Words Michael Snyder Photography Chris Mottalini

Published in No 19

Nepal Asatthawasi and Chris Motallini were both working on the sunny spring morning in 2015 when they bought their modest stone house outside Rhinebeck, NY. Motallini, an architecture and interiors photographer who grew up in Buffalo, had gone to a surface shop in preparation for a shoot while Asatthawasi, working at the time as Director of Development for New York’s Pratt Institute, had shut herself into her office to bid on the stonework cottage. That morning, Motallini noticed something odd on the prop table: “If a stylist wants something they put a post-it note on it and there was a bunch of stuff with this name, Fran M,” he recalls.

The house, set back from a two-lane country road on a low hill surrounded by locust trees and sugar maples, was the central lot in an estate sale for a recently deceased woman named Fran Monahan, who for years had been a friend of Motallini’s father. “I’d been an assistant forever and knew all the set designers and I’d never heard of anyone called Fran.” he says. “Kind of spooky.” By midday, Asatthawasi had emerged victorious in her online bidding war, outlasting the predatory flippers looking to capitalize on an unexpected deal. The house was theirs.

When the couple had entered the house for the first time a few days earlier, Motallini had reservations. He and Asatthawasi had been talking for some time about buying a home, but both assumed they would eventually make a down payment on an apartment in the city where they’d both lived for more than two decades. Asathawassi, the child of Thai diplomats, had lived in Bangkok, Hong Kong, London and Prague, but never outside a major urban center. Motallini, for his part, “still wasn’t established enough, career-wise, to remove myself from New York, from the jobs and the meetings,” he says. A home in the city made sense. Then, out of nowhere, an ad for the Monahan estate sale surfaced on Asatthawasi’s phone, headlined by a black-and-white banner image of the Rhinebeck house with its rough-hewn walls and steeply gabled roof. “The house just didn’t look like it belonged in America,” Asatthawasi recalls. “Everything about it was romantic.”

For all its charm, the house had seen better days. The kitchen cabinetry was rotten and the old linoleum floors had cracked and peeled. Empty whiskey bottles filled the unfinished basement and asbestos tiles lined the ceilings. The upper level, accessed by a lovingly turned wooden staircase at the house’s entrance, remained unfinished. “There was nothing about it that made it look like a good decision,” Asatthawasi says now, with a laugh. “But it was late spring, and it just felt very serene, even though it smelled like cat piss, and it was filled with garbage and rot.” Monahan had spent nearly half a century in the house with her partner, Peg Chart, “and they lived happily here in an era where they couldn’t be explicit about their relationship,” Asatthawasi says, “I felt that sense of protection that these two women had up on this little hill.”

The first owner, a retired Irish stonemason from the Bronx, had built the house by hand sometime around 1950, using pieces of a stacked-stone wall that snaked across the property. To hold the rocks together, he mixed concrete on site using water from a nearby stream, which he lugged back to the property two buckets at a time, a tobacco pipe dangling from his mouth. He died not long after completing the house (or almost completing it) and Monahan and her partner moved in. Motallini and Asatthawasi followed, only the third occupants in three quarters of a century.

They spent the first year and a half doing as much heavy labor as possible, relying, from the first, on talented friends to bring the house back to life. First, they got in touch with Erik Blinderman, a carpenter in Los Angeles who Asatthawasi had introduced to his partner years before. Blinderman, a filmmaker-turned-woodworker who operates under the name EB Joinery, made the cabinetry from maple and white-laminated birch ply that he flat-packed in his old Mercedes station wagon, drove across the country and assembled on site, spending nights sprawled across the concrete subfloor. After that, Motallini tore out the yellowed drop ceiling to reveal handmade joists and the underside of the upstairs flooring, cobbled together from scraps of trim and old door frames. He and Asatthawasi whitewashed the ceilings, covered the walls in plaster, laid down pine floors and tiled the bathroom — the basics to make the house habitable. By the time their son Nino was born in 2017, Mottalini and Asatthawasi were coming up to almost weekly; for a year or so after, new work on the house more or less stopped.

Then, when the pandemic set in in March 2020, Mottalini and Asatthawasi closed up their Greenpoint apartment and headed north. Six months later, they decided to relocate permanently. “This place was just here, we knew every inch of it, so all we had to do was commit to living here,” Motallini says.

