Brooke Lea Foster

If you’re surprised to hear that two city-based creatives gave up their urban roots for life in the country, so were their families. Perhaps no one was more shocked than Weinberg’s grandmother and a friend of hers who once vacationed near the young couple’s new home in West Kill, New York. “The Catskills are over,” the friend said with concern.

Weinberg, 34, politely responded: “But you haven’t been there in 40 years. It’s different now.”

One could say the same for many of the rural hamlets, lush valleys and charming Main Streets of upstate New York: They’re changing, thanks to awave of city folks moving in. Sure, the hemlock trees are still towering, the mountain ranges still majestic and the streams still rushing, but telecommuting has inspired a new crop of people to move to these sometimes wild, sometimes walkable and sometimes wide-open spaces. Priced out of the city, but armed with the possibility of working at home, some New Yorkers are willing to trade their walk to work for a walk in the woods.

“If you want to live on 5 acres, that’s never going to happen in the suburbs, so some people are looking farther,” said Jessica Fields, a real estate agent for Compass in Park Slope. In 2014, she founded Beyond Brooklyn, which helps people who want to leave the city figure out where to go.

She and her husband considered moving their family to Ulster County seven years ago — and while that is not entirely off the table, they are staying in Brooklyn for now. “We know so many people who have moved upstate or are curious about moving there. It attracts the people that want to be outside and make their own kombucha, but still want to stay connected to arts and culture.”

A 2018 StreetEasy report showed that when New Yorkers move within the tristate area, 6 percent go to Westchester and Rockland counties, while 12 percent wind up in New York counties north of there. (For comparison’s sake, 9 percent move to Long Island and 13 percent to New Jersey, whether to urban Hudson County or beyond.) Residents of the Bronx and Staten Island are most likely to move upstate (17 percent), followed by Brooklynites (12 percent).

“Ninety percent of my clients up here are from Brooklyn,” said Megan Brenn-White, a real estate agent in Kingston, New York, who left a 750-square-foot apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, that she shared with her husband for an A-frame style house surrounded by woods in Ulster County that they bought for $255,000 in 2016.

Brenn-White markets listings and interesting local businesses on an Instagram account with 6,500 followers, many of them potential or recent transplants from the city.

“Everyone wants the same things: to be within 2 1/2 hours from the city, to have a cute town with a coffee shop less than 10 minutes away,” she said. “Sometimes they’re looking for a weekend house and sometimes — about 20 percent of the time — they’re looking for the reverse: a ‘full-time’ move where they’ll still go a few times a month to the city for work.”

City dwellers are being drawn north, in part, because of affordability. You may live in an apartment in Hudson, New York, within walking distance of Basilica Hudson, a former glue factory that now has a busy lineup of concerts, readings and food-related events. Or you may buy a rural farmhouse a quick drive from Beacon, New York, with its galleries, restaurants and shops. Either way, you could buy or rent a house for a fraction of what a one-bedroom apartment in the city would cost. Freeing up a chunk of income enables some people to chase their dreams, allowing them to open a business or live the kind of life they might not have been able to in the city.

In 2011, Amanda and Anthony Stromoski, who were living in Park Slope, discovered Kingston while weekending in the Catskills, where they liked to go camping. After wandering Kingston’s sidewalks for a night, and stopping in at the local craft brewery, they fell for the walkable streets and proximity to nature.

They visited several more times over the years and kept Kingston in mind when they were ready to leave Brooklyn. They briefly considered a move to one of the Rivertowns in Westchester, but decided they were ready for a bigger change and wanted to be closer to nature, said Anthony Stromoski, 36.

In 2016, he left his job as an assistant principal at a public high school in Brooklyn, and they bought an 1890 Victorian in Kingston for $311,000. Now they can see mountains from their windows. They made the decision, in part, because they harbored fantasies of opening a bookstore on Main Street.

