from China. On the left is a 14-by-11-foot room that can function as a guest bedroom, office, or den. A full bathroom across the hall features a custom-altered engraved wood vanity from Anthropologie and gray ceramic tile from Nemo in New York City chosen by the Wengers. For the shower, Fanelli’s team hand-cut and placed the tile in an angled geometric pattern to create a drain (a feature of all three full bathrooms in the house). At the end of the hall is both a separate entrance to the front of the house and access to the attached garage. The space is also one of the house’s four temperature zones for the ducted air-source heat pump system, which makes it easy for the space to function separately from the rest of the home if needed. Back in the shared kitchen, dining, and living space, doors on either side of the hearth access the screenedin porch on the north end of the house. The porch’s eight-by-eight-inch solid supporting columns are also made from the pine milled from the site. The floors, which continue out to the deck, are Brazlian ipe, also sourced from Ghent. According to Fanelli, ipe is prized for its incredible density, which naturally protects the wood from mold. Because of this, the team chose to keep the wood unsealed, to let its almost-gray patina develop. On the other side of the house is the sleeping wing, entered through rosewood doors that match those to the guest/office suite. To the left are two closets: one for the utilities and the other for the laundry, which has its own passthrough to the master bedroom’s walk-in closet on the other side. To create light throughout the hallway, Kalesis designed the space between the two closets as an alcove with a five-and-a-half-foot by seven-and-a-half-foot window, which looks out to the front of the house. The window’s one-of-a-kind exterior head and sill are made of angled slabs of bluestone. Across the hall are two symmetrical 12-by-14-foot guest bedrooms with six-foot-wide picture windows that look out to the mountain and have separate doors to the deck. The two rooms share a full bathroom, tiled above the sink and inside the shower with a high-gloss celadon-hued ceramic tile from Nemo. The double sinks are inset into a Carrara marble-topped vanity from Pottery Barn that exposes the plumbing. At the end of the hall is the 18-by-14-foot master bedroom, which also has a six-foot-wide picture window and a private door to the deck. Across from the bedroom is the master bathroom with a glass-doored 10-by-11-foot shower room. The room is tiled in a heathered gray ceramic tile from Daltile, chosen by the Wengers for its resemblance to birch bark. Above the marble vanity, another six-foot-wide window provides quiet views into the woods to the south.
From top: The window to the left of the entry has an exterior head and sill made of angled slabs of bluestone. A drawing of the house’s layout.
The guest bathroom in the entertaining wing. Opposite, from top: The shared kitchen, dining, and living space leads to the screened-in porch. Photo by Constantine Kalesis. The master bathroom faces south.
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A Collaborative Effort The elegant, meticulously detailed house is a close-knit collaboration between the distinct voices that shaped it. “We ended up being a very good team,” Kalesis says. At every turn, he, Fanelli, and the Wengers worked together to anticipate the needs of the future owners who would call it home and wove them together into a space that feels beautiful, functional, and livable all at the same time. “You look at the Ashokan Reservoir, and it looks different depending on what time of day you see it,” says Fanelli. “I feel that way with this house. It’s different every time I look at it, and that wasn’t a mistake. That was all of this work coming together.”
