Another move within the Hudson Valley wasn’t exactly part of their pandemic plans. Blake MacKay and Jordana Rothman had been settled in a charming brick ranch-style home that Blake had purchased when she was single, but with their family growing, they found themselves needing more space. As they weighed a potential move to the West Coast, fate intervened: while looking at homes in their area, they fell in love with a waterfront home in nearby Coxsackie.

“We had a refrigerator box in our garage covered in a pro-con list,” Jordana recalls, which included things like staying near friends and family. Finding the property, a 17th-century Dutch colonial with four acres that backed up to the Hudson River, though, felt like kismet. “It did, and it still does,” Blake says. “The process of finding, seeing, renovating, and living in the house has not been without challenges, of course, but at every turn, it has felt, deep down, like ours.”

Before: Exterior

After: Exterior

The home had been well cared for by its previous owners, a family who moved in during the 1960s and raised their children there. It had remained largely untouched since the passing of the family matriarch, Blake and Jordana learned. Although it was in “beautiful, livable condition,” it needed changes to meet the couple’s needs, including reworking the second story to accommodate two en suites, a kitchen better designed for entertaining, and essential updates like new flooring, insulation, and built-in storage. Before closing on the house in November 2021, Blake and Jordana started talks with Gabrielle Marcoux, a Brooklyn architect, to go over their must-haves while honoring the home’s extensive history.

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

“It sounds a little cliché, but the bones were very good,” Marcoux says of the 2,500-square-foot home, which was somewhat surprising given its age. While the original listing dates the residence to 1780, a newspaper clipping gathered by Jordana and Blake list it as nearly 100 years older. Still, “it had old-growth timber beams that were in great condition, and so was the masonry,” adds Marcoux.

“This is the oldest structure I’ve ever worked on. You want to have a lighter touch, in a way, to let the house show its character.”
—Gabrielle Marcoux, architect

Before: Stairwell

After: Stairwell

Withstanding a kitchen renovation and layout changes upstairs, Marcoux gave much of her attention to making the home comfortable for years to come. “We added insulation, new windows, and an air conditioning and heating system,” she says. “It was a little challenging. Nothing is predictable in an old home, not like your typical New York City apartment where everything is more or less what you would expect.”

Before: Upstairs

After: Primary Bedroom

In the primary suite, a free-standing tub and new dormer window lend an air of European elegance." layout="" credit="Photo by Kate Sears" photoUserId=""/>

Among surprises for Marcoux and her clients were a massive beehive in the attic, which luckily hadn’t been active for decades, and a shingled-over opening in an exterior wall of the addition containing the kitchen. “It seemed like different pieces of reclaimed wood had been cobbled together to line the jamb and header of the opening,” says the architect.

The pandemic-era remodel was done primarily via Zoom, but the couple worked through material selections with Marcoux in person, wanting something that “felt country without being cutesy or cabincore,” says Blake. “We didn’t want it to be super Scandi, either, which a lot of Hudson Valley homes can lean on.”

After: Primary Bedroom

To hone an aesthetic that synched with the home’s age, the couple pored over records kept by the previous owners and visited the Greene County Historical Society. Its headquarters is the Bronck Museum, a family homestead claiming to be the oldest in upstate New York, built in 1663. “It’s probably the closest in terms of the timing of the building of our house,” says Blake, mentioning the shared characteristics of Dutch architecture like sloping dormers and gables, hardwood flooring, and delft tile. “For us, honoring the home’s 250- or 300-year history and its recent past was really important,” Jordana adds. “The house needed updates to be a place we could live, but we didn’t take that lightly or carelessly. We wanted to know what came before and how and why.”

After: Daughter’s Bedroom

Jordana and Blake’s daughter’s room is upstairs with theirs, painted a shade of blue. The couple made a point of it that nothing in the home should feel too precious, knowing they’d be raising a child here." layout="" credit="Photo by Kate Sears" photoUserId=""/>

Blake and Jordana salvaged some of their home’s original flooring, as seen in the entry vestibule and guest bedroom. European wide-plank white oak was added for its character and durability, flooring that would hold up to toddler toys and cooking spills. The home’s new paint palette is a mix of welcoming primary hues, including butter yellow for the kitchen, red in a guest bedroom, blue for the couple’s daughter’s bedroom, and green in the living room.

After: Guest Bedroom

“Adelphi Paper Hangings does historic recreations of wallpaper and we chose one from the age of our house to use in the guest bedroom,” Blake says. “We wanted to bring in more ways we could honor its age.”

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Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

On the first floor, the plan stayed primarily intact. “The funny thing about the kitchen’s original layout is that the clients actually loved it,” Marcoux says of its U-shape. Jordana, a former restaurants editor for Food & Wine magazine, and Blake, who does communications for food-related businesses, both like to cook and host dinner parties, and the layout gave them “some separation between the cooking and entertainment areas,” adds Marcoux. Today, the kitchen is more inviting with its island doubling as banquette seating for a dining table.

An “oppressive” stone-slate hearth in the living room was likely added by the previous owners, guesses Marcoux. In its place is now a minimalist woodburning stove with a plaster frame that quietly blends with the room’s cozy feel.

After: Primary Bathroom

The upstairs had low ceilings because of an attic, which posed an opportunity. Marcoux removed that space entirely to expand the floor’s plan, replacing three small bedrooms and a bath with two en suites and a laundry room; the level’s fresh sense of airiness is owed in part to a new dormer window and skylights. To create storage in the primary without interrupting or removing old ceiling beams, Marcoux designed a headboard-meets-closet that divides the room from the bath, a “white oak veneer-clad volume, broken up with solid oak strips that introduce a finer scale to the monolithic piece,” she says.

While the renovation had its ups and downs, the couple agree they loved “the process of marrying old and new in physical space,” says Jordana. When they wake up in the morning, the beams are there with the headboard, a reminder of the historic home that they’ve now added their own chapter to. “Even in the worst moments of the worst days of the renovation, I never regretted the decision.”

More Before & After stories:

A Gut Remodel Corrects a Century of Quick Fixes in This Brooklyn Row House

This Canary Islands Home Was a Crumbling Ruin, but She Rebuilt It Piece by Piece

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Studio Marcoux Architecture and Interiors /@studiomarcoux

Builder/General Contractor: O'Brien Carpentry

Interior Design: Studio Marcoux Architecture and Interiors /@studiomarcoux

Cabinetry Design/Installation: Dcor Design Works

Photography: Kate Sears/@ksears

Styling: Lauren Snyder

Floral Styling: Nikki Pettus

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Before & After: A Family Writes a New Chapter for One of the Oldest Homes in the Hudson Valley