Each year for the past 15 years, the publication has traveled the country to collaborate with a builder and designers to create a striking home showcasing the latest design trends, with the results featured in a lavish ten-page photo spread in the September issue of the magazine.
This year’s House of the Year was built in Rhinebeck by Catskill Farms, headquartered in Eldred, which specializes in building second homes for metropolitan New York buyers. “There’s not enough of the good houses with good bones and low maintenance and predictable costs out there,” says the company’s founder, Charles Petersheim, “so that’s been our niche.”
He says that the design for the Country Living house was inspired by a little house in Fremont Center in northern Sullivan County that he saw for the first time in 2002. “It was sitting on a vacant piece of land, just rotting away, but it had a feeling to it that caught my attention as I drove by,” Petersheim says. “We reinvented it with higher ceilings and better insulation and a more workable floor plan, but it was always the classic, quintessentially American farmhouse: the perfect house that inspired the whole business and became the business model for all of the nearly 100 homes Catskill Farms has built in the Hudson Valley since.”
When Country Living editors saw an advertisement for his firm in an issue of New York Magazine last fall, Petersheim says, they got in touch and asked him about collaborating with them on the House of the Year project in Rhinebeck in time to feature the home during the Country Living Fair. It was a tight timeframe, made even more so by the fact that Petersheim’s previous builds were in Sullivan and Ulster Counties; having not yet built in Dutchess County, he therefore had to obtain all the necessary permits before proceeding, along with finding a suitable piece of land. But he saw it as a challenge, and within ten days had gotten the ball rolling.
The home’s buyers had been looking to build a home with him four years earlier, but hadn’t yet found the right property. When this opportunity arose in Rhinebeck, they signed on; so as the plans for the house proceeded, it had a team of six design editors from Country Living magazine, two homeowners, their team of two New York City designers and Petersheim all working on the design.
When the fierce winter of 2013/14 kicked in, that added another layer of complications, as severely cold weather delayed the pouring of the foundation. Things started happening after that, Petersheim says, but it still involved his workers being there seven days a week for a while, working around snowstorms and getting a house built in just a few months that normally would require much longer.
The farmhouse nestles nicely into its site, with a generous front porch and an expansive deck for entertaining out back, overlooking a lushly wooded view. The house features an open floor plan with wide-plank floors of tongue-and-groove yellow pine. The color scheme of the interior was chosen by the magazine editors, Petersheim says, and it will be up to the homeowners when they take possession of the house after the Country Living Fair closes as to whether they wish to change anything or not.
Currently the house has peach-toned pink ceilings downstairs, a vivid mocha-brown-and-white diagonal tile backsplash and wall in the kitchen and slate-blue stairs leading up to the second floor, where a dark raspberry-colored full bath is found. The bedrooms upstairs each have a distinctive color scheme: One features a chartreuse closet door and moldings, another has yellow-and-blue flocked wallpaper with a distinctively vintage flair and the third has been hand-stenciled with a floral design inspired by wallpaper.
As of presstime, the house had not yet been filled with furnishings and styled; but by the time Country Living Fair visitors come through, it will all be in place, as if stepping into the magazine’s pages. The results will be seen in the September 2014 issue of the publication.
Petersheim now has four other homes planned for Dutchess County, he says, and is looking forward to expanding into the area. Because the price of land determines the cost of building (the House of the Year in Rhinebeck was sold for $450,000, with most of Catskill Farms’ houses costing between $375,000 and $600,000), the idea, says Petersheim, is to find that point “where design and cost meet perfectly on the matrix: spending enough to get the impact, but not enough to break the budget.”
The process usually involves Catskill Farms buying the land, designing the home, building it and selling it, with the buyers typically coming in pretty early in the process, he says. The collaborative aspects of building a home appeal to many buyers, Petersheim adds, because they can design the home to incorporate the historic details, but switch the floor plan around to suit modern living styles.
The builder says that he has not encountered any resistance from longtime residents of the Hudson Valley over building new-made-to-look-old houses for second-home buyers. “We build homes that are modest, restrained and super-tasteful,” Petersheim says. “I think people get what we’re doing, and we’re a good company; that goes along with it. If we did something stupid, like clearing all the trees or building too close to other properties, we’d be bad neighbors, but we don’t do that. We fit in with all the historical homes around us, and we typically enhance the neighborhood and raise property values.”
For more information about Catskill Farms, call (845) 557-3600 or visit www.catskillfarms.com.
Tickets for the Country Living Fair are available at the gate for $16 for a one-day pass or $20 for a three-day weekend pass.
Country Living Fair, Friday-Sunday, June 6-8, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $16/$20, Dutchess County Fairgrounds, 6550 Spring Brook Avenue (Route 9), Rhinebeck; (866) 500-FAIR, www.stellashows.com, www.countryliving.com.
