ADK Oasis Highlawn: Looking West (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
If you’ve ever wanted to visit the Adirondack Coast, I have some good news for you. Late last year we decided to purchase a new property north of Rosslyn, and as of last month we’ve launched an AirBnB that we’re calling ADK Oasis (www.adkoasis.com as well as www.airbnb.com and @adkoasis). (Updated in 2019 to ADK Oasis Highlawn to distinguish it from second adjoining vacation rental we’re calling ADK Oasis Lakeside.)
Susan and I have been variously involved in the vacation rental market for a few years. I developed a luxury property called Maison Margaux in Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Germain almost two decades ago, and Susan and I launched Adobe Oasis (www.adobeoasis.com) is Santa Fe, New Mexico’s Historic Eastside in 2013. We’ve come to believe that the distinctly authentic and immersive travel experience made possible with well designed, well located, and well maintained vacation rentals is one of the best concepts in travel accommodation. And given the somewhat slender “bed base” in our region, we’re hoping to provide an alternative for visitors eager to discover the Adirondack Coast lifestyle.
ADK Oasis Highlawn
Commanding a panoramic view of Lake Champlain and Vermont’s Green Mountains, this totally private vacation rental is nestled into into lush landscape on seven lakeside acres. Renters rave about the revitalizing rhythm as much as the view. And the fire pit in summer, fire pit in winter. With a well stock, open plan kitchen, you’ll love chef-ing up locally produced ingredients. With kayaks, paddleboard, snowshoes, and all sorts of revitalizing activities waiting for you, we’re hoping that you’ll fall in love with ADK Oasis, your very own Adirondack sanctuary on the Adirondack Coast.
Here’s a sneak peek at our ADK Oasis Highlawn vacation rental.
ADK Oasis Highlawn (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn Firepit (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn Pebble Beach (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn Pebble Beach (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn Living Room (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn: Deck View (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn Master Bedroom (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn: Workspace (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn: Looking West (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
ADK Oasis Highlawn: Looking West (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
Ssshhh… We’ve been keeping a little secret. Very, very soon we’ll be launching another vacation rental on the Adirondack Coast. A little north of Rosslyn and directly adjacent to our existing ADK Oasis Lakeside vacation rental we’ve been working on an exciting project that we call ADK Oasis Lakeside. With four bedrooms (max 8 people), 3.5 bathrooms, a super accommodating kitchen, window filled living room with a handsome stone fireplace, a dedicated office, an outdoor hot tub overlooking Lake Champlain and sooo many decks (and a master bedroom balcony), our visitors will be pampered from the moment they arrive.
We’ve been beavering away since last summer, 2-3 shifts of contractors daily, often 7-days a week, to meet an ambitious timeline. And we’re down to the final weeks!
It’s premature to share photographs yet, but I will soon. Until then, enjoy these renderings by our friend and architectural draftsman extraordinaire, Tiho Dimitrov (www.dimitrovdesignstudio.com).
The first / top image above shows you what awaits you when you descend the private treelike driveway. Just before you arrive at the shore of Lake Champlain, you’ll pull at at a gravel circle in front of this welcoming property. The second / lower image is looking back up at the property from the lakeside lawn. Intrigued? We hope so!
Mallard Jacuzzi, February 9, 2014 (Photo: Geo Davis)
As Lake Champlain freezes and thaws and freezes again, trying to create a seamless skateable expanse between the Adirondack Coast and Vermont, Rosslyn’s boathouse bubbler offers the wild ducks welcome refuge. It’s a veritable mallard jacuzzi! Or a bald eagle buffet? The shrewd raptors observe from the trees nearby, waiting…
Ducks at Dawn on Icy Lake
The sounds and sight of our wild duck neighbors enjoying the midwinter sunrise is mesmerizingly agreeable. Hypnotic even. So the sudden disruption of a predator upsetting this morning meditation is unsettling to say the least. But the bald eagle buffet is a fact of nature, right? And so I resign myself to the bittersweet battle at work in these bucolic moments.
Perhaps this video captures the mallard jacuzzi magic.
A cooold jacuzzi, but it’s the best match for these cold weather acclimated fowl. An icy bubble path to jumpstart the day (and keep these mallards alert to threats lurking nearby…)
Mallard Jacuzzi or Bald Eagle Buffet
While others have witnessed the baldies snatching confit de canard from the frigid “pond” in front of Rosslyn’s boathouse, I’ve never actually experienced it myself. But I’m keeping an eye out from my office, wondering if this will be the newest Rosslyn safari.
