the house
Ashokan High Point A HISTORIC STONE HOUSE NEAR WOODSTOCK By Mary Angeles Armstrong Photos by Winona Barton-Ballentine
T
he day Diane Raimondo first happened on her hilltop West Hurley home, she was immediately taken by the vista. It was 2013, and she’d found the listing for the nine-acre property just south of the Ashokan Reservoir the day before. At the suggestion of the agent, she drove up from her Brooklyn brownstone and found her way to the property’s dirt road. Winding her way through thick woods up alongside the hill, she finally came to a clearing, where, it seemed, the entirety of the 12-mile-long reservoir—all the way from the Ashokan High Point in the west to the Olivebridge dam in the east— was laid at her feet. At the apex of the hill, a 3,500-squarefoot neoclassical manor stood overlooking it all. Right away, Raimondo realized there was something special about the place. “I came up the dirt road and turned the corner,” she remembers. “As I parked, an eagle swooped down right over head.” Angular and symmetrically designed, the home’s exterior is comprised of large beige bricks molded into distinctive, alternating patterns along the walls. A low-pitched roof with simple carved eaves tops the three-story house. At the home’s
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entrance, five stone steps lead to a flat-roofed front portico running the width of the first floor. Twelve carved Ionic columns border the deep front porch providing enough sheltered space for ample outdoor seating. Throughout the grounds and bordering the home, previous residents planted a garden of flowering trees, shrubs, and plants, and a stone patio lays along the home’s view-facing edge. Although the house was completely shuttered and empty that day Raimondo first encountered it, the property caretaker, who lived in the stone guest cottage nearby, offered to show her inside. As the two walked through the house they drew open the wood-slatted blinds that covered the double hung windows one by one, as well as a set of French doors leading to the stone patio, revealing the bird’s-eye view of the Ashokan Reservoir and the Catskill Mountains beyond. “I was just blown away,” Raimondo remembers. “By the views, by the winds, by the house, by the whole feeling of it.” Later that day, the caretaker sent her a picture of the sunset from the property. She immediately made an offer and shortly thereafter the home was hers.
