An exceptional timber-framed farmhouse in Upstate New York painstakingly renovated by hand

When Tara Mangini and Percy Bright, founders of American design studio Jersey Ice Cream Co, first viewed their timber-framed farmhouse in a remote westerly corner of Upstate New York, their plan was to renovate it and move on. The couple had, over the previous six years, won acclaim as the hands-on design duo behind a series of carefully crafted country houses and were used to living a rather unusual, peripatetic lifestyle. Their intensely hand-crafted approach often entailed living on-site for the duration of a project and overhauling the house themselves, with Percy taking care of all the structural work and carpentry, and Tara overseeing the materials, sourcing and decorative flourishes. But this way of working had eventually begun to take a personal toll. And so, five years on from buying the property, the pair – who say they feel more aligned to an art collective than an orthodox design studio – are still firmly ensconced in it.

‘It was love at first sight, although it shouldn’t have been,’ says Tara of seeing this house after years of scouring the area. ‘The place was not cute at all. There were walls painted neon green, vinyl windows and antifreeze solution in the toilets. But there’s just something about this land that’s so magical.’ The house is set at the end of a long, meandering driveway, punctuated by blueberry bushes and Queen Anne’s lace, amid 40 acres of wetland and meadow, including a sprawling abandoned apple orchard. What they had not bargained for was the way that the rural setting would get under their skin, leading to a new way of living and working aligned to nature and the shifting seasons.

They had an inauspicious start. Moving in on the very coldest of January days, the couple arrived to no serviceable plumbing, heating or insulation. The majority of Percy’s early efforts involved undoing the work of former custodians. Happily, the timber framework of the property was still intact. The same was true of much of the flooring, which is now a mix of the original hemlock – a softwood thought to be a by-product of the region’s once-thriving tanning industry – and reclaimed boards in the same type of wood, sourced locally. Slowly, they began to restore a sense of warmth and history to the long-neglected property’s rooms.

The house was sold with seven bedrooms – three of which were downstairs – so Tara and Percy decided to restructure the layout to form a single, large-scale room on the ground floor, with space for sitting and dining, plus a study area. This open-plan room connects to the kitchen via a stone-floored entrance hall, known as the mud room. Despite having built a greenhouse and a stone-walled sauna in the garden, they admit that, come winter, they gravitate to the main open-plan living space for its proximity to the stove. The only remaining original wooden window frame was rotten, but it became the template for the replacement windows.

They also reconfigured the upper level to transform a baffling maze-like landing into two distinct spaces. The first, accessed via a staircase from the mud room, is for the main bedroom and bathroom, which has an earthenware bathtub surrounded by reclaimed marble tiles. From the main downstairs space a second set of stairs leads up to three spare rooms, a guest bathroom and a little bookcase-lined corridor to Percy’s simple attic studio.

As the seasons shifted from winter to spring, they started to notice the parallels between their new home and Scandinavian farmhouses they had encountered on visits to the Swedish island of Gotland. ‘There’s something similarly beautiful about the light,’ says Tara. Decoratively, houses in Gotland have a visual kinship with the Shaker and American folk-art aesthetics they admired closer to home. They first visited this Swedish island in the Baltic Sea in 2018 for what Tara describes as ‘a dream plaster job’.