I’d planned on getting the drone up in the air for some aerial photography of the waterfront and deck areas (where we’re planning some maintenance projects). As luck would have it the morning was misty. No, more like pea soup. So I waited. And waited. It burned off a little, but finally I realized it wasn’t going to clear up. I decided to find out what I could photograph despite the less-than-optimal conditions.
The results were not as useful as I’d hoped, but also considerably more interesting than anticipated. More dreamy and evocative. More dramatic. More romantic. In short, a win!
Sometimes it’s just a matter or pivoting priorities, right?
At moments like this that I surrender to poetics. To place. To the poetics of place.
Sometimes poetry and artful images speak more clearly, even more truthfully, than all the analytic blather we’re want to rely upon. Sometimes it’s worth stepping aside and allowing the simplest of ideas and images to tell the story.
Here’s one of the photographs that speaks volumes to me. Hope it says a little something to you as well!
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSWsTAdrIuU/
I find that aerial photography (and drone imaging in general) often deliver surprising results. The perspective is often surprising. As is the beauty. The almost tannic inkyness of the foreground waters (where Rosslyn’s boathouse extends east into Blood’s Bay). The shoreline connection to Lake Champlain‘s Adirondack Coast is as compelling as the relationship to the Adirondack Mountains (and Boquet Mountain in particular) is this hazy midsummer “eye in the sky” snapshot.
Is Home a Place, a Feeling, or a Relationship? (Source: Geo Davis)
In the days since publishing “What Makes a House a Home?” I’ve been fortunate to enjoy follow up exchanges with many of you. It seems that we all have some compelling notions of homeness! Thank you for reaching out and sharing your often personal stories. I’ve mentioned to several of you that I’d like to dive in a little deeper if/when you’re inclined. This inquiry is foundational to Rosslyn Redux, and I believe that the objective is less to answer the question and more to propagate more questions, to seed wonder and reflection.
There are so many little forays into this residential quest, that I’ve decided to follow up with three follow-ups posts that intrigue me and that have been percolating with renewed vigor since sharing the previous post. I’ll jumpstart the three with a preliminary introduction of sorts, maybe more of a welcome, today in seeding the three questions as one. Is home a place, a feeling, or a relationship? I’m hoping to intersperse more narrowly focused posts on each of the three questions with progress reports on the icehouse rehab (It was a big day today!) and the boathouse gangway. And I’m hoping to hear from you if you feel moved to share your thoughts on any of the three. I suspect that many of us consider all three to be connected in some way to our ideas of home. More one than another?
Two weeks ago I shared a tickler for this post on Instagram, a short reel offering an aerial view of Rosslyn that I filmed with my drone last summer. It feels meditative to me. Like a soaring seagull wondering, wandering…
https://www.instagram.com/reel/ClB-1F8AFiK/
I think for now, I’ll leave the question of home as place gently gyring in the updraft to be picked up again soon in another post.
Is Home a Relationship?
In the digital sketch / watercolor at the top of this post, the almost abstract blue green wash hopefully feels a little bit like a dream. Maybe a memory. Something fuzzy and abstract in my memory. It’s a barn, actually a barn quite near Rosslyn in the hamlet of Boquet. But it’s not necessarily that barn I’m depicting. It’s many barns including the barns at Rosslyn (carriage barn and icehouse) the barns at The Farm where I spent a few formative early years, and the barn(s) that I hope to one day, same day build or rebuild. In short, for reasons I’m still unraveling, homeness for me includes a feeling of an old, perhaps even an abandoned farm, with barns. More at that anon.
Is Home a Place, a Feeling, or a Relationship? (Source: Geo Davis)
Is Home a Feeling?
Sticking with digital sketches / watercolors for a moment, that black and white image above was actually made a few years ago to represent Griffin, our Labrador Retriever before Carley. But like the barn, my rudimentary skills at representation allow it to merge into all of our dogs including Tasha, who we had before Griffin, and even Griffin-the-1st, a long ago predecessor and the namesake for our more recent Griffin. That’s a bit jumbled, but it’ll do for now.
Why dogness as a way to explore homeness? Well, frankly, for me, part of the feeling of home is that it’s where my dog is. And when we’re migratory between the Adirondacks and the Southwest seasonally, our dog is with us, maintaining a sense of home even though we’re temporarily nomadic. More on that now soon.
Is Home a Point of Overlap Place, Relationship, and Feeling?
I’ll leave you with this follow-on because I find that it’s surprisingly challenging to tease apart the elements of homeness. Intrinsic to all three, is my beautiful bride, Susan. She is my home in a way that embodies place, relationship, and feeling. What about you?
