Cottage 36 - Moved in Pics (and now for sale)
Cottage 36 is a hot house, which we finished up about 18 months ago. Thing is, owners liked the process so much they want to do it again, this time only bigger. I've often said, tongue in cheek like, that it's too bad you only get to typically build once in your life, since you learn so much along the way that would help the second time around. These folks are taking me up on that assertion.
Cool house on 15 acres, selling for $439k, which is a good deal by anyone's calculations, considering how loaded this house is with upgrades and goodies.
Mudroom, with the bowling pin pic with salvaged wood frame that she gave him for some life marking event. This is a fun little area of the home - with the salvaged wood, rad, bench, stone and elbow room.
The upstairs has a catwalk to the 2 bedrooms that allows this elevated vantage.
A lot of downhomeness here. Super simple, restrained and classy. You can't teach taste, and typically our clients have taste by the basketfull.
Eat in kitchen, that seques both onto the deck and the living room.
Couple of snazzy bedrooms with beds consistently made well enough to bounce a quarter off of. Don't try that at home.
Spacious, low key, high impact baths.
The kids playhouse. Far enough away from the house for noise muffling, but close enough to keep an eye on those damn kids.
And the old out door fireplace in the screened porch trick.
There's you got it. I'm down in Miami Beach, gotta go run and get my hair cut.
Farm 20 - SOLD
Well, it wasn't that long ago that Michael and his soon to be new bride visited us looking for something upstate. Before long we had them convinced we were the team for them, helped them located 25 acres, design a house, and now they are moving in (or possibly even have moved in).
1950 sq ft 3 bedroom home with a 2 car barn with a green house off to the side. Some hot colors - I always call this red 'panty red'.
We cleared an acre of land and built these two classic structures.
You may remember Farm 11 the other year over in Narrowsburg - this home was inspired by that one, with some personal choices driving some changes in the floor plan and flow priorities.
Lots of good colors that accented the barn beams and cable rail. 4 panel shaker doors, black hardware, white radiator, sliding barn door and a jacobean stained floor.
Simple fireplace with lots of light.
Our famous barn door leading out into the mudroom.
Here's the main entrance door, off on the side, with a rad to dry the wet winter stinky socks and a stone floor to catch the muddy boots.
Seriously, who wouldn't love this mud room, out to the shelves and into the dining room and out to the deck.
Tito the magician getting it done in the kitchen.
Media room with lots of hi-tech wiring. Great colors.
Going up in the 2nd floor with wood ceilings and cladded beams. Another great shot of what's going on - beams, salvaged posts, rail, planks, rads and shaker doors.
Blue and pink rooms.
The 2nd floor shared bath is hot...
but this is the house of the POJAB - pimped out japanese awesome bath - I think that's what we named it anyways, and every house has a starting point, a focus of the dream. Farm 11 started with the kitchen, Cottage 36 started with the bunk beds, Glasco Cottage really focused in on the porches and outdoor living - this one had an eye from the beginning on this bathroom, and in very few conversations we nailed the general idea and during the course of construction, we nailed the design and materials.
Here's the master bedroom, with the walkin closet and the 2nd floor deck out back.
That's me in the mirror - I just refound my orange hat so I'm pretty happy about that.
And looking out the upstairs window into a dreamy landscape and faraway thoughts about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a Catskill Farms home.
Ok, say we've embraced Pinterest with a passion with the help of Kerry over at Farm 18 who is an expert. Find it's more usable and relevant and collaborative than a blog and definitely more so than Facebook - and our homes are really about the way they look and you know what they way about a picture being worth a thousand words
I hope to come up with an idea or two every month about some element of our homes, be it the landscaping, the furniture, a favorite nook, a favorite pet spot, deck chair, doobie hiding location, favorite light, etc... Should be fun.
We've gotten started. Here's are boards - feel free to post away and repin. Once on Pinterest site, just search for Catskill Farms, then choose our 'boards' to see what we've started.
