Rosslyn Redux

Tag: Maison Margaux

  • Rosslyn Featured in Old House Journal

    "Beguiled into Stewardship", Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 1-2)
    “Beguiled into Stewardship”, Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 1-2)

    Exactly three years ago on June 3, 2015, Old House Journal published an article about Rosslyn. Time for a flashback! Regina Cole’s story and Carolyn Bates’s photographs are entitled, “Beguiled into Stewardship“, and you can find their original article here. (Note: the print edition and the online edition differ slightly.)

    If you’re unfamiliar with Old House Journal, — and if you’re renovating or rehabilitating an older home — I recommend both the print magazine and the online website and resources.

    This site is the ultimate resource for owners of old houses and period-style homes, gathering information from Old-House Journal, Old-House Interiors, Early Homes, and New Old House. You’ll find inspiration, how-to info and advice, stories and photos of old houses galore and sources for traditional products. Whether you’re restoring your old house or searching for period decor, you’ll find help here. (Source: Old-House Online)

    An Insider’s Glimpse

    It’s worth noting that the article fumbles a few points here and there, but the gist is mostly on target. And the photographs are amazing!

    Like many owners of important old houses, this couple never intended to become stewards of a 2½-storey neoclassical manse that spreads over more than 6,000 square feet. The building was originally just a three-bay, side-hall dwelling, but Rosslyn was expanded between 1835 and 1840 into its symmetrical five-bay configuration. Other buildings on the grounds include several barns and a very adorable, Eastlake-style boathouse added in 1898. (Source: “Beguiled into Stewardship“)

    Eek! Adorable? Though my bride and I fell head over heels in love with the Rosslyn’s boathouse (really a “dock house” more than a boathouse) long before we succumbed to the home’s beguiling pull, neither of us would likely describe the quirky lakeside structure as adorable. Too cute, me thinks, for this weathered folly. But I’ll leave that judgment up to you.

    A significant rear wing had been added to Rosslyn in the 19th century for domestic services—a kitchen and pantry, etc.—and servants’ quarters. Early in the 20th century, when the house became a hostelry called The Sherwood Inn, that service wing was renovated to accommodate guest lodging, a restaurant, and a tavern. When the inn ceased operation by the early 1960s, most of the rear wing was removed.

    George and Susan used its remnant to create a large new family room. For symmetry and better flow, they also added two new wings, one to house a screened porch and one to create circulation between old rooms and new. The boathouse, of course, was a later addition, but its late Victorian style is so charming, they never considered removing it. It has been restored inside and out.

    […]

    The front of the house is historic, but the rear had undergone numerous additions and subtractions over the years. George and Susan updated the rear with sensitive additions and a patio surrounded by a stone wall. George rebuilt the old stone walls that surround the property. They built a new fence, basing its design on one found in a Federal pattern book. (Source: “Beguiled into Stewardship“)

    Mostly accurate, except I’ll humbly concede credit to others for the handsome stone walls. I did design/redesign/adapt them and figure out how to repurpose old stone salvaged from failed walls and long buried foundations, but virtually all of the heavy lifting was done by others. And we remain extremely grateful for it!

    Okay, enough revisionism… On to the article.

    "Beguiled into Stewardship", Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 3-4)
    “Beguiled into Stewardship”, Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 3-4)

    The opening spread showcases one of the handsome entrance gates designed and built by our friend, Tom Duca. And that interior shot of the front entrance door with side lites and fan lite? That challenging project was meticulously executed by Kevin Boyle.

    "Beguiled into Stewardship", Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 5-6)
    “Beguiled into Stewardship”, Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 5-6)

    The front parlor and the dining room offer pigmented nostalgia bridges.

    The pea green paint in the parlor is a nod to the previous owner whose paint choice perplexed us at first, but grew on us gradually, imperceptibly during our endless renovation. My bride elected to preserve and refresh it while I was away. It was the perfect choice.

    And the light blue walls in the dining room recollect the dining room in Maison Margaux, a top-to-bottom renovation I shepherded in Paris’ Faubourg St. Germain.

    "Beguiled into Stewardship", Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 7-8)
    “Beguiled into Stewardship”, Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 7-8)

    The kitchen and morning room (aka “the north porch”) are principle phases of our daily orbit. No finer way to start the day that breakfasting with songbirds!

    "Beguiled into Stewardship", Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 9-10)
    “Beguiled into Stewardship”, Old House Journal, June 2015 Issue (Page 9-10)

    Griffin, our Labrador Retriever, is the perennially proud protector of Rosslyn in general and our bedroom in particular. From his perch at the end of the bed he can monitor the deer and wild turkeys sneaking snacks from his vegetable garden and orchard. I suppose “protector” might be a mild overstatement.

