Sometimes the first idea is the best idea.

Eduard and Selina van der Geest knew from the beginning that they wanted to build a barn-style home, and there was no place more perfect for them than the Hudson Valley’s Dutchess County. Eduard had lived in the area for 20 years, and Selina was instantly charmed by the rolling hills and countryside so reminiscent of her native England. “We thought about how we like to live, which is eating and entertaining – very informally,” Selina says, “so we decided we wanted one big room.”

Dreaming aloud at the Caf é Flore in Paris, Eduard sketched plans for their house on a napkin, and Selina followed up by assembling a team of experienced builders and craftsmen to transform the sketch into a delightful country home. The budget was modest, which called for inventive sourcing of materials and flexible, hands-on management. But Selina was ready for anything – before moving to the States a few years ago, she’d run her own decorating business and often worked with property developers. In just six months, Merrow Down Barn, as Selina have dubbed their home, was up and running.

The couple have a passion for things with a past, so although they were building new, they searched for pieces to lend the barn old world character. Even before they located their property, the couple bought 19th century Chinese doors, figuring they would find a use for them. The doors now make an unexpected and striking front entrance. They open into a dining area, the center of the home’s great room- a 40 x 25-foot open space with a seating area at one end and a kitchen at the other. The dining area’s 14-foot-long table is positioned between the Chinese front doors and a pair of French doors that lead to a terrace.

In the seating area, new sofas covered in linen, a small upholstered bench, and a table from India form a welcoming group around a 17th-century limestone mantel from Bordeaux, France. The couple’s collection of 19th-century European paintings and drawings adorn the walls.

Bedrooms and bathrooms extend off both ends of the great-room. The master suite is appropriately barn-simple, featuring white walls, pale carpets, and understated window treatments. Contrast comes from panels of a 19th-century Chinese screen transformed into closet doors – echoing the front doors – and the dark hue of the ceiling’s exposed wooden beams, which stand out against the creamy walls. A red feathered headdress from Cameroon adds color and texture to the serene space.

Merrow Down Barn is such a success that Selina has been inundated with requests to apply her range of skills to other projects. And yes, Selina will draw plans on a napkin, “if that’s when the inspiration comes.” Because sometimes you do get it right first time.

NL-GB, BANGALL, NY

The Hudson Valley has another outpost of the home to draw city dwellers upstate. Interior decorator Selina van der Geest packs her shop near Millbrook with her own industrial-style steel furniture. Also on hand are European antiques, sophisticated textiles, and standout accessories (hand-made lamps by Edwina Hunt; beaded necklaces by Eduardo Garza).

Natural Order

Designer Edwina Hunt’s earthy hideaway brings argentine attitude to the Hudson Valley

Text by Ingrid Abramovitch, photography by Simon Upton, produced by Anita Sarsidi

A house and its owner are sometimes destined for each other. That was certainly the case for Edwina Hunt, who swore she never wanted a country home. “I’m a nomad,” the New Yorker explains. “I like to travel around.” Little did she know that the old farmhouse she and her financier husband, James, ended up purchasing would help her reconnect with her past- and inspire a new career in home furnishings in the process.

Growing up in Buenos Aires, Hunt spent summers on family estancias south of the city. “My mother’s side was British and raised sheep, and my father’s family was Spanish and bred cows,” she says. “For me and my siblings, the barns and hay were out playground.” After some prodding from her husband, Hunt realized she wanted her four young children to have that experience too- outdoor space and a respite from televisions, computers and phones.

It was a visit one day to a 40-acre property in Dutchess Country, New York, that ultimately won her over. The dirt accessed road, softly curving and framed by handmade wood fences created by acclaimed garden designer Nancy McCabe, bordered picturesque pastures and a profusion of maple, oak, locust, and elm trees. An old barn, one of several, straddled a stream. “I didn’t even have to get out of the car,” Hunt says. “It immediately felt like home.”

The 1770 saltbox farmhouse had been added onto twice- first in the 19th Century and again in the 1990s by New York architect Zhenya Merkoluva, who installed a mudroom with a flower sink and a spacious sky lighted kitchen equipped with a pizza oven. Despite the contemporary amenities, at heart it “was still a simple farmhouse,” says Hunt of the rustic architecture-exposed beams, plank floors, and slanted ceilings- that recalled the beloved ranches of her childhood. “I felt that the d écor should respect that.”