Thanks.
Almanac Weekly Article: Rustic Without the Rust
Catskill Farms was recently features in the Almanac Weekly's article, Rustic Without the Rust, by Lynn Woods:
Rustic Without the Rust
Charles Petersheim didn’t know a soul in the Catskills when he left New York City post-9/11 and purchased an abandoned shack in Sullivan County. Petersheim, who had done construction and real estate in the City, found work upstate renovating old farmhouses for weekenders – and quickly made an important discovery: The first-time second-homebuyers who were his customers found the process unbelievably stressful. The charming rustic cottage on three or four acres that is every Manhattanite’s or Brooklynite’s country dream sometimes turned out to be a money pit with all kinds of disappointments and problems.
Petersheim saw an opportunity. In 2002 he launched Catskill Farms, which offers the ideal alternative: building new homes modeled after the old farmhouse. Using salvaged wood as accents and planks for the floors, refurbishing old radiators for the cozy steam-heat systems and siding his abodes in pine or cedar, with metal roofs and fireplaces as options, he realized that he could build farmhouses with all the charm of an original but none of the hassle.
All his homes are energy-efficient, with spray-foam insulation and on-demand hot-water heaters. Plus, the customer can weigh in on the design, such as the height of the ceilings, size and placement of the windows and location on the property, avoiding a common pitfall of old homes, which is they are too close to the road. “We’ve been able to capture the romantic essence of an older home, which is a very subliminal thing,” Petersheim said. “Our homes have a heart.”
As you may guessed from that remark, Petersheim is also a marketing whiz. His company’s website, www.thecatskillfarms.com, powerfully evokes the Catskills’ down-home appeal, from the personal testimonials to the vintage graphics to the country-music classics that play as you flip through the virtual brochure. The company has been featured on DIY’s Blog Cabin, and three of its homes will be featured on the February 14 episode of HGTV’s Selling New York program at 6:30 p.m.
While the 1,600-square-foot “farmhouse” and 1,300-square-foot “cottage” are his most popular models, he also constructs mid-century ranch-style “moderns” and “micro cottages and shacks”: 700-square-foot cottages that start at $185,000. Customers can pick features from different models and combine them and choose where to put the driveway, said Petersheim. So far, Catskill Farms, which employs 15, has built more than 100 houses, with sales of $36 million. Nearly half of them were small farmhouses priced just under $350,000: the “sweet spot” for most customers, Petersheim said.
Most of his houses were built in Sullivan County, where land was cheaper and more available. It has been Petersheim’s dream to build houses in Ulster County, and last summer that dream became a reality. In 2012, he sold 18 homes, nine of which were in Ulster, and plans to expand into Columbia County next. The farther east he moves, the more expensive the houses: Petersheim said that his farmhouses sell for 12 percent more in Ulster than in Sullivan County and start around $395,000.
Petersheim said that the strength of Catskill Farms’ product is borne out by the fact that he has not only survived during the Great Recession, but prospered. Partly it’s because of his business savvy. For example, the company is vertically integrated, meaning that it offers everything from soup to nuts (realtor sales to the final paint job). And to save on the cost of spray foam, which he said is priced artificially high due to a monopoly, he started his own company, Ecotech Spray Foam, in 2009.
Based in Barryville, Petersheim said that working in Sullivan County has been challenging. “My day-to-day existence was one of loneliness and having no industry peers in what I was doing. I spent a lot of time in an area with scarce resources and a shallow pool of labor, and it was a real struggle to grow.” Hence, expanding into Ulster is a kind of arrival.
On the other hand, he said that his company serves as a gateway to the Catskills for many urbanites, regardless of the county, with an average of 12,000 hits to his website a month. “So many people fall in love with the area,” he said. “We would like to leverage real estate and construction skills and resell other homes. I’m positive we have many more challenges in front of us, but I’m excited there will be less of a headwind and more tailwind.”
