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The 200-year-old Greek Revival house in Chatham, N.Y., was crumbling, and the 187 acres surrounding it were overgrown. But Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz, the founders of the modern apothecary brand Malin+Goetz, saw the potential for a perfect country life that had eluded them for years.
Their first rural outpost in nearby Kinderhook offered scant land to cultivate. A second house just south of Hudson, didn’t feel quite like home for the both of them. But this one, the one that had laid fallow for three decades, was just right.
“We bought it because of the house,” said Mr. Goetz, 62. It was a “gem,” despite the decrepitude, according to Mr. Malin, 57. A contractor told the couple that the structure, with its heavy old oak internal framing and beams, would stand for two centuries more. The couple began renovations in 2021, preserving whatever they could: the doors, the floors and the antique handrail and newel post.
Move-in was just three weeks away when the couple received a devastating phone call on Oct. 26, 2022, as they headed to their Upper West Side apartment in a taxi after dinner with a beauty editor. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” Mr. Malin recalled the ominous first words from a farmer who helped them care for the property. “We were told there was no reason to drive up.”
The restored house had been consumed by flames that lit up the night sky.
The next morning, they could still smell smoke. They snapped pictures of the smoldering pile, though Mr. Malin deleted them as shock blurred into numbness. Local fire officials did not respond to inquiries about the cause of the fire; the couple’s insurance claim remains unresolved. “It was traumatic, he recalled. “We went through a series of emotions.”
But they decided to rebuild. And after 18 months of focused construction, a farmhouse phoenix has risen 500 feet away from the original structure.
Freshly painted white and fitted with new mahogany shutters, this new old house is nearly finished. “I’m anxious, and excited to move in,” said Mr. Malin.
All that remains — the stacked-stone basement of the burned house — is the site of the earliest completed act of recovery. The great timbers inset in the foundation retain a heavy char, a chic shou sugi ban finish achieved entirely by accident. The basement is now a verdant sunken garden spiked with unruly elderberry bushes.
“Gardening helps us decompress after time in the city,” Mr. Malin said.
The couple, who have been romantic partners for three decades, have opened apothecaries from Larchmont to London and sell in most of the European Union, five Asian countries and Australia.
Together, Mr. Goetz and Mr. Malin named the property, with its swaying willows and a spring-fed pond thick with duckweed, Haroldhurst Farm — after Harold van Goetz-Malin, their pug puppy, and as a riff on Sissinghurst Castle Garden, in South East England.
Getting to this point was an exercise in patience and persistence. The extensive renovations began here without illusions about potential roadblocks and delays — which the couple knew to be as inevitable for houses as for the creation of Malin + Goetz, started 20 years ago in a storefront beneath their apartment in Chelsea.
The couple sells scented candles and no-nonsense luxury skin cleansers in unadorned packaging, sometimes with a wink. Their sought-after Cannabis fragrance, a spicy marijuana-free floral with black pepper and bergamot notes, hit stores in the era when smoking a joint was punishable by law.
Though their Upper West Side apartment exudes an urbane minimalism, rurality lets them unplug. Their first country house was the move-in-ready Greek Revival in Kinderhook that had little land to garden. Mr. Goetz deemed it too close to State Route 9H and pushed to sell. Mr. Malin agreed to move but never got over leaving. “It was filled with love,” he said.
Next was 10 acres in the countryside several miles south of Hudson. Selling shares of their business to an investor funded restorations and additions. Andrew Bernheimer, the architect for a number of their apothecaries, made an airy, contemporary addition behind the antique house, yet another Greek Revival. Jim Joseph, of Hottenroth + Joseph Architects, undertook historical restoration of one Federal-era outbuilding.
Mr. Malin says he never felt strongly connected to the property. He proposed a “retirement” project, and Mr. Goetz was game, though he objected to the word retirement. “We love the creative process so much,” he said.
Then along came what has become Haroldhurst: The land had ancient trees and a brook. There were dozens of acres of overgrown pasture that a tenant farmer now mows for hay. An old red barn offered footage to add a solarium and an exercise room on the ground floor.
The barn ended up being more important than they anticipated: For the last six months or so, they have bunked there with their pugs, also home to the only working toilet around. Visitors are encouraged to pee in the weeds anywhere they please on these 187 acres.
Their 18-month renovation was led by Mr. Joseph. Even with 80 percent of the surfaces replaced, Mr. Joseph said “it really did feel like an old house.”
The couple ditched some outdated updates, like a mismatched family room addition still sporting “one of those bad 1970s stained glass windows,” Mr. Malin said.
And then came the stunning phone call, freezing Mr. Goetz and Mr. Malin in the back of that cab. The fire wrecked their dream.
Mr. Goetz, with his professional reputation as a modernist, wondered if they should rebuild in a contemporary style or sell and start fresh elsewhere. Either would cost precious time. The men asked existential questions around rebuilding. Would it “look like a fake old house?” Mr. Malin asked. Maybe not, since the new materials of their restoration had mostly hidden its old oak structure. “Do I care whether a two-by-four is hundreds of years old, or 90 days old?” Mr. Goetz asked.
Mr. Joseph, who lost his own house in a fire, advised a prompt return to the plan he had developed for the original renovation. He said that “starting from scratch would have been too difficult” emotionally, as well as logistically.
Mr. Joseph relocated the house across the pond, on a knoll with superior exposures and views.
The old-growth pine floors are level “as opposed to rolling all over the map,” he said.
The living room mantelpiece is architectural salvage, likely taken from a stately house in the Hudson Valley. Key elements blur boundaries between original and reproduction.
In a stroke of fortune, the handrail and newel post that greeted visitors for centuries were off-site for restoration and did not burn. Today they serve the replica stairs, right where they belong.
“This is lemonade from lemons, a silver lining,” said John Hulka, a family friend and designer who helped Ralph Lauren create the Polo Bar in New York. Mr. Hulka had decorated the couple’s Hudson house and is working with them in Chatham.
His casual new interiors, which measure around 3,000 square feet, may not have a wow factor. “We are going for an Aah factor,” he said.
The farmhouse library walls, ceiling and trim will be drenched in Van Courtland Blue, a Benjamin Moore Historical Collection paint that evokes stormy skies. The dining room will get a Dutch-style brass vintage chandelier from Frederick P. Victoria & Son over the space-age vintage Saarinen dining table currently waiting in the barn solarium. Mr. Joseph may add plaster crown molding to match the living room.
The side door of the farmhouse was built with a window by the Connecticut cabinetmaker who recreated the dozens of other replica wood windows with double panes.
That door leads to a manicured one-acre kitchen garden with dinosaur kale, Macoun apple trees and 13-foot branching sunflowers, all laid out by Jamie Purinton, a local landscape architect the couple has employed for more than a dozen years.
Construction can’t be finished fast enough for Mr. Goetz and Mr. Malin. Before they moved into the barn, they were in another temporary living situation. Once the farm is complete, maybe they can finally turn their attention to a planned Haroldhurst Farm lifestyle brand.
“I want my life back,” said Mr. Goetz.
Yet life on Haroldhurst has presented the partners with a host of new opportunities.
“We’ve become obsessive gardeners, but how are we going to keep our fingernails clean?” Mr. Goetz asked.
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