HUDSON VALLEY // REAL ESTATE
A Hudson house that hails from the Wild West
Sunshine Flint Jan. 10, 2023
Wyoming-born architect Jane Smith’s contemporary home in the Hudson Valley showcases her love of light and landscapes Middle Road House, Spacesmith architect Jane Smith’s modern home in Hudson. Peter AaronHow to take the feeling of the wide-open vistas and the scrubbed skies of eastern Wyoming and replicate it in the lush folds and hills of the upper Hudson Valley? The vast Western rangelands are a continent away from Columbia County’s rolling fields and farmhouses. But the house that Laramie, Wyo.-born architect Jane Smith built for herself just outside Hudson is her answer to that question. In fact, it’s very black and white.
Smith’s Middle Road House consists of a modern all-white residence and a black studio garage, with a large garden between them. They sit on an eight-acre plot that is longer than it is wide, extending from the road down a meadow and into woods backing a stream. For an architect who has built everything from large-scale municipal and corporate projects to restorations of historic houses and buildings, this home is her most personal expression of self to date.
Smith is the founding partner of Spacesmith, an architecture firm that has designed large-scale projects such as the Staten Island Family Justice Center, part of Cooper Union’s Administrative Building, and various U.S. embassies and consulates.
“In (New York) city, I do many big corporate or institutional projects,” said Smith, while in Hudson she designed Talbott & Arding gourmet grocery and is currently working on plans for the second location of Via Carota, the famed Italian restaurant in the West Village, in the former Mexican Radio space. She is also on the Board of Trustees at Olana State Historic Site, and her practice is starting to take on projects around Albany and Troy.
Smith opened an office in Hudson after renovating her house and her neighbor ’s house on Warren Street, she said, and she is now a full-time resident at Middle Road House. She had also previously renovated a property in Chatham, but this time she started with just a plot of land on what was formerly a potato field. She purchased it in 2018 and took three and a half years, hindered by the pandemic, to complete.
The 5,000-square-foot main house is a simple rectangle with a gabled roof and oriented to fit the narrow length of the property, with the entryway on the side facing the open fields. Inside, large windows on either end flood the narrow, central hallway that connects the double-height living and private sections of the first floor, and also the wide second-floor loft, which doubles as a TV/family room and home office space.
The great room is a combo living/dining/kitchen area with four 12-foot-wide sliding glass doors on three sides and a vaulted ceiling, which gives the space a bright, airy feel.
“I wanted this space to be for family, for visitors, for entertaining,” Smith said. The wide plank white oak floors are a nod to traditional farmhouse construction, while stainless steel kitchen counters are a counterpoint to the tactile soft furnishings and contemporary shapes of the couches and dining table. In the two bedrooms and the living and dining rooms, Big Ass fans are suspended from the double-height ceilings, adding their sculptural forms to the overall minimalist design.
Throughout the house, Smith showcases her Western heritage with her personal art collection, which includes contemporary landscape paintings that she says she switches out regularly, bronze sculptures of pronghorn antelope and cowboys on horseback, and vintage prints. And she puts the focus on her family connections, with old photos in the basement office and workout space and a comfortable guest suite in the studio set up for her nieces and nephews to stay (plus their four-legged companions). The wide guest bed faces the garage doors which roll up to panoramic views of the fields, the main house, and the fenced garden with its raised beds. Additionally, the sleek wood dressers in the primary bedroom were designed and built by her brother, Dave Smith of Ingrain Furniture in Seattle.
Smith says building her own house from the ground up has been a true education.
“The biggest lessons I learned were about the land: the siting of the house and the studio, where the leach field should be and the septic, how to bring in the utilities,” she said. The relation of each structure and its placement has been carefully considered. The garden and shed are placed slightly up from the house with the studio and garage closest to the road and the gravel drive winding between. She is also learning about landscaping and has planted side gardens of pollinatorfriendly flowers and cleared trails through the woods to the stream that borders her property. The field and flowers are as thought through as her interiors, fixtures and accessories.
“I’m a neatnik,” Smith said. “I like everything to have its own spot.”