My mind’s been wandering to watercolor painting during recent bicycle rides. Wondering about watercoloring as a way of seeing and becoming acquainted and interpreting. Watercolor as a way of knowing. A way of storytelling.
I’m hoping to make time this fall for a fresh foray into watercolor painting. It’s been a while. A long while!
Just about everything I cast eyes upon is begging to be added to the list of images to paint. The orchard’s colorful fruit and lush summer foliage, for example. The Amish man, horse, and buggy trundling past Rosslyn early this morning, silhouetted against a magnificent sunrise…
And Señorita Serendipity seems to approve of my plans. While brainstorming a punchlist of September/October watercolors, recent August skies appear to have been watercolored by the universe. Another portentous twist of fate: my enfatuation with bygone barns was concurrently satisfied during two recent bike rides, orchestrating the watercolor sky plus barn snapshots I was able to share earlier today with a “Backcountry Barns Haiku”.
Time torn, weatherworn
byways by backcountry barns.
Watercolor skies.
After yesterday’s runaway rumination on wavy window glass (with a nod at watercolors), this quick post was practically born of necessity.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CS9iHSCrE6a/
I’m sure I’ve touched on this elsewhere over the years, but it’s worth acknowledging that barn architecture, especially minimalist barns, patinated with weather and time, speaks to something practically primordial in me. My earliest hope when looking for a North Country properties was to convert an old barn into a home. I looked at lots of backcountry barns, but I never made a match. Some day I still hope to explore the barn vernacular, perhaps in a modern and somewhat interpretive way.
Until then I’m going to keep massaging this watercolor metaphor a little longer.
Maybe once I dip my brush into paint this fall more meaningful observations will materialize. Perhaps I’ll be able to better articulate why watercoloring (and wavy glass, for that matter) are helping me decipher and describe my process, my pleasure, and my goals.
For now, and for this post, I’ve returned to the Waterlogue app by Tinrocket to create this (and other recent) digital watercolors. I’ve always used the iOS version beacuase it’s a well tuned flaneur’s tool, always at hand, always handy for a quick “field sketch”. After snapping a photograph I usually import it into the Snapseed app by Google for some pre-watercolor tuneups to creatively manipulate the results in a way that will render a digital watercolor that suits my vision. Then into Waterlogue for some empirical playtime… And voila!
Piece-by-Piece: fabricating post bases for Rosslyn’s boathouse railings (Photo: Peter Vaiciulis)
As temperatures drop and winter weather threatens, Peter and Supi are toiling against the onset of winter. They’re taking advantage of shop work when possible, fabricating post bases — piece-by-piece — painstaking duplicating our boathouse‘s existing post and railing details while ensuring the most hardy, weatherproof construction possible to ensure the longevity of these handsome architectural elements that will be installed in the most challenging conditions on the entire Rosslyn property. It takes master craftsman to to marry these delicate aesthetic details with such a demanding, punishing environment. And there is no other way to describe the conditions endured by the boathouse and the boathouse gangway.
The trim molding is being shaped, one router pass after the other to match the existing details. These will then be secured to the railing posts above the bases being fabricated below. Piece-by-piece the carpenters are transforming a vision into a railing. And today sections have been handed off to Erin who has begun installing the first coat of primer to cure, be re-sanded and re-primed. Once primers are properly cured we will begin to paint, again building up to well cured coats in a controlled, heated environment so that when these elements finally reach their destination along the shore of Lake Champlain, they will be not only beautiful, but well protected from the Adirondack Coast winter elements.
Piece-by-Piece: fabricating post bases for Rosslyn’s boathouse railings (Photo: Peter Vaiciulis)
Piece-by-Piece Mashup
In keeping with the spirit of previous updates, here’s a quick remix of Peter and Supi’s painstaking, piece-by-piece post base fabrication for the historic rehabilitation of Rosslyn’s boathouse gangway railing.
Nor’easter Neige: boathouse, February 4, 2021 (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Nor’easter delivered 10-12” of fluffy powder to our stretch of the Adirondack Coast, and it sure looks postcard perfect. Or, almost postcard perfect…
Any idea what’s just shy of midwinter Adirondack Coast perfection? Look at the water beyond the boathouse.
It’s February and Lake Champlain is still wide open. No ice. It seems that this has increasingly become the new normal. Open water in February. It certainly does challenge skaters!
Nor’easter Neige: carriage barn and icehouse, February 4, 2021 (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
But, of course, rotating 180° and looking West the unfrozen lake vanishes and winter wonderland is assured. Time to strap on hbd cross-country skis and head out to Rosslyn’s fields and forests. Come along!