For a year, Anthony Stromoski worked as a bartender while he and Amanda Stromoski formulated a business plan. And in 2017, they opened the 2,000-square-foot Rough Draft Bar &amp; Books, just a few blocks from their house. Here, “bibliotenders,” which is what they call their bartenders, will serve you a glass of wine along with a book recommendation; they also offer coffee and pastries from a local artisanal baker. Anthony Stromoski runs the bookstore, while Amanda Stromoski, a health writer with Meredith, works behind the scenes.

“Opening this kind of business would have been close to impossible in Brooklyn,” Amanda Stromoski, 36, said. “But here, it was more attainable for us.”

On their first day, one local after another popped in to welcome them, she said: “We feel really lucky to be part of such an amazing community.”

Weinberg, who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, and Scieszka, 34, who is from Park Slope, were drawn to the Catskills by another kind of dream: They wanted to open an inn, a place where “people like us would go,” Scieszka said.

That meant buying (and painstakingly renovating) an 8-acre property with an aging seven-room motel strip, an 1850s barn and farmhouse with original pine flooring, and open land with a trout stream running behind it. They paid $370,000 for the property.

For the motel, they built a Pinterest-worthy bar, freshened up the rooms with rustic-chic furnishings, designed a glossy website and gave the place a lovely, albeit sufficiently hipster name: the Spruceton Inn. So far, the inn has been sold out nearly every weekend, and there is often a waiting list.

Still, while opening it was a lifelong dream, Scieszka worried at first about running a place that was so isolated, feeling the anxiety that New Yorkers often experience when leaving the city. New York is the best, and only, place to live in the world, isn’t it? That was five years ago.

“It took me three months of being out of the city to realize how good living in nature was for me, and that’s when I started to think, ‘What would I be rushing back for?'” she said.

Since then, they have started an artist-in-residence program: They take applications from writers and artists who want to spend a free week at the inn, which helps maintain a steady stream of interesting guests during winter. One of their first artists in residence, a writer named Stephanie Danler, worked on revisions to her book “Sweetbitter” there.

Scieszka and Weinberg now have a baby girl, Amina, whom Weinberg often straps into a Baby Bjorn when he goes fly fishing. She gurgles at the trout, he said: “I love that she’s growing up with a true connection to nature.”

Scieszka said she and Weinberg, who has been a guest writer at the small public elementary school nearby, don’t worry about getting Amina into school, as they would have in Brooklyn. “Out here, there’s only one choice, which in many ways is a relief,” she said of the closest school, 20 minutes away.

That it has fewer than 40 children in each grade is even better, she added: “The opportunity for the students to get individual attention from teachers seems wonderful to me.”

While transplants may worry about detaching from the frenetic pace of city life, some new upstate residents report that moving to the country connected them to the natural world in unexpected ways, filling a void left by the city with something they were not expecting: serenity. Living in the shadow of stunning mountain ranges and dense forests helps put things in perspective and shifts the focus away from stressors, they say.

Former city people might find themselves chopping wood (even owning multiple axes), growing some of their own food, heating their homes with wood stoves or learning to spot signs of wildlife, like the marks a buck makes when it rubs its antlers against a tree. At parties, they say, people talk about swimming holes and nature hikes rather than what they do for a living, and gathering around a firepit is as commonplace as a Manhattan power lunch.

“I had no idea that there were signs of spring besides not wearing a jacket,” Scieszka said. “Here, you’re tied to the seasons. You come to learn what plants come up first, where things grow.”

And while the winters can be, well, long, Megan Caponetto, a set stylist who moved to her weekend home in Ghent, New York, full time in 2009, said that living up north has made her enjoy winter. “I love waking up and hearing the snowfall,” Caponetto, 49, said. “It’s so quiet. Winter used to be so horrible for me, so depressing. But up here, the land is so pretty in the snow.”

There is a sense among some that in living upstate, they are almost cheating: It’s not really the country. They can live deep in the woods or in a densely populated country town and meet like-minded creatives, foodies or artisans — and still be in New York City in less than two hours. In fact, easy access to the city has broadened the region’s appeal, as commuting once or twice a week feels doable.

