When Charles Brill and Merrill Lyons bought land in upstate New York, they imagined building a weekend home there, an escape from their full-time life in Gowanus, Brooklyn. But that was before the pandemic made them rethink the way they lived.
For years before they bought the property, said Mr. Brill, 40, a founder of the lighting company RBW, “we would seek out all the different farmers markets of the Hudson Valley and take day trips to different towns,” trying to figure out which places they liked best. They finally settled on an eight-acre lot outside Rhinebeck, N.Y., paying $123,000 in September 2019.
Ms. Lyons, 44, an interior designer, began drawing up plans for a house with two small structures connected by a breezeway, calling on her friends Ben Sandell and Van Chu, the founders of the architecture firm Built Narrative Studio, for help.
“We wanted to echo traditional bucolic architecture and the way a farm grows over time, with buildings upon buildings,” Ms. Lyons said.
Or as Ms. Chu put it, “We wanted a design that looked like it belonged to that space and had been there for a while” — even though it was a modern house.
By the end of the year, the plans were complete and they had lined up a contractor to start construction the following spring. Then Covid arrived. The project was put on hold, and Mr. Brill and Ms. Lyons left New York with their children, now 8 and 6, to stay at a lake house in southern Ontario, Canada, that belonged to Ms. Lyons’s family.
“We lived there for about six months,” Mr. Brill said. “It was pretty desolate, and the only restaurant was a Tim Hortons. We said, ‘Hey, if we can live up here for six months, living in Rhinebeck would be a breeze, with all its great restaurants and shops.’”
After some discussion, they decided to make the upstate house their primary residence, and to eventually sell the place in Brooklyn. Revisiting the architectural plans, they made just one small change, expanding a section of the house to allow for closets in the bedrooms.
The 2,500-square-foot, four-bedroom house that they built splits public and private functions between the two structures. One volume contains a wide-open living, dining and kitchen space beneath a cathedral ceiling, along with a guest suite. Across the breezeway, the other volume contains three bedrooms, including the primary suite. They planned a garage as a separate structure.
Impressed with a house the architect John Pawson had designed in rural Sweden, which had a roof of corrugated, galvanized metal, they used the same material for their roof and clad the exterior walls in white fiber-cement siding.
Inside, Ms. Lyons led the design charge, taking inspiration from midcentury-modern and Scandinavian design. “I’m a lot more decorative than Charlie. I use a lot of wallpaper and color,” said Ms. Lyons, who attempted to find a middle ground when their ideas about design diverged. “Charlie gave me the brief that he wanted it simple and clean.”
Aiming for quick, low-cost construction, Mr. Brill also requested that she use tough, readily available materials that weren’t too time-consuming to install.
Ms. Lyons responded by specifying a tile floor, laminate kitchen cabinets and terrazzo counters in the primary living space. She kept the clean-lined space largely free of decorative clutter, but added color with various shades of laminate on the cabinets (mustard yellow, dark and light gray), bright green Rey dining chairs and a shaggy teal-and-black floor covering from Beni Rugs.
In the bedrooms, she created softer spaces with more visual warmth, using whitewashed pine flooring and covering the walls of the primary bedroom in floral wallpaper from the Swedish company Borastapeter.
The family moved back into their Brooklyn house a few months after construction began in August 2020. A year later, when the Rhinebeck house was nearly finished at a cost of about $650 a square foot, the family moved in and sold their Brooklyn home. Since then, they have completed the finishing touches, built the garage and done the landscaping, based on a plan developed with R Design.
“We love it,” Ms. Lyons said. “It’s a whole lifestyle change. We can spread out, and the kids can enjoy the outdoors without us having to watch them.”
“The parking is really good, too,” Mr. Brill added with a laugh. In Brooklyn, it used to take him an hour to find street parking. Now he drives right up to the front door.
To make the journey a little more fun, he bought and restored a 1969 Subaru mini truck that had been converted into a mobile hot-dog stand.
“We have ambitions for our kids to have a stand at the Rhinebeck Farmers Market,” he said. “When they’re teenagers, that can be their souped-up lemonade stand.”
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