B'ellow, Our Home in the Hudson Valley

B'ellow, Old Chatham, New York

A house designed by two people who spent thirty-six years learning how to live beautifully.

1790 Federal farmhouse. Named for big yellow, and the Italian word for beautiful.

Their only client

They hired no decorator.

When Karen and Martin found B'ellow, it had good bones and bad wallpaper and the kind of potential that only two people who have spent careers in design can properly evaluate. They called no one. They made every decision — every paint color, every choice of wall treatment and floor and molding — themselves.

"We only have one client," Martin says. "Us."

What resulted is not a decorated house. It is a house that tells you, room by room, exactly who these two people are: Federal architecture with Chinoiserie accents. A teal ceiling in the black lacquer dining room. Walls the color of ancient fired clay. And everywhere, the objects — small, specific, irreplaceable — that a life of looking tends to leave behind with people who know what to do with them.

Day

The room where morning arrives first.

B'ellow moves through the day. The yellow living room is its morning — light-filled, unhurried, the house still open to whatever comes next. Karen chose the yellow: not a designer's yellow, not a statement, but the yellow of old botanical prints and rooms that have been lived in since before anyone thought to call that living a style. It is warm by conviction. The color of a house that has always known how it wants to feel.

Dusk

The salon, as the day begins to settle.

The fire is lit by the time the salon earns its hour. The terra cotta came from a specific image: standing inside a Greek vase — the interior color of ancient fired clay. On the mantelpiece, two Greek vases make the reference visible; the wallpaper, a lyrical botanical pattern printed in gold, extends it across every wall. The room is intimate. A little sensual. Two black chairs pulled to the fire, figurative drawings on the walls, silver objects catching the light. It holds you. And there is not a single thing in it that arrived by accident.

Step inside and time suspends itself.

You cannot say, standing in the black lacquer dining room at B'ellow, what hour it is. Or what continent you are on. Or what century holds any claim to you. The teal ceiling and the gilded molding and the table that is always set beautifully — it narrows the world to candlelight and conversation and the faces of the people gathered there.

Slightly Dickensian, Martin will tell you, but done entirely their way — a bit of the Wolseley Café, a dollop of Harry Potter, and a teal ceiling that Karen painted herself. It may be the most famous dining room in upstate New York.

It is also the room where The Punctilious Mr. P's Place Card Co. was born.

Every corner of B'ellow is a postcard from somewhere too beautiful to leave behind.

The figurative maquette in the salon came from Paris — or perhaps Rome. Martin cannot say with certainty anymore, because the objects in B'ellow have been accumulating across thirty-six years and as many countries, and some of them have outlived the occasion of their finding. What matters is what it is: a small clay study for a figure, the kind of thing a sculptor thinks through before committing to bronze. Martin has loved figurative sculpture since before he could name what he loved.

B'ellow is full of this. Ephemera from London markets. Ceramics from Paris and Milan. Botanical prints chosen slowly, one at a time, over decades. None of it was arranged. All of it was chosen. There is a difference.

A decorated house tells you what someone wanted it to look like. B'ellow tells you who they are.