Caponetto, who travels to Manhattan frequently for work, said she uses nature to center her before getting on the highway. “Even if I’m leaving at 5 a.m. to get into the city, I have a quiet moment every single day sitting on my porch and staring out into nature,” she said.

Russell Jones, a jewelry designer who left Park Slope for Hudson in 2013 after he got divorced, mostly works in a rented art studio near his 1920s bungalow. But once a week he takes the train down to New York City to teach at Pratt Institute. “It was less daunting to make the move up here at first because I still had that lifeline into the city,” he said.

He enjoys maintaining his connection to Manhattan, taking advantage of his weekly jaunts to see the latest show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or buy gemstones and materials for his designs. Plus, the train trip along the Hudson River is “magnificent,” Jones, 58, said. “I routinely see bald eagles flying alongside the train.”

That you can escape into nature with ease brought Matt Dilling, 39, and his wife, Erika deVries, 48, both artists, and their three children north in 2013, when they moved into their A-frame weekend house in the woods of West Saugerties.

DeVries left her job teaching art full time at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, while Dilling opted to move the production portion of his business, Lite Brite Neon Studio, which makes neon signs and has been featured in Architectural Digest, out of Brooklyn. His mortgage on a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Kingston (for which he paid $505,000) was nearly the same as the rent on his former 1,500-square-foot studio in Gowanus. Taking the stress of finances out of daily life, he said, has enabled him and his family to live a more meaningful life.

Their children, who attended a Waldorf school in Brooklyn, love their new private schools upstate; one is at a Waldorf program in Saugerties and another is at a Woodstock school that bills itself as a “socially and environmentally mindful education journey.” (Their oldest child, deVries’ son from a previous marriage, returned to Brooklyn for high school and is living with his biological father.)

The move freed up head space, Dilling said. Now he has more time to spend with his family, and without the external stimulus provided by the city, he has done more soul-searching and become more spiritual. There is time, he said, for things other than work, like meditation.

Upstairs from Lite Brite Neon, he and his wife opened Cygnets Way, a studio that offers community yoga and classes in mindfulness practices, like sound healing. DeVries also teaches bead-making and love-letter writing there.

“Before, it was hard to have time for an inner life,” Dilling said. “But nature has helped my mind quiet down and get in touch with what’s going on inside of me. There’s a strong connection up here to what’s larger than you, and it’s great when you don’t live inside a mental to-do list.”

Those who have made the move, like Dilling and deVries, say they have a constant rotation of friends from the city coming to visit. And it’s easy to meet people with similar values.

“There’s truly an expat community up here,” said Brenn-White, the real estate agent.

The idea that you might move upstate to re-create a version of your city life, however, didn’t sit well with Grace Bonney, editor of the lifestyle blog Design Sponge, and her wife, Julia Turshen, a cookbook writer. They bought a weekend house on 4 acres in Ulster County in 2014 because they wanted a larger kitchen and craved a closer connection to nature. After four months, they let go of their Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment and moved up to the 1850s farmhouse full time.

The transition wasn’t entirely rosy. The more time Bonney, now 37, spent in her new home, the more perspective she gained about the Brooklyn migration. While volunteering for a nonprofit group, she worked with longtime business owners whose companies were being overshadowed by some of the trendier ones started by out-of-towners.

“Everybody loves the land here, but there’s a financial tension between new residents and longtime locals that’s palpable,” she said, adding that she was surprised and humbled by the concerns of locals who felt as if their towns were being taken over.

She and Turshen, 33, have since made a commitment to shop mostly at local stores. And they hire only local tradespeople, rather than bringing in contractors and designers from the city, something they often see others do.

By now, she said, they have come to feel at home upstate. They walk their dogs regularly at the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, 10 minutes away. And as a self-professed homebody whose work on Design Sponge has taken her to designer homes around the country, Bonney said she can’t imagine living anywhere else.