And where better to find it than Argentina, where she headed straightaway for furniture to fill a container she would ship back to New York. It was 2002 and the devaluation of the peso had made it prohibitive to import just about anything from abroad. To cope, Argentine designers were teaming up with local artisans and using indigenous materials- goatskin, rawhide, wood, and bone- to produce a fresh visual vocabulary.

The creativity astonished Hunt. She thought, I should do something with all of this. Within a month, she and her sister, Silvina Pampillo, a Buenos Aires architect, launched a business designing and exporting Argentine home furnishings handmade by master craftspeople. The products, which range from silver trays to animal-hide benches, draw on tradition but possess modern chic- rough cactus wood adds texture to a contemporary silver lame base, while a dressy suede ottoman sits atop four cow-horn legs.

With her new venture off to a solid start, Hunt returned to the States and enlisted the help of interior designer Selina van der Geest to decorate her family’s four bedroom country house. Van der Geest offset the earthy Argentine furnishings with a serene palette of warm neutrals mixed with rich linen upholstery. “Edwina and I have a very similar approach to natural materials and colors; we seek inspiration from the environment,” Van der Geest says. She transformed an attic room into one of the ore whimsical spaces in the house, a bedroom for Hunt’s daughter. Her sons’ shared bedroom is a mix of blue-and-white patterns and a zigzag rug by Roberta Freymann. “I don’t like things to match,” Hunt says. “To me what’s important is that a house have a soul.”

After days spent riding horses and playing in the garden, the children join their parents in the living room, where the d écor-a tan sofa, a funky antler-and-deerskin bench-is stylish without feeling precious. The family plays cards and chess, then gathers in the dining room for a meal at the long wood table, a weathered relic once used by dressmakers for sewing. Hunt’s passion for her heritage is evident throughout the house. She uses antique awayo blankets as upholstery for cushions and liberally employs accent colors- a fiery range of rusts, reds, and oranges- inspired by these textiles. Among the living room furnishings is a pair of wobbly wood-and-rawhide matera chairs, the traditional perch for sipping yerba mat é.

Six years after they took the plunge, the house in the country has become a haven for Hunt and her family and an eloquent showcase for her flourishing design aesthetic. “My husband asks me if I’m finished decorating,” Hunt says. “I’m never done. And if there are mistakes along the way, all the better.”

Quotes

“Van der Geest offset the earthy Argentine furnishings with a serene palette of warm neutrals mixed with rich linen upholstery.”

“Edwina and I have a very similar approach to natural materials and colors; we seek inspiration from the environment.”

Elle Decor, July 2008

“Frédéric Fekkai and Shirin von Wulffen relish their downtime at a country house where big city chic embraces rural comforts.”

“Once Frédéric Fekkai discovered the tiny New York Village of Millbrook 12 years ago, there was no way the celebrity hairstylist and creator of a line of eponymous hair products would establish his home anywhere else. “I’d had enough of the Hamptons,” Fekkai recalls, referring to the Long Island beach towns that attract upscale throngs. Granted, Millbrook, 80 miles north of Manhattan, has it’s share of famous and fabulous residents – Liam Neeson and Mary Tyler Moore among them. But there, Fekkai explains in the sunny accent he acquired growing up in Aix-en-Provence, “It’s calm and rural. There are two streets in the village and no fancy stores. People aren’t trying to compete, they all have pick-up trucks.”

Fekkai rented one cottage after another, heading to Millbrook as often as his busy life and demanding travel schedule allowed. Then in late 2003 he met Shirin von Wulffen, now the director of communications for Tom Ford North America, and soon asked her to join him there one weekend. Born in Iran to German parents, von Wulffen grew up on a thoroughbred farm in Virginia. “I am very much a combination: I’m a country girl who likes New York City,” she says. And although she admits she harbored assumptions about Fekkai, whose clients include Debra Messing and Martha Stewart, she says, “When I saw him in Millbrook, I understood who he really was. I realized that if he liked this simplicity he was the right person for me.” The couple married in May 2006.

By that time they had already bought their own Millbrook property – “a little old farmhouse,” as von Wulffen calls it, with four barns and a 27 acre lake on more than 350 acres. “Frédéric and Shirin had a vision,” says Cynthia Filkoff of Di Biaze Filkoff Architects, the regional firm that renovated the place. “They saw this 150 year old building painted red with white trim and imagined it could be a jewel.” Mindful of the structure’s integrity, Filkoff transformed its exterior with a coat of white paint and removed an ungainly extension containing the previous kitchen. She knocked down a wall to create and expansive kitchen-and-breakfast room out of what was a dark, cramped space, exposing wood beams overhead and a brick wall above the large restored fireplace. Two sets of French doors in the kitchen open to the garden and “made sure the house was connected to the land and the light,” Filkoff says. She also carved out a mudroom and new bathrooms on the first and second floors and blackened original pine floorboards with a rich ebony stain.

