Like many couples, Spencer Bergen and Jack Alessio Pretto bid Brooklyn adieu at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown, and they started living together for the first time in Spencer’s upstate getaway in Andes, New York. Thinking they would be away for a week, Spencer, a TV producer for an entertainment news show, and Alessio, an art director in fashion, packed only their backpacks. They ended up staying in the western Catskills for six months.

All that time together, however, got them thinking. With Spencer’s experience fixing up old houses and Alessio’s background in retail store design, they could create a place that was all their own. They sold the house in Andes in October and spent the next nine months searching for the right opportunity. They would find it in an ’80s ranch-style house in nearby Roxbury. Renovating it over a four-month sprint, Spencer and Alessio were able to get it ready by Memorial Day 2022. They recount the experience below.

On the Hunt for Home

Spencer: I love the Western Catskills. It’s a really special community, so I wanted to stay in that area.

Alessio: Spencer’s thing is, when you’re in the countryside, you want to be in the middle of nowhere. There were maybe 10 houses on this two-mile dirt road, and you really felt like no one would pass by. It was just all birch trees and pines around us.

Spencer: The view was what sold it. I like to call it a makeshift tree house because you’re on a pretty steep hill, so it’s just treetops all around you. You get amazing fall color; in the summer it’s lush and green. You’re removed enough from the town that it’s quiet, all while being a seven-minute drive from the small-town life down there.

The guy living there previously was a full-timer, so he kept the place up, but he just did not do anything fancy. (His TV stand was a milk crate.) So it was a perfect find, in a sense, because he repainted it and kept the systems from rotting but had left the design untouched since the ’80s. It presented this great opportunity for us to update it, and I felt relatively safe about the scary monsters that could be hiding within a project like this.

Finding a Contractor

Alessio: It was incredible because it’s so hard to get a contractor upstate right now. At our Andes house, he installed the porch swing. He came with no website, no email address—just a phone number written on a piece of paper. He had a big motel project fall through two weeks prior, so we just had to keep up with him—he said, “I can start tomorrow. You have me for this amount of time.”

We got right to it. I did a lot of the layout design, and Spencer did a lot of the sourcing for materials, but there were many moments like, “Oh, this thing we really want has a 10-week backorder, so we have to pivot to what’s similar and available.”

Finessing the Floor Plan

Alessio: In the original design, as soon as you open the door, you are faced with the door to the basement, so we knew we had to open that up. We couldn’t move the staircase, so we decided that it could be a half wall. We expanded the space to make a big living area.

Spencer: When we opened up those walls, you could see the view from every room of the house. It’s like this sense of release.

Alessio: The bathroom was smaller than most New York apartment bathrooms. We moved the toilet to where the pantry was, and added the biggest prefab window we could find. We also moved the vanity wall to give six extra inches to fit a double sink.

I initially didn’t want to expand the deck. It was so expensive because we’re on this huge hill, and to pour those foundation posts was very involved—and we had to wait for spring. But he was insistent on it.

Spencer: That was my number one thing, absolutely. I knew the deck would be where I was living whenever it was above 40 degrees. So I made sure that part of the plan was to expand the deck and get more living area. Previously, the house had a porch, but it was on the side of the house where there was no view to speak of. We chopped down some trees and opened that up.

Fleshing Things Out

Spencer: I wanted to keep things really clean. We had brought all these antiques from the Andes house, and they’re such beautiful pieces. We didn’t want anything battling them. One of the first things we chose was the flooring—this warm oak plank flooring that has a little bit of a whitewash in the knots. It has a bit of character, but it’s muted.

Then we could play with contrast from there. We chose matte black hardware, and the gray tile surround is a bold contrast against the fireplace. Once we put that big window in the bathroom, it was spa-like and open to nature, so we warmed up that space by leaning into some pinkish hues—it’s almost like a dim, calming light is on at all times.

An Uphill Battle

Spencer: The quirkiest thing about the house was definitely the access. In the Catskills, it gets icy and snowy. We were going up to do a big painting weekend with his parents, so we picked up two five-gallon buckets of paint, and we rented a truck.

We always leave at the end of work, so we usually roll in around 11:30 p.m. to midnight. It just so happened to be the coldest weather I’ve ever been in in my entire life—it was -14 degrees when we pulled up. The rental people swore to me that they had four-wheel drive, but they did not give me a four-wheel drive truck, and so we were skidding out at the bottom of our hill.

Alessio: I’m from New England, so I knew what to do. I was on the back trying to weigh it down. I was like, “Floor it, floor it!” But we were just not going to make it out that night.

Spencer: I got out of the car, and instantly my nostrils were frozen together. We hiked up about a half mile and left the truck in the middle of the road. Then I woke up in a panic because I’m like, “What happens to paint when it freezes?” It’s going to be clumpy—it’s over. We scrambled up and got dressed. His parents were almost there at that point, and his dad rolled up in his mega truck, towed me out, and brought us up. And by a true miracle we opened up the paint and it was completely still liquid, not iced at all.

Alessio: There was a little bit of crusting at the top that we just scooped off. We wrapped the buckets in blankets and the extra coats that we had.

Working Side by Side

Spencer: I definitely have learned a lot from him design-wise. I can choose some quirkier things, and he’s hesitant, and I can slowly get him on board. We definitely have melded into one solid taste.

Alessio: When we first met, I was in the space where John Pawson is the ultimate. You want things to be monastic and severe. I’ve moved into more layering and tactility. Spencer has a big sense of whimsy which I’ve grown into a lot, which is fun.

As soon as the floor was put in, we were living there. Before the kitchen went up, we got takeout from downtown Roxbury and brought it up with a bottle of wine. We had a TV on the ground. It was very “New York apartment first week.”

Spencer: I look back on the night we were building all the Ikea cabinets. Even though it’s a pain in the ass in the moment, I actually had a lot of fun doing that. It’s a nice moment to sit together and build something with your hands.

More Construction Diary Stories:

A Ceramicist Gets Hands On While Renovating Her Midcentury Home

A Midcentury Ranch in L.A. Becomes a Young Family’s Japandi Dream Home

A Stylist and a Photographer Reenvision a 1950s Bungalow

Project Credits:

Designer: Jack Alessio Pretto

Project Manager: Spencer Bergen

Builder/General Contractor: Jay Trussell

Appears In

Construction Diary: A Brooklyn Couple Revive an ’80s Time Capsule in the Catskills