“There’s something special about this house,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/realestate/forget-the-suburbs-its-country-or-bust.html" id="09c763ea-28b2-38d4-a4df-400d17a0d6f0">The New York Times</a>.

When Casey Scieszka, a freelance writer, and her husband, Steven Weinberg, a children’s book writer and illustrator, decided to leave Park Slope, Brooklyn, they didn’t consider the New York suburbs, where the yards were too small and the property too pricey. Instead, they moved to a house 5 miles down a dirt road — in the Catskills.

Forget the Suburbs, It's Country or Bust

Six years ago, the couple began auditioning vacation destinations for their family, knowing that someday they wanted to buy a weekend home. They tried staying in Hillsdale, in Columbia County, New York, and in various towns on Long Island; they tested nearly every beach town on the Jersey Shore.

Two summers ago, they fell hard for Cold Spring, New York, a Putnam County village on the Hudson River, a little over an hour from the city, renting a house near a nature preserve with a river view. Although they didn’t find a house to buy there, the experience inspired them to search in other relatively close areas, as their daughters, Sasha, 4, and Sydney, 3, get carsick on long drives. They looked at towns like Bedford and North Salem, exploring places many have long considered — gasp — the suburbs.

When Polina Stein, 36, a graphic designer, heard a parent at her daughter’s Manhattan preschool raving about the family’s house on Lake Kitchawan, in sleepy Pound Ridge, a town of roughly 5,000 people that is home to the 4,315-acre Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, they found a house on the same lake soon after. The 5,000-square-foot house, which they are renovating, abuts 16 acres of conservancy land. There are views of the 100-acre lake from most rooms, and there is an indoor pool. They paid less than $1 million.

“I’m a city person at heart,” Polina Stein said. “I’m not ready to live in the suburbs, but I liked that this house wasn’t too far; it was private, and you really feel like you’re deep in the woods. I don’t want my girls to grow up scared of bugs.”

Weekending in the suburbs? Well, why not? These towns are commutable — if you don’t mind a commute of more than an hour — and offer plenty of birdsong out your window. Many have charming downtowns, some with the boutique exercise classes popular in the city and farm-to-table restaurants. And depending on where you buy, you might get a house with a pool that is also a short drive or walk from a beach, great hiking trails or parks. Or a lively farmers’ market.

“Suburbs is a dirty word,” joked Melissa Marcogliese, an agent with Compass Real Estate, in Northern Westchester. “We prefer to think of it up here as country chic.”

New Yorkers like the Steins aren’t buying second homes in commuter havens like Garden City or Bronxville, half an hour on an express train from the city. Brokers in less-dense suburbs like waterfront Greenwich, Connecticut, and walkable Katonah, New York, say they are getting calls from city buyers (and renters) interested in weekend houses within 90 minutes of Manhattan. An agent in Rowayton, Connecticut, said summer rentals in the exclusive waterfront village tend to fly off the market.

“It’s a larger trend than it’s ever been,” said Alison Bernstein, the executive director of Suburban Jungle Realty, a real estate agency that helps city dwellers find the right suburb. Some of her clients have fallen in love with an area outside the city, only to discover that they can’t cut the cord and leave their city life behind. So a few have opted to buy a weekend house there instead. “For some people,” Bernstein said, “it’s a way to get their feet wet.”

Drawn to the open land, quiet villages and deer crossing their yards, families may spend the summer in those houses, commuting back and forth for a few months, while enrolling their children at suburban camps. Others, often telecommuters, extend their weekends by working a Friday or Monday from the vacation homes, then hopping on an hourlong train the morning they are expected back at work.

Many of these towns tend to have a mix of full- and part-time residents. It’s easy to see the suburban weekend house as a modern twist on the city pied-à-terre: In the last century, if a parent was working late, he or she might stay in an apartment in Manhattan rather than head home to the suburbs, and the place offered a base for family activities in the city on the weekend. Today, the suburban house offers a similar jumping-off point for weekend excursions, and the advent of telecommuting offers the possibility of working a day or two in the backyard.