It was then that interior designer Selina van der Geest stepped in. An outdoorsy Briton with impeccable taste, van der Geest operates her stylish showroom, NL-GB, in the nearby town of Bangall. The couple had visited her store as well as several homes she decorated – van der Geest’s own included. “they wanted the same kind of relaxed European feeling in their house that I have in mine,” the designer says. And that is exactly what she delivered.

Inspired by the kitchen’s exposed brick and beams and wood pieces the couple already owned – chief among them the dining room’s 17th century Italian credenza, Renaissance revival chairs, and an 18th century Italian painted architectural panel – van der Geest picked what she calls “natural linen colors”, from off-white and taupe to plum and cocoa, for the curtains, shades, and much of the upholstery. Referencing Fekkai’s love of hunting and von Wullfen’s fondness for rugs, she filled the house with kilims and nods to his hobby: a striking shed-antler chandelier and Edwina Hunt leather-and-alpaca lamps in the dining room; wildebeest pillows and a Hunt deerskin-covered stool in the living room; and a mink coverlet in the master bedroom.

The latter is one of the most luxurious items the decorator selected for the house. “I don’t think it’s always necessary to spend a lot of money, and Frédéric is very much of that feeling,” explains van der Geest. The linen fabrics all cost about $20 per yard and though antiques abound, many items came from catalogues, such as the large glass jars (the Conran Shop) and reproduction French steel chairs (Sundance Catalog)in the kitchen breakfast area; metal bedside cabinets (Anthropologie) in the master bedroom; and the desk (Design Within Reach) in the bedroom of Alexandre, Fekkai’s son from a previous marriage. All blend easily with perfectly pitched one-of-a-kind pieces van der Geest brought in, from a bright and sophisticated pumpkin-velvet sofa she designed for the living room to an antique Moroccan rug under the dining table.

The house feels spacious, bright and unpretentiously elegant. European, yes, but rooted in the rustic simplicity of Millbrook. “There’s nothing complicated here,” declared von Wulffen. “You can come in, drop everything, and just relax.”

A Barn to Call Home

In New York’s Hudson Valley

Somewhere there’s a napkin with Eduard Van der Geest’s house plan on it. And if you were to find it, you might be surprised how little those rough ideas sketched at the caf é Flore in Paris vary from the finished home he and wife Selina built outside Millbrook, New York. From the beginning, the Van der Geests knew they wanted a barn style home. “We thought about how we like to live, which is eating and entertaining…. Very informally,” explains Selina,” so we decided we wanted one big room.” They also knew they would build that home in the Hudson River Valley’s Dutchess County. Eduard had lived in the area for 20 years, and Selina was instantly charmed by its rolling hills and countryside so reminiscent of her native England.

The couple also decided that they would build the home themselves, though the project fell largely on Selina. Before moving to the States four years ago, Selina had her own decorating business, often working with property developers, and she felt familiar with the building and remodeling process. In fact, Merrow Down Barn, as Selina and Eduard have dubbed together home, was built in just six months.

Selina assembled a team of experienced builders and craftsmen’s to transform that napkin sketch into a delightful country home. The budget was modest, which called for inventive sourcing of materials and flexible, hands-on management. Selina was ready for anything—from shoveling snow to painting cabinets to laying a Belgian granite floor in the hallway.

From the moment they came up with the idea of building a barn perfect for the setting in a field above two ponds, the couple found great pleasure in searching out pieces to add character.” I don’t like new things,” says Selina, “and I wanted to move away from the white clapboard look.” A great discovery was vintage barn boards in Canada for the siding. The 17th century mantel came from Bordeaux, France, the powder room’s marble sink is from a Turkish bathhouse, and other items were Flea-market finds from throughout Europe. (The old beams are a local touch, discovered right in Millbrook.)

