UPSTATE MODERNIST: LITCHFIELD COUNTY

photography by ETHAN ABITZ

Fab Living

Blending a distinctly modernist aesthetic with natural materials, warm textures and traditional forms, the Upstate Modernist collection of homes by S3 Architecture (based in both NYC and Rhinebeck) reimagines modern living.

“The custom-built homes are the epitome of the style, where comfort and luxury meet the serenity of country living,” Vega says. “Having access to sprawling properties, there’s the opportunity to splurge and build spacious dream homes that can easily entertain family and friends.”

nature’s own

This new approach to country living isn’t afraid of creating exterior spaces where people can commune with nature. The Salisbury House concept shows off an optional greenhouse with a vegetable garden that anchors the decidedly modern look with cultivated flora. Expansive windows and a true barn-like exterior also add to this feeling.

“The use of large picture windows is part of the new aesthetic so that one feels more connected to the stunning bucolic views,” Vega says.

uring the first season of All in the Family in 1971, its Episode 5 was titled “Judging Books by Covers.” Its story line was a gay one concerning Archie Bunker’s homophobia and his having to face the fact that his bar buddy, Steve, an ex-pro football player and linebacker who owned a camera shop down from the bar foreshadowing Harvey Milk’s opening his the next year, was gay himself. I was 15 years old and just beginning to deal consciously with the actuality of my own gayness. That episode of All in the Family made as an indelible emotional and psychological impression on me as Archie’s derrière did in a physical way on his famous chair on which he sat and spewed his scripted bigotry as perfectly spaced punchlines each week as the sitcom contextually debunked his Bunker mentality. That chair now sits itself at the Smithsonian where it proves the importance of the metaphoric “furniture of home,” as Auden wrote of more than its comfort in his “September 1, 1939,” but also of its own contextual need in the larger design of life and history, a harboring of hope where the direness of derrières— humanity more haunch than homily—rested, steadfast in their unsteadiness, on bar stools homing in on the fierce resolve of the familial no matter how far we stray from our selves toward the collective self.

In that same All in the Family episode, Archie’s wife, Edith, expounds in her batty way about the existential bounds of photography when shown some vacation snapshots of a luncheon guest who had just visited London. She talks about her fascination with the idea that posing for photographs momentarily suspends time and allows those posing to pause their haunched humanness which then inspires her oddly moving, yes, poetical homily. Bunker arches his Archie eyebrow at her musing. “You’re a pip,” he says. “You know that Edith? You’re a regular Edna St. Louis Millay.” The audience laughs at his latest malapropism, getting the reference to another poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, proving not only its own erudition but also how Millay was still so well-known that she could be referenced as a joke on a sitcom. I wasn’t sure who she was myself when I was 15 so later went to look her up at the library and have been fascinated by her ever since.