01Architecture & Interiors · Kingston, New York
We design for the second owner.
A building only proves itself once the people who commissioned it have moved on. So we plan around daylight instead of around furniture, specify materials that look better worn than new, and draw details a local crew can actually build without calling us twice a week.
Four people in Kingston, New York. Sixty-eight buildings across Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and the Berkshires.
- Years in the valley
- 11
- Projects delivered
- 68
- Buildings older than we are
- 9
- People, deliberately
- 4
02Selected work
Three buildings, and why they are the way they are.
Every project below started with a constraint someone else called a dealbreaker — a floor plate with no windows, a flood zone, a watershed authority. The constraint is usually the design.
Wallkill Mill
An 1887 knitting mill on the falls, turned into a fourteen-room inn without pretending the last century didn't happen.
- 10
- Guest rooms, all with daylight
- $3.9M
- Construction cost
Stone Ridge Farmhouse
A 1790s stone house given the one thing it never had — a warm south-facing room — without touching a single original opening.
- 1,240
- Square feet added
- -46%
- Annual heating oil, whole property
The Ashokan Cabins
Six cabins on a hemlock slope above the reservoir, each one sited so no guest ever sees another cabin's light.
- 6
- Cabins, zero mutual sightlines
- -19%
- Cost per unit vs. benchmark
03What we do
Four ways to work with us.
Most people start with the site study, because it is small, fixed, and answers the question that determines everything else: what will this property actually let you build?
0112% of construction costArchitecture
Full design services from the first site walk to the last punch item — new buildings, additions, and the barns and mills worth keeping.
02Fixed fee from $60,000Interiors
Interior architecture, lighting, and furnishing — for hospitality fit-outs and for houses that need the inside resolved as carefully as the shell.
03$12,500 fixedFeasibility & Site Study
Six weeks and a fixed fee to find out what a property will actually let you build — before you buy it, or before you commit to the version in your head.
04$4,800 a yearStewardship
A small annual retainer for buildings we've finished: seasonal check-ins, phased next moves, and someone who still has the drawings.
04From the journal
Notes from the studio.
We write down the things we would otherwise have to explain twice — what a mockup costs, when to walk away from a barn, why our specifications name a yard in Saugerties.
- Practice
What a mockup costs, and what it saves
Building a four-foot square of the actual wall assembly, on the actual site, in the actual light, runs about $2,400. On the Ashokan cabins it caught a stain colour that read green under hemlock shade and saved a $61,000 re-clad.
5 min read
- Adaptive reuse
Nine barns, and the one we told them to take down
Most timber frames in this valley are worth saving. One in nine is a hay barn with rotted sills that will cost more to stabilise than to rebuild, and saying so early is the whole job.
7 min read
- Detailing
Why our drawings name the local supplier
A specification that reads 'or approved equal' hands the decision to whoever is bidding lowest that month. We name the yard in Saugerties, the price holds, and the sample on site matches the sample in the studio.
4 min read
Come walk the site with us.
The first afternoon is free and it is on your property, not in our studio. We will tell you what we see, what it is likely to cost, and whether you want a different architect — all before you have paid anyone anything.