Even Before they located their property, the couple bought 19th-century Chinese doors, figuring they would find a use for them. And sure enough, the doors now make an unexpected and striking front entrance. They open into a dining area, the center of the home’s great room a 40 x 25 foot open space with a seating area at one end and a kitchen at the other. Above the kitchen is a loft with Selina’s office, and behind it is a television room. The Dining area’s 14 foot long table is positioned between the Chinese front doors and a pair of French doors that lead to a terrace. “We were looking in Europe for ages for a table that long, but ended up finding it right here,” says Selina, The neo-Gothic English dining chairs were purchase in London.

In the seating area, new sofas covered in linen, a small upholstered bench, and tables from India form a welcoming spot around the limestone fireplace. The couple’s collection of 19th century European paintings and drawings adorn the walls.

The open kitchen, built around and 8 x 4 foot island, is perfect for entertaining. Selina loves to cook, and is able to enjoy the company of friends as they mill about. The counters are gray concrete to complement the stainless steel appliances. One touch of home for Selina: the kitchen sink, shipped from England.

There are bedrooms and bathrooms beyond the kitchen for Eduard’s teenage daughters, Leannah and Cornelia. At the opposite end of the main floor, the master suite is appropriately barn-simple white walls, pale carpet, and understated window treatments. Lending character are doors made from the panels of 19th century Chinese screen. A red feathered headdress from Cameroon adds color and texture to the serene space. Selina’s collection of colorful Eduardo Garza necklaces serves a similar role in the bathroom.

Merrow Down Barn is such a success that Selina has been inundated with requests to apply her range of skills to other projects. And yes, Selina will draw plans on a napkin,” If that’s when the inspiration comes, and given how much I like to eat, it could,” she says with a laugh.”

Peaceable Kingdom

With the help of Designer Selina Van Der Geest, a creative Manhattan couple gets a country house that provides calm and inspiration.

Some people might argue that for urban dwellers, a country house is more a necessity than a luxury. But just leaving a city’s clamor far behind isn’t always enough. The bucolic destination at the end of the road should be a refuge that stokes creativity as much as it soothes souls.

Wanda and Greg Furman have achieved precisely that in a onetime farm in Dutchess County, New York, about two hours north of their weekday Manhattan digs. It was not the getaway of their dreams when the couple found it nearly ten years ago – the 19th century clapboard house and its buildings were dilapidated – but the property had potential. Especially appealing was a red barn that could be turned into a studio for Greg, a painter and sculptor whose day job is running the Luxury Marketing Council, which he founded in 1994. Before that could happen, however, there was work to be done. “The place was in serious despair,” says Wanda, a fashion director turned home-interior stylist. “It needed someone to rescue it.”

Enter Selina van der Geest, a local decorator with an international reputation. She and Wanda met when each had a booth at an antiques center in nearby Millbrook. Furman found herself admiring Van der geest’s quiet, sophisticated tastes and soon asked her for help refining her new home. “I had a picture in my mind of what I wanted – earthy, stony colors”, Wanda explains, adding “and I wanted the house to flow, with each space feeling like a natural extension of the last.”

It was a perfect client-decorator match. “We both like peaceful environments and natural fabrics,” Van der Geest observes. “I enjoy working with colors that you are not immediately aware of, that are relaxing and organic.” The decorator’s preferences were precisely in tune with the Furmans’ desire for a quiet palette that would complement the five-acre property’s trees and stonewalls.

Maintaining as much of the historic character of the house as possible was a prime objective, but the original pumpkin-color pine floors upset the neutral scheme Van der Geest planned. Her solution for the main level was to sand the planks smooth and apply a calming gray stain. (The Furmans’ are debating whether to do the same upstairs.) The four-pane Victorian windows though were preserved without modification. “I should replace them for energy efficiency, but I just can’t,” Wanda says. “I love wavy old glass.”

She was, however, willing to gut the kitchen; Van der Geest then planned the new one with an impressive sensitivity. Birch cabinets and a farmhouse sink from IKEA blend seamlessly with an antique worktable topped with a hefty slab of well-worn marble found at a flea market in Manhattan. “I wanted a European flavor,” Wanda explains. She also didn’t want to see the modern refrigerator-the appliance is hidden in a pantry off the mudroom. The walls are painted a gravel color by Farrow & Ball, and from the beams hang an assortment of baskets that might have been used for gathering fruit or eggs back in the day. “Selina wasn’t keen on them,” Wanda says, “but they soften the space and take off the hard edge.”

An astute balancing of cozy and cool, comfortable and chic, is in evidence throughout the poetically restrained rooms. Overstuffed sofas and chairs upholstered in crisp but inviting tobacco-color linen. Firewood is neatly yet conspicuously stored in a nail-studded steel container, and subtle red accents, like the trim on a Swiss army blanket, reference the barns seen through the windows.

