The Record
The house faces south from the crest of a hill above Alligerville, across the valley to the Shawangunk Ridge, with Mohonk Mountain House and Sky Top Tower on its skyline and the Catskills behind it to the north. Three buildings share the crest, a main house, a studio and library, and a gatehouse, on 30.91 acres in the Town of Rochester.
The main house went up in 2003 around hand-hewn oak and chestnut barn frames, left exposed under a central 23-foot vaulted ceiling. The floors are wide-board Pennsylvania heart pine and the walls are clay plaster. The kitchen has custom cabinetry, black soapstone counters, a Wolf range and a pantry, and opens to the dining and living rooms; glass doors from the main room give onto a bluestone terrace. The three-season porch carries a Vermont Castings woodstove on a single slab of bluestone.
Two en-suite bedrooms and the laundry are upstairs. A wing on the main floor adds a third en-suite bedroom, a library or dressing room, a spiral stair to a loft, and doors to its own bluestone terrace. The finished lower level holds a workout room, the mechanicals and wine or cold storage.
Across the garden
The studio and library building is framed from the second barn. Its two rooms of 925 square feet each currently hold a library of more than 10,000 volumes and a painting and sculpture studio, with private space on a second floor above each. There is a full bath, sculpture storage, and a separate studio apartment with a kitchenette, a full bath and storage. A lookout cupola sits on the ridge, and 73 photovoltaic panels on the south-facing roof supply much of the energy used across the property.
The third building is a net-zero passive gatehouse designed by Peter Reynolds of North River Architecture, the Stone Ridge firm whose Accord Passive House, designed for Reynolds himself, carries PHIUS+ certification. The gatehouse has triple-paned German windows and doors, and rock walls frame its view across the ridge to the Gunks.
The land and the hamlet
Five acres around the buildings sit inside a custom eight-foot deer fence, planted with mature oaks, shagbark hickories, flowering and fruit trees, berries, currants, kiwis and five bearing paw-paws, with a koi pond near the house. Below them a five-acre meadow opens, and twenty more acres run into the woods on walking trails, bridges and stairs, with a year-round spring through the back acreage.
Alligerville, at the foot of the hill, grew up after 1828 around Lock 21 of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2015. High Falls and Stone Ridge are close, and the Shawangunks begin across the valley.