Not long after the move, Nino entered the local Waldorf School and befriended the daughters of another newly relocated couple, Jasmine Labeau and Cameron Walker, who’d moved to New York from Rotterdam a year earlier and come up to the Hudson Valley with the outbreak of the pandemic. The couples soon became friends and, in 2022, Mottalini and Asatthawasi asked Walker, who’d worked with OMA and completed a pair of impeccably detailed small projects in the Valley, to help them rework the still-unfinished second floor. They talked, at first, about mirroring the naked materiality of the ground floor’s white plaster, but the added weight on rafters would likely have caused deflection and cracking, which made the plan impracticable. They discussed tongue-and-groove paneling, but Walker worried it might look twee. (The skyrocketing cost of materials didn’t help.) Instead, they started from what was already there: the plywood boards that Motallini had laid over the floor to make the space at least moderately usable. “The house is a consequence of necessity,” Walker says. “It’s all about honesty and what makes sense and plywood was the most honest material.”

Almost every day for eight months, Walker, Asatthawasi and the master roofer John Kurowski would gather for coffee in the kitchen before going their separate ways: Asatthawasi to her ground-floor office, Walker to the upstairs construction site and Kurowski to the roof. In that time, Walker clad every surface — even the WC, separate from the wet bath, which he lined in floor-to-ceiling white tiles — with 4x8 panels of plywood, their heavy grain like marbled paper. Rectangular skylights flooded the room with dappled light, filtered through a canopy of sugar maple and oak. Uninterrupted by walls, the space followed the L-shape thrust of the house’s footprint, with an expansive bedroom and sitting area centered on an eggshell-white Malm fire drum and, around the 90-degree bend, an office that you can access only after bending your head beneath the origami fold of the gables. Outside, Kurowski, a highly regarded local craftsman, covered the roof in gleaming sheets of corrugated metal—a resilient material, poetic in its practically, that reminded Walker of farmhouses in Europe and Asatthawasi of mountain houses back in Thailand.

Mottalini, at first, had inclined toward slate shingles or a standing seam roof, which he felt might feel closer to the house’s atemporal rusticity. “Chris speaks about the house so emotionally — it’s a sanctuary, and his family is a big part of that — and it was so important to him that its character not be disturbed,” Walker says. But for a house built in the middle of the 20th century with materials and technologies that had already passed out of common usage, that “character,” as it turned out, had less to do with any particular period or constructive technique than it did with a profound and personal sense of intimacy — the serenity and protection that Asatthawasi felt on that first visit.

“In a lot of shoots I do, you can tell that people got everything at once and just put it in the space, but we have such a connection to all these pieces,” Motallini says. Almost every object speaks not just to the couple’s taste, but to years of friendships and collaborations. There’s the kitchen, living room bookshelves and coffee table by Blinderman and, upstairs, the ten-foot-long bench-shelf crafted by Brian Persico, a friend based in Windham, to slip discretely into the acute angle where the roof meets the bedroom floor. In the dining room, there are paintings and wall-hangings by Martin Basher and Liam Lee and an original Donald Judd dining set that Motallini recently inherited from his mentor, the set designer and prop stylist Jeffrey W. Miller. “That was my first exposure to Judd, that table, sitting there every morning before we went to work, and now it’s in our dining room,” Motallini says, “that will be the only dining table we ever have.” Even the upstairs, which constitutes half of the house’s livable space, feels less like a renovation than a single object, lovingly hewn, a self-contained world set gently down on its sturdy pedestal of stone.

Whatever misgivings Motallini and Asatthawasi might once have had about shifting their lives to this quiet hill in the woods have long-since dissipated. “I’m Thai, so the world is animated for me in a different way, and I feel like the house has boosted our careers,” Asatthawasi said on a gilded afternoon last spring, not unlike the morning when they bought the house nearly a decade ago. Trained as an architect and urbanist at the Architectural Association in London, she was on a break between calls for her current work, focused on sea-level rise and its impact on the urban industrial zones that keep the global economy running. (She also works closely with Thai human rights groups.) “It’s really clear to me that we’re where we need to be right now. Being in this house and the sense of ease that it contributes to our lives — I wouldn’t say its causational, but I think it contributes.” The house was quiet, calm and cool, gentle and alive. “Whatever sense of good will or good fortune the house has — I don’t know,” Asatthawasi says, “maybe it’s rubbed off on us.”

Michael Snyder is a freelance journalist and Contributing Editor for T: The New York Times Style Magazine based in Mexico City. His work has appeared in Saveur, The Nation, Lucky Peach, The Believer, Travel + Leisure and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Chris Mottalini is a regular contributor to UD. He shoots for AD France, Elle Decor, August Journal and Casa Vogue, among others. mottalini.com