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  • ADK Oasis Highlawn

    ADK Oasis Highlawn

    ADK Oasis Highlawn: Looking West (Source: Julia Rebecca Photography)
    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.

  • Connection with Place

    Connection with Place

    Connection with Place (Source: Geo Davis)
    Connection with Place (Source: Geo Davis)

    I was recently accused, tenderly but definitively, of being obsessed with locale, and more precisely, with my connection to place. As a lifelong wanderer, this struck me as slightly ironic. And accurate.

    By now my fixation on hyperlocality and placeness (aka the poetics of place) have become inextricably woven into the entirety of Rosslyn Redux, the robust and resilient fiber that holds it all together, or — as popularized in the parlance of contemporary talking heads — the “connective tissue” of this protracted inquiry into our decision to purchase and rehabilitate Rosslyn as a foundational platform for our small family’s life (and lifestyle) reboot.

    From 1999 to 2003 I was living and working in Europe. Mostly Paris, France. But Rome, Italy had become a second base by the end of that exciting chapter, a period that started with teaching and coaching at the American School of Paris and evolved into co-founding and launching Maison Margaux, an exclusive vacation rental startup, and Margaux Europe Group, a boutique travel platform. My business partner and I had based these businesses in New York City, and this third base of my globetrotting existence became even more important in the summer of 2001 when Susan and I discovered one another and tumbled head over heals into an intoxicating transatlantic romance.

    In those years I prided myself with what I had dubbed immersion travel rather than tourist travel. The Margaux Project was founded on this distinction. Deep travel. Authentic travel. Meaningful travel. Transformative travel. Human-centric vs. travel brochure scrapbook travel… My love affairs with Paris and Rome (indeed even with New York City) were complex and enriching and multifaceted. We wanted to provide a means for discerning clients to experience Paris, Rome, (and eventually Barcelona, intended at the time to become our third property) with the nuanced richness; genuine, unadulterated texture; and personal intimacy that we had both come to appreciate.

    But I was a committed and unabashed global nomad. By choice. By conviction. The dissonance didn’t really phase me at the time!

    Wanderlust vs. Connection to Place

    This fundamental duality — a peripatetic wanderer drawn to unique locales and connection to place — is at the heart of the thread I call Wanderlust to Houselust. I’ve learned through our Rosslyn years that I am both migratory and rooted. For many years I understood myself as a perennial vagabond, and I celebrated the carefreedom and independence that my work/life amalgam allowed.

    But building a loving family and a profoundly fulfilling lifestyle around placeness (Rosslyn, Essex, Lake Champlain, the Adirondacks, the North Country,..) has taught me how important community and connection to place are to me. It’s also helped me understand that I’m not either/or… not nomad OR potted plant.

    Life, my life, is more complex than I’d understood despite developing Maison Margaux and Margaux Europe Group around the philosophy of immersion travel — journeying more authentically and meaningfully, interacting rather than travel-skimming. Certainly my need for connection to place was there, but I didn’t recognize what it was. Now I do. And I understand that the meaningful authenticity, the human-to-human interaction, the belonging that had drawn me to a specific type of travel was precisely what fueled my early enthusiasm for living in Essex. It was connection to place that had always enticed me. I just didn’t know it.

     

  • Serene, Patinaed Fantasy

    Apartment buildings lining the south side of E...
    East 57th Street between First and Sutton (via Wikipedia)

    Accustomed to living out of a suitcase, I pendulumed back and forth between Manhattan where Susan was wrapping up a degree in interior design following a decade-long career in video production, and Westport, New York, where both of our parents owned homes and where we’d met a couple of years prior.

    Susan had recently refinished a one bedroom apartment in The Galleria, and she was itching to sell it and start a new project. I was intrigued by the prospect of collaborating on a project and plugging my recent Paris experience into a tired but dignified New York apartment, but the Adirondacks were pulling me. After almost half a lifetime living in cities, I yearned to return to the rhythms and pleasures of rural life.

    My idealized notion of a country house had its roots in a small farm that my parents had bought in Washington County while still living in New York City in the 1970s. Initially a getaway for my recently married parents trying to balance life and careers in New York City and later, albeit briefly, a full time residence, The Farm underpins my love for countryside and provides my earliest childhood memories.

