20 South Mountain Pass Spur

Garrison has been collecting modern houses since the 1940s, when four went up in the hamlet built from Durisol, a hollow core block manufactured for a time at Denning's Point in Beacon. The best surviving one is credited to Edward Durell Stone. I. M. Pei adapted a barn here into a residence in the 1950s. Frank Dushin, who had drafted in Stone's New York office before a Fulbright took him to Newcastle to teach modern American architecture, opened his own practice in Peekskill in the mid 1950s and then stayed close to home. His output is thought to run to more than sixty custom houses across the Hudson Valley and metropolitan New York, and eight or nine of them stand on South Mountain Pass alone, the dirt road this property spurs off. When the Putnam History Museum surveyed modern residential architecture in the Highlands in 2014, Dushin's son helped choose which of his father's houses to show.

Built in 1985 and shingled to the ground, the house carries the two materials Dushin was known for, Douglas fir and long expanses of glass, into a plan that stays low and turns toward the woods. The living room is sunken beneath exposed trusses, with two arched windows set on either side of a brick chimney, and a second fireplace anchors a smaller room in exposed brick. Five bedrooms and five baths run across 6,216 square feet, along with a screened porch and a library wall, and a recent renovation took the primary suite and the bathrooms back to the studs. A detached two bedroom guest house has its own kitchen, and a separate wellness pavilion holds a gym, a steam room, and an outdoor hot tub.

Thirteen acres across two lots, one of them vacant and buildable, run up against the 8,000 acre Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve and its seventy miles of trails. The property keeps its own trail network and a private trailhead onto the Appalachian Trail, along with a seasonal stream and a campsite. More than two decades of work by a local horticulturist have turned the grounds into a sequence of garden rooms and woodland paths. Manitoga, the house and quarry garden Russel Wright made for himself, is a short way down Route 9D.

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