Van der Geest made the rooms harmonious, but Wanda made them personal by brining in rustic stools, glass-front country cabinets, and simple ceramic vessels. “She has great accessories because she’s a stylist, and she really knows how to put them together,” the decorator says. “Wanda is wonderful at making vignettes. When the construction crew came to demolish the kitchen, she put out coffee and muffins, and it looked like a page from a magazine.”

That control of visual details is one reason the farmhouse seems clutter free. Another is that the Furmans have work spaces that keep personal papers out of sight. Under the attic eaves a carpenter built Wanda a desk area with enough shelves to neatly store hundreds of design magazines and books, while her husband has a study plus the barn studio they first imagined, which is heated in winter by a woodstove.

A fan of Greg’s art, Van der Geest sprinkled his paintings and drawings judiciously throughout the rooms and had his archive of works catalogued. “He is a wonderful artist,” the designer says. “And since he had never been exhibited before, I gave Greg a show at my shop and published a book about him.” Sometimes creativity just needs a helping hand – and the right place to let it shine.

FASHION & STYLE News

Seek and Ye Shall Find

A trove of treasures either specially made or a bit below the radar.

SELINA VAN DER GEEST’S well stocked store, NL-GB, is Millbrook, New York’s best-kept secret. Among the boutique’s array of furniture, textiles and private-label clothing is its new line of stoles made of vintage fur and updated with vibrant ikat linings. Mink and rabbit stoles ($900 each), 845-868-7130, weekends or by appointment.

Contemporary Barn

It is not often that weekend retreats are born from drawings on café napkins in Paris, but in the case of the van der Geests’, necessity was the mother of invention. “We always had a dream to have a country place where we could entertain, live and play with all the ease we could think of,” explains Eduard, who is Dutch, of he and his wife, Selina who is English. So a few years later and over three thousand miles away in Hudson Valley, New York, the sketch of dreams became a reality: a symmetrical barnlike contemporary home, fashioned from vintage silver gray barn siding, along with twelve-foot-square oak hand-hewn beams. Surrounded by woodland and abundant wildlife, it sits at the end of a winding dirt drive, past ponds and fields. One enters directly into the mudroom, which feels like the ultimate way station between outdoor and indoor pleasure. There is reassuring order here, with symmetrical closets set with wire meshing (built by Eduard), but also fancifulness, as in the vintage frames (collected by Selina) hung alongside hunting trophies. A pair of Chinese barn doors grandly gives way to the great room, the heart and soul of the home, which despite its soaring twenty-eight foot ceilings, still embraces you with a peaceful hospitality that is part French country, part Zen.

At one end is the living area, punctuated by a great fireplace complete with seventeenth-century soapstone mantel. (It took six months to get an export passport so that it could leave France.) In full view at the other end is a serene Swedish-style kitchen, where Selina elegantly displays glass jars full of tempting goodies and Eduard whips up much-anticipated breakfasts featuring blue eggs from nearby farms. When it’s time to eat, European and local guests congregate around the enormous fourteenth-century country table at the corner of the room. Selina, an accomplished decorator, acted as her own general contractor and designer, and knows a thing or two about solving problems with personal panache. When a suitable drinks cabinet could not be found, for example, she simply fashioned one of her own designs out of steel. When budget dictated Ikea cabinets for the kitchen, she had them sanded and painted to achieve just the dove-gray patina she wanted.

Whether reclining fireside or helping with the culinary preparations, visitors are surrounded by Eduard and Selina’s intimate displays of beloved objects brought back from their travels the world over. From the nineteenth-century watercolors dotting the living room landscape, to the Chinese wooden screens in the master shower, to a Belgian white cupboard in the kitchen, guests are encouraged to get close, admire, and, always touch.

With the new addition of a pool just steps from the house (complete with outdoor stained oak furniture designed by Selina), the house is an even greater destination for friends from both England and Holland. Visits to the local farmer’s market are a weekend ritual, as is walking with Zola, the couple’s welsh Springer. In the winter Selina is in charge of snow blowing, and in the summer she mows the lawn (she says it’s the ultimate therapy), while Eduard busies himself with the constant attention such an active household requires. The van der Geests’ most important task each day is to create the ideal environment for themselves and those they cherish. Says Selina, “We want our guests to feel they are somewhere special.”