    The perfect place, I explained to Bruce, the friend and realtor who shuttled me from property to property, would be a small, simple farmhouse in the middle of fields with a sturdy barn and some acreage, maybe a stream or a pond or access to a river. Barns, in particular, pulled me. Secluded places with good light and views, forgotten places with stories still vaguely audible if you slowed down long enough to hear the voices. No loud traffic. An old overgrown orchard, perhaps. Asparagus and rhubarb gone feral near the barn. Stone walls, lots of stone walls and maybe an old stone foundation from a building long ago abandoned, the cellar hole full to bursting with day lilies. A couple of old chimneys in the farmhouse with fireplaces. A simple but spacious kitchen. A bedroom with plenty of windows. A room to read and write and collage the walls with notes, lists, photos, drawings and scraps. Someplace I could tinker at myself, gradually restoring the walls and plaster and roof. Timeworn wide plank floorboards of varying widths that I would sand by hand to avoid erasing the footpaths and dings and cupping from a burst pipe years before.

    Although I’d painted the picture often enough, my budget and unwillingness to abandon the serene, patinaed fantasy resulted in a few false starts but mostly a very clear idea of what I was not interested in buying. On the upside, I came around and helped Susan select and renovate a coop in a 1926 McKim, Mead and White prewar located on 57th Street just off Sutton Place. An elegant apartment in a handsome building. Great bones, view and sunlight enhanced with a top-to-bottom environmentally responsible, non-toxic renovation. A success!

    Though there were occasional fireworks when our aesthetics and convictions clashed, we enjoyed working together and decided to look for a North Country property that would suit both of our interests…

  • Paris Renovation Bug

    Paris Renovation Bug

    Paris Renovation Bug

    Starting in about 2003 I initiated an unfocused real estate hunt for a “fixer-upper” in the Adirondacks’ Champlain Valley. I’d returned from four years in Europe with enough savings to justify some idle time, a reprieve I hoped to plough into a long languishing novel while tinkering with the vestiges of a web-based business I’d launched in Paris a few years before.

    But I couldn’t shake the renovation bug that had bitten me quite unexpectedly while bringing a luxury vacation rental to market in Paris’ Faubourg St. Germaine.

    I’d made it into my early thirties without owning a home due to my intentionally peripatetic lifestyle, and despite an aesthete’s appetite for buildings and furnishing and gardens, I hadn’t the least interest in settling down. No biological clock ticking. No nesting instinct. No yen for taxes and maintenance and burst pipes and snow shoveling. No desire whatsoever for the trappings of a settled, domestic life. I understood why it appealed to others, but for me the commitments and encumbrances far outweighed the pride and financial wisdom of home ownership.

    Until recently.

    Something had changed, and I couldn’t quite figure out how or why.

    I’d spent the better part of a year and a half immersed in the acquisition, renovation and marketing of a grand Haussmannian property that promised tourists an opportunity to enjoy Paris à la Parisienne. My business partner and I joked that it was “Versailles in the heart of Paris”, which was a gross exaggeration, but fifteen foot ceilings, 3,200+ square feet of living space including three master suites, a grande salon, a petite salon and a formal dining room invited exaggeration. Magnificent marble fireplaces, intricate plaster moldings, hardwood floors and meticulous finish details exuded Parisian elegance by the time we started booking the accommodation, but it hadn’t always looked so inviting.

    The property underwent a top-to-bottom transformation between the day we received the key and the day we shot the photographs for our brochures and website. Half of the property had been gutted and rebuilt from scratch. One bathroom was remodeled and two new bathrooms were created from scratch. Walls were moved, electrical systems were rewired. Carpets were ripped out and herringbone hardwood floors were hand sanded and resealed. Magnificent crown moldings were painstakingly restored, and sconces, chandeliers, and period hardware were refinished.

    No architect. No designer. No engineer. Just outsized self confidence and a hepped up learning curve. I scribbled construction drawings on walls and fumbled through French and Portuguese until contractors seemed to understand what I wanted. With the Lebanese contractors I gesticulated, made funny sound effects and scribbled some more. That we completed the project at all was a miracle. That the results were exquisite, a mystery that still awes me. Though I’d grown up assisting my parents with a couple of renovation projects, I’d never before undertaken anything so ambitious or complex. Or so rewarding.

    Although our business plan involved duplicating the process in Italy and in Spain, the woman I’d been dating for two years lived in New York City, and after two years of cycling through Paris, Rome and Manhattan on a roughly two week cycle, I opted to trade the business for the woman I loved. I dissolved my interest in the business, packed up my apartments in Paris and Rome, and moved back to the United States.

    [To be continued…]