481 Old Albany Post Road

Old Albany Post Road runs 6.6 miles through Philipstown as packed dirt, the surface it has carried in continuous use since 1669, and in 1982 it went onto the National Register of Historic Places largely for staying that way. Colonial mile markers still line it. The first were set in 1763, shortly after Benjamin Franklin, who had argued for measuring the post roads so postage could be charged by distance, was appointed joint postmaster general of the colonies; New York's Act to Regulate the Highways later ordered county highway superintendents to finish the run. One of the surviving stones, cut 55 Miles to N York, stands at the edge of this property, 1.2 miles up the dirt from Travis Corners.

The house went up in 1961 on 28 acres bordering permanently protected state land, in the same Hudson Highlands strain of organic modernism Russel Wright was then finishing a few miles south at Manitoga, where Dragon Rock sits in a played out quarry and became a National Historic Landmark in 2006. Stone and timber pulled out during excavation went back into the hearths and the grounds. Low asymmetrical rooflines and deep eaves cover 3,896 square feet: curved plaster walls and two round recessed skylights over a cobblestone entry, a living room and library under ceilings framed like an inverted ship's hull, cork floors, board and batten paneling, window benches, and an oval dining room whose original cabinetry follows the curve of the room. Three bedrooms, three and a half baths. The 2007 kitchen holds a stone pizza oven and a dumbwaiter that hoists firewood from the basement.

Below the house, a 36 by 68 foot gunite pool sits in a shaded glen, filled by the spring fed stream that empties back out the opposite bank, with a pool house built in the manner of a tea house at the water's edge and a separate studio with running water. A flat boulder balanced on another sits poolside, in the way of the stone dolmens found across the Highlands. The land carries a spring fed pond and a brook, runs on well and septic, and is gated by a 20 foot wrought iron gate on 8 foot stone piers.