From where I sit when I write, I can see the hamlet of Andes, New York, a small town (population 1,301) nestled between steep hills. This house I share with my husband, Ed Kratt, sits near the top of one of those hills, on roughly 50 acres that were once part of a dairy farm. The farmers who owned the property, and whose cows continued to graze on it long after we bought it, still hay the fields, stockpiling silage to feed their herd in winter.

What I can’t see from here, but often imagine, is the straight line that links this spot in New York’s Catskill Mountains to an unconventional—and largely inexplicable—subdivision called Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado. I first visited the development in 2001, when I was editor-in-chief of Dwell and learned that the developer, an iconoclastic Texan named Kiki Wallace, and the development’s lead architect, Mark Sofield, had started adding modernist homes to a streetscape characterized by faux-historic houses.

The new homes were highly idiosyncratic. One, designed by Sofield and nicknamed the Rubik’s Cube House, owed its peculiar configuration to its corner location. The ground floor was angled to align with one street, and the second floor was twisted to align with the other. But the thing that really made the house and the 80-acre subdivision stand out was color. The homes were painted with a whole Crayola box of vivid shades chosen by Sofield’s wife, Kelly Feeney, formerly a curator at the Albers Foundation, who had a powerful bias against what she dismissed as “Band-Aid–colored houses.”

Prospect was joltingly unconventional, meaning it was exactly how I thought the world should look. So I wrote about it. It was on the cover of the April 2002 issue of Dwell (America’s Coolest Neighborhood) and, later, in my first post-Dwell project, a book called The Perfect $100,000 House, which came out in 2006.

The book chronicles a 14,000-mile road trip I took around the U.S., a quixotic adventure in which I sought the best way to build a great, cheap house. It was published at roughly the same moment as Eat Pray Love. Doing publicity for my book, I was flummoxed by women’s magazine interviewers who were clearly disappointed that, unlike Elizabeth Gilbert’s, my trip didn’t conclude with finding true love. My idea of a happy ending, of course, would have been a viable home project. But that didn’t happen, either. Instead, I bought a studio apartment in Downtown Brooklyn and regarded the book as an interesting, labor-intensive failure.

Indeed, by 2009, when I met Ed, a New York City criminal defense attorney and drummer, I had given up on dating and home building. We were introduced one evening by a college roommate of mine whose son Gabe was fronting a band in which Ed’s teenage son, Steele, was the drummer. One thing led to another.

Two years later, after Hurricane Irene forced Ed and me to cut a Hamptons vacation short, and we had a little extra time on our hands, we visited an animal shelter. We adopted Memphis, our beloved Australian cattle dog mix, who recently passed away. And once you have a dog in New York City, fantasies about it running unleashed through verdant pastures inevitably follow.

In early 2014, we purchased 50 acres of rolling meadow in downtown Andes, an ideal location even if it is well beyond the two-hour-drive window that most New York City residents can tolerate. Not long afterward, we learned that Mark and Kelly had left Colorado and moved east. Mark, in fact, had set up an architecture practice in Brooklyn. This was kismet. We quickly hired him to design a house.

Ed, Memphis, Mark, and I visited the land together and chose a site about two-thirds of the way up the hill. Our program was simple: We wanted a long, lean, energy-efficient house, primarily glass on the south side for passive solar—and the views—with a primary bedroom and an office (for me) at one end and a drum studio (for Ed) at the opposite end: a writing wing and a musical wing. Our two main activities would be buffered by a central kitchen/living/dining area. Also, one of the guiding principles of the design was that we should be able to play fetch with Memphis directly from the front deck.

After several weeks and a couple of attempts, Mark delivered the basic design. It was 1,900 square feet, mostly spread over two large volumes. The primary bedroom/bath/writing room wing faces southwest, and the kitchen/dining/living space is angled southeast. Tucked behind the living room is a third volume that contains the drum studio, a one-car garage, and a mudroom/laundry. It took me a long time to notice that the house is a subtler version of Prospect’s Rubik’s Cube.

Our Andes home, however, is definitely not The Perfect $100,000 House. The land alone cost more than twice that much, and the total over the years (which we’ve never precisely calculated) is surely closer to a million. During the construction process, I worked with Mark on design decisions—fixtures, appliances, surfaces—and Ed worked with Steve Walker of Beaverdam Builders on construction issues, such as the route of our long driveway, and scheduling. Because we were paying for the project out of Ed’s savings, I assumed he would focus on controlling costs. We were well into the project by the time I realized that Ed doesn’t think that way.

That said, there were places where we did make cuts. The most dramatic one had to do with the windows Mark originally specified. Because the south side of the house is approximately 80 percent glass, the windows were always going to be a major budget item. Still, we were shocked when the estimate for the commercial windows Mark wanted, manufactured by Kawneer, came in at $120,000. Eventually, we wound up purchasing Weather Shield windows for about $40,000 less. Other cuts were smaller: The total for stylish LED fixtures from a New York distributor of European lighting, for instance, was more than $28,000. We wound up buying less fabulous LED fixtures from a store on the Bowery, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, saving about $10,000. (They were installed in 2017, and the fixtures are still going strong.)

We initially held off on installing a photovoltaic array and heat pumps, although reducing our dependence on propane and the grid is now high on our to-do list. Meanwhile, Mark’s passive solar design works incredibly well; if there’s any sun, we don’t need to turn the heat on, even in the coldest weather. On the sunniest winter days, we have to open windows.

And then there’s the inevitable nickel-and-diming that happens late in the process, what a developer might call value engineering. The IceStone recycled glass countertops in the bathrooms turned into a cheaper Caesarstone; a high modernist, flying saucer–shaped woodstove that cost around $10,000 was replaced by a more utilitarian Osburn stove for which we paid about $1,300. The fabulous Italian sectional of my dreams wound up being a more humble pair of sofas from Blu Dot. Our Thonet dining chairs came from a used furniture dealer in Andes. And our minimalist glass-and-metal night tables—which I truly love—were purchased at Ikea, as was our sleek glass TV table. Best of all, our exceptionally cool sliding doors and cabinets were fashioned from wood we found in a pile, remnants of an old silo that had been disassembled by the property’s previous owner.

However, what’s most distinctive about the house—or, at least, the thing that people in town comment on most—is the color. Kelly recommended that our cement board siding be painted green with yellow trim. But Ed thought the dark green she’d chosen made the house look like an army barracks. So we picked a more vivid shade, something akin to turquoise, a selection for which Ed now claims full credit.

“I remember Mark driving me around the area surrounding his Colorado development, pointing out the rustic oddities that inspired him, such as a house that had been constructed on top of and around a mobile home.”
— Karrie Jacobs, resident

While the Prospect connection explains much about our home’s unusual style, there’s another piece of the story I forgot about. I recently reread the final chapter of The Perfect $100,000 House for the first time in years. And I was reminded that what happened after my epic road trip ended was that I spent a few days hanging out with a friend in Bovina Center, the next town north of Andes.

Here’s what I wrote in the book about that moment: “I sit on the back deck of the house, staring dreamily at the pasture that used to be full of dairy cows and is now home to a few horses. And I think that, for all the miles I’ve driven, some 14,320 to date, there is no place in America that I like better than right here.”

That was the truest thing I wrote. And it’s even truer 20 years later. Somehow, belatedly, I wound up residing in my book’s conclusion, living in the happily ever after I didn’t know I needed.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: PSF Projects Architecture DPC

Structural engineering: Beaverdam Builders

Cabinetry: Twin Restoration & Millwork

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