While there are pretty, vacation-like suburbs across the tristate area — Little Silver in New Jersey, Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island — Bernstein said the horse farms and lakes of Northern Westchester, as well as the serene waters of the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, seem to pull people north when it comes to buying a close-in weekend house. “Compared to the Hamptons, you’ll get so much more for your money up there,” she said.

It was the traffic that pushed Leonard Steinberg and his partner, Thom Caughlin, to sell their weekend house on the Hudson River. On Friday nights, it could take three hours to get to their beloved Saugerties house, about 100 miles from the city. And then it was another three hours to return home Sunday.

“It was becoming a bit absurd,” said Steinberg, 54, an executive at Compass Real Estate. “We came up with a mission statement: Find a house with a shorter commute, so we could enjoy our weekends more.”

He and Caughlin, 52, the executive director of creative operations at Estee Lauder, considered areas like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Tuxedo Park, New York, before buying a piece of land for $380,000 on Whatmores Lake, in Waccabuc, New York, in Northern Westchester. They finished building their 3,000-square-foot farmhouse-loft dream home there last summer.

Now, after a weekend of hiking, dining at the Inn at Pound Ridge by Jean-Georges or catching up with locals at the Market at Union Hall in North Salem, they can be back in the West Village in less than an hour.

“Time is the luxury with the greatest value, because we all keep running out of it,” Steinberg said. “Being this close allows us to go up for a night if we’re busy. It’s heaven.”

Eric Rosenfeld, a broker with William Raveis Real Estate, in Katonah, said he often showed houses to urbanites who were surprised by the raw beauty of some suburban areas. “There is the assumption that you have to go far away for it to be wild and natural,” he said. “But we have areas where, thanks to rocky outcroppings, lakes and streams, you swear you’re in New Hampshire.”

“It was the stone walls that got me,” said Allison Rudary, 39, who works in private banking. She and her husband, Matt Rudary, 39, a software engineer at a hedge fund, bought a weekend house in Redding, Connecticut, a year ago. “You pass over the Saugatuck River, and there’s this little house in Wilton where the road turns from two lanes to one, and when I see it, all of the tension from my neck and back falls away,” she said.

They considered buying a weekend house in Beacon, New York, or Candlewood Lake, Connecticut, before deciding on Redding, where they fell in love with the forested and hilly terrain of the rural town. Redding doesn’t have a commercial downtown, or even a stoplight, but it is less than 60 miles from their Upper West Side apartment. They adore the bucolic country roads winding to the four-bedroom colonial they bought for $705,000, which sits on 6 acres and backs Devil’s Den Preserve, a nature lover’s paradise. “We see woodpeckers; we see hawks nesting; we see deer. But we don’t see people, and we don’t hear them. It’s a true escape,” Allison Rudary said.

They leave every Friday night year-round, returning to the city on Monday morning. Allison Rudary loves to cook and bake. Matt Rudary tends the fire. They catch up on television and take their dogs for long walks in the woods. And if they wanted to have a barbecue with friends, they could entertain like-minded neighbors; three of the four houses on their cul-de-sac are occupied by weekenders from Brooklyn and Manhattan.

“For us, it’s a refuge,” Matt Rudary said.

While most people have heard of the Hamptons and the Catskills, there are many towns that may be overlooked in a house hunt simply because they are lesser known.

Tom Postilio and Mickey Conlon, real estate brokers with Douglas Elliman in Manhattan, grew tired of commuting to the Hamptons, so last year they built an 11,000-square-foot house on the Long Island Sound, in the estate section of Nissequogue village, 54 miles from the city.

“Long Island is not a flyover state,” said Conlon, 42, who grew up in Nissequogue. But he and Postilio, 49, said that drivers heading east along the Long Island Expressway don’t have any idea how beautiful many of the areas in Suffolk County are, simply because they don’t have a reason to get off the highway.

