This Culinary Couple Designed the Upstate Home of Our Dreams
Photo by Tim Lenz
“We needed a weekend away, and we were more concerned with how pretty our Airbnb was than where it was necessarily located,” Sara Zandi says, somewhat jokingly, as her husband Sohail laughs in the background. That’s how this couple discovered the town of Bovina eight years ago, after meeting in New York City. “Most people stop along Hudson or Woodstock, but we pushed a lot further. And it just felt really magical.”
Set about three and a half hours north of the city, amid rolling hills and farmland, the 600-person town was once an old dairy outpost, says Sohail, where people would get their tools and send their mail and do their grocery shopping. “It’s sort of stayed that way. There isn’t a Quik Mart. The locals here care about it a lot,” he says. “You can walk from one edge of town to the other in 15 minutes.” (Sara chimes in to say, “Fifteen minutes, walking slowly.”)
