The Restoration of this Midcentury Home Shows Off Killer Views
Photo by Nicole Franzen
Long before architects Tal Schori and Rustam-Marc Mehta could make their mark on a picturesque site perched high in the woods of the Hudson Valley, another architect beat them to it—their client’s grandmother. Roberta Thrun, one of the first women to earn an architecture degree at Columbia University, built this midcentury-modern property on the site as a quiet family retreat in 1962. Then after years of outside ownership, her grandson bought it back, lured by childhood memories and an escape from the city. Schori and Mehta, founders and partners at GRT Architects, helped him bring the house up to date.
“Nobody wanted a fundamental change of style so much as a close reading of what the house was, to see how best to build on that,” Mehta says. “Spending time on-site—with the view—didn’t hurt either.” Upgrades were mostly simple but impactful improvements to the existing architectural details, but further emphasis was put on the landscape outside the home's many windows. The renovation even kept to the original 1,800-square-foot size by the time it was completed last year. “It has such a strong inherent personality that all of the clues needed were present,” Mehta says.
