The Story
Paul Wesley Arndt (1881-1978) came to landscape painting the long way, through the Art Institute of Chicago and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme, then a mural career that put his work on steamships, theaters, and public buildings across the country. Around 1925 he built himself a stone house on Library Lane in Woodstock and later raised a painting studio beside it, and the compound became a gathering place for the circle of Depression-era painters now grouped as the Woodstock Impressionists.
Arndt painted the valley to the end. A mural of the Woodstock hamlet he completed in 1966, in his eighties, hung over the teller counter of the town's bank branch for decades. The compound last traded in 2020, and the current owners restored both buildings around the original fabric, the beams, the Dutch doors, the wavy glass, rather than over it.
Inside
The stone house holds four bedrooms and two baths under exposed wood beams, with wide-plank oak and pine floors and a stone-clad wood-burning fireplace in the living room. The kitchen pairs a Viking range with Siberian elm counters, a clé tile backsplash, and an unlacquered Barber Wilson brass faucet; the renovated primary bath carries a double vanity and a soaking tub.
Arndt's former studio is now a three-bedroom, two-bath guest cottage with its painting light intact: soaring ceilings, skylights, and a large picture window, warmed by the original stone fireplace fitted with a Belgian Stûv insert. Its bath is Venetian plaster, hand-troweled by the artist Anthony Chase.
The Land
Michael Trapp designed the gardens, 1.6 acres planted abundant rather than formal: oaks more than a century old, silver birch and hemlock, magnolias, dogwoods, hydrangeas, crab apples, clematis, and viburnum, taken in from a screened porch with a cathedral ceiling.
The lane, shared with the Woodstock Library, sits a five-minute walk from the village center, in the town the Byrdcliffe colony helped turn into one of America's first arts colonies after 1902, just under two hours from New York.
