gardens bursting with phlox, peonies, bee balm, echinacea and hollyhocks. The couple also added peach, plum and cherry trees, as well as a cutting garden and a wildflower meadow.

“As we did these things, we always left pieces of what was there behind,” Correll said, noting that the total cost of the work inside and out was about $250,000. “We didn’t want it to look like we had done something new that didn’t fit in.”

Now it is difficult to tell which parts of the property are new, which are old and which fall somewhere in between.

“When we were refinancing the house after the kitchen was done, Paul was showing the appraiser around and said, ‘That’s a new kitchen,'” Correll said. “The appraiser looked puzzled.”