The couple browse in the antiques shops in quaint St. James village, spot deer in their yard and enjoy their private beach about 40 steps down a high bluff. “This is perfect for people who aren’t looking for a scene,” said Postilio, adding that while he loved the Hamptons, he didn’t want to buy a house there. Too much traffic, and too much of New York at the beach.

An additional perk of buying a weekend house an hour from the city is that it makes for a popular rental listing on Airbnb. Daniel Fries, 49, a filmmaker, and his wife, Hana Shimizu, 37, a producer, live in Chinatown with their two young children, but they longed for “a place to escape the crowds and the smell of trash in summertime,” Fries said. For years, they rented weekend houses on Airbnb in Ulster and Dutchess Counties but found many of them disappointing.

The couple wanted a weekend house of their own — one they could enjoy or rent on Airbnb when they weren’t there, to help pay the mortgage. Fries became enamored of three acres of lakefront land in Pound Ridge; on the property was a dilapidated house that needed a major face-lift, but the couple was undaunted. They bought it in 2016, for $650,000.

The first year, while the house was being renovated, they visited every weekend in the summer. Fries and Shimizu set up a platform near the house, outfitting it with a big safari tent, so they could camp there.

“Even with the renovation, we wanted to get a summer out of it,” Fries said. “My 3-year-old doesn’t remember the ‘tent summer,’ but she talks about the lake all of the time.”

When the renovation was finished, he and Shimizu decorated the midcentury-style home with Scandinavian-style furnishings and Thermador appliances, hoping to attract deep-pocketed city types. They have had no trouble renting it, for as much as $700 to $1,300 a night, depending on the season, billing it as a “Modern Lakehouse just 55 miles from NYC.”

“With young kids, it can get harder to travel. So we created our own Shangri-La up here,” Fries said. “The benefit of the location is unbeatable.”

Sometimes a weekend house is so alluring that it begins to feel like home, ultimately becoming home. Pandora Lycouri, a brand and marketing consultant, and Nicholas Karytinos, an architect, were pleasantly surprised when they visited Tod’s Point, a sprawling stretch of sand in Greenwich, Connecticut, where residents can swim, stroll on meandering paths and order a grilled shrimp salad at the concession stand. “I was stunned,” said Lycouri, 47.

They had been to the area before — Karytinos, 45, had designed houses in Connecticut, and the couple had gone to barbecues at the homes of friends in Greenwich — but Lycouri had always written off the area as too suburban. Now the beach gave her a newfound appreciation for bustling downtown Greenwich and its sophisticated residents.

“We’re both half Greek, and the beach here reminded us of the golden sand back home,” Lycouri said. “The water is calm, which is what I’m accustomed to, and there was so much natural beauty. A light bulb just went off.”

They liked the first house they saw, a 1920s farmhouse with a front porch and a lovely garden, listed for $875,000, within walking distance of downtown Greenwich. They kept their apartment in a high-rise doorman building in NoMad the first year they owned the house, but every Sunday they would get cranky about returning to the city. They longed to wake up in nature, by the water, for longer than a weekend.

“After living in Manhattan for so long, I think I was desperate to feel the earth under my feet,” Lycouri said. “Being there felt like paradise.”

Eight months ago, the couple decided to make their weekend house their permanent home. They agreed, however, that if one of them missed the city, they would return, restoring the house to weekend status. For now, though, their decision still feels right.

“I feel much healthier out here,” said Lycouri, who works remotely two days a week. “It feels good just to breathe fresh air.”

Jon Stein and his wife, Polina, have been known to get so antsy to be outdoors that Jon Stein and his two young daughters have camped out on the terrace of their Lower East Side apartment on Ludlow Street. “It’s a really nice deck,” Stein, 39, said.

Weekending in the Suburbs

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Brooke Lea Foster

Articles written by the author

Forget the Suburbs, It's Country or Bust

Weekending in the Suburbs