When Charles Brill and Merrill Lyons bought a property in upstate New York, they planned to build a weekend home to escape their full-time lives in Gowanus, Brooklyn, but that was before the pandemic forced them to rethink their lifestyle.
For years before they bought the property, said Mr. Brill, 40, founder of the lighting company RBW, “we went to all the different farmers' markets in the Hudson Valley and took day trips to different towns” to find out which places they liked best. They finally settled on an eight-acre plot outside Rhinebeck, N.Y., and paid $123,000 in September 2019.
Ms. Lyons, 44, an interior designer, began drawing up plans for a house with two small buildings connected by a passageway, enlisting the help of her friends Ben Sandell and Van Chu, founders of the architectural firm Built Narrative Studio.
“We wanted to reflect traditional, bucolic architecture and the way a farm grows over time, one building at a time,” Ms Lyons said.
Or as Ms. Chu put it, “We wanted a design that looked like it belonged in this space and had been there for a while” – even though it was a modern home.
By year's end, the plans were ready and they had found a contractor to begin construction the following spring. Then Covid came. The project was put on hold and Mr. Brill and Ms. Lyons left New York with their children, now ages 8 and 6, to live in a lake house in southern Ontario, Canada, owned by Ms. Lyons' family.
“We lived there for about six months,” Mr. Brill said. “It was pretty desolate and the only restaurant was a Tim Hortons. We said, 'Hey, if we can live up here for six months, living in Rhinebeck with all its great restaurants and shops would be a breeze.'”
After some discussion, they decided to make the upstate home their primary residence and eventually sell the Brooklyn home. They revised the building plans and made only one small change: they expanded part of the house to add closets in the bedrooms.
The 2,500-square-foot, four-bedroom home they built divides public and private functions between two buildings. One part of the building contains an expansive living, dining and kitchen area under a high ceiling, as well as a guest suite. Across the passage, the other part contains three bedrooms, including the master suite. They planned a garage as a separate building.
They were impressed by a house designed by architect John Pawson in a Swedish province that had a roof made of corrugated galvanized metal. They used the same material for their roof and clad the external walls with white fiber cement cladding.
Inside, Ms. Lyons was in charge of the design, taking inspiration from midcentury modern and Scandinavian design. “I'm much more decorative than Charlie. I use a lot of wallpaper and paint,” said Ms. Lyons, who tried to find a middle ground when their ideas about the design diverged. “Charlie gave me the brief that he wanted it simple and clean.”
Since the aim was to build quickly and inexpensively, Mr. Brill also required the use of robust, readily available materials that would not be too time-consuming to install.
Ms. Lyons responded by including a tile floor, laminate kitchen cabinets and terrazzo countertops in the main living area. She kept the clean space largely free of decorative clutter but added color with different shades of laminate on the cabinets (mustard yellow, dark and light gray), light green Rey dining chairs and a shaggy teal-black floor covering by Beni Rugs.
In the bedrooms, she created softer spaces with more visual warmth by using whitewashed pine floors and covering the master bedroom walls with floral wallpaper by Swedish company Borastapeter.
The family moved back into their Brooklyn home a few months after construction began in August 2020. A year later, when the Rhinebeck home was nearly finished at a cost of about $650 per square foot, the family moved in and sold their Brooklyn home. Since then, they have been putting the finishing touches on it, building the garage and doing the landscaping based on a plan developed with R Design.
“We love it,” Ms Lyons said. “It's a total change in our lifestyle. We can spread out and the kids can enjoy the outdoors without us having to look after them.”
“The parking is really good too,” Mr. Brill added with a laugh. In Brooklyn, it used to take him an hour to find a parking spot on the street. Now he drives right up to the front door.
To make the trip a little more fun, he bought and restored a 1969 Subaru mini truck that had been converted into a mobile hot dog stand.
“We want our kids to have a stand at the Rhinebeck Farmers Market,” he said. “When they're teenagers, it can be their souped-up lemonade stand.”
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