Indholdsfortegnelse for At Home in the Adirondacks 2023 i Adirondack Life

I recently bought some land in the Adirondacks. Who didn’t? Or at least who didn’t think of doing such a thing during these last few years of pandemic and catastrophe? North of someday-underwater-Manhattan, east of the incinerating-West, south of foreignerscan’t-buy-land-there-anymore-Canada, the Adirondacks sit in a sweet spot for American escape. The harsh, minus 30-degree temperatures of olden days will all but disappear in the coming winters and the year-round weather in the region will, by century’s end, resemble the mild conditions of North Carolina’s Great Smokey Mountains. I’ll be dead by then, but maybe on a balmy December afternoon in the mid-2090s my heirs will lie back on my land, mix up a pitcher of North Carolina’s state cocktail, the Cherry Bounce, and drink toasts to my foresight. My land…

In the late 1970s my parents bought a summer cabin on Fourth Lake. Calling it a summer cabin is high praise because it was little more than a shack. But it was only a five-minute run from the front door to the lakefront for five-year-old me and that made me look forward to our time there. I still loathed the drive. Once we were in the car—the station wagon or Suburban or whatever land-ship my father happened to own at the time, always second-hand, always a wrench turn away from sound running condition—and we four kids were settled among the luggage, tools and building materials my father had stuffed into the massive vehicle, we’d be off. Usually we left when the sun was just coming up, and we’d try to…

In the manic, monied heart of the Industrial Revolution, an iron-mining titan in Au Sable Forks by the name of Henry Graves threw an architectural haymaker, a chest-thumping Gibraltar of a home honoring his rise to prominence and the lavish world in which he lived. Course after course of exquisite brickwork soared toward the heavens (it would exceed today’s Adirondack Park Agency height regulations by 20 feet), blowing all its frilly, wooden Victorian neighbors out of the water. Its gardens spoke of European palaces. A US president would speak from its second-story veranda. Completed in 1880, it was the greatest building between Port Henry and Malone—and not even those Gilded Age industrial outposts could boast anything as whimsical or ornate, said Christine Bush, preservation services director for Adirondack Architectural Heritage…

A dream was born 120 years ago on the southeast shore of Lake George: Wiawaka Holiday House, a haven for any woman—no matter the size of her pocketbook—to take a break from the daily grind. It was a pet project of Mary Fuller, the daughter of a successful stove manufacturer in Troy, who noticed the rock-bottom wages and unrelenting pace of workers at the city’s shirt-collar factories. So Fuller approached her friends Katrina and Spencer Trask with a plan to establish an affordable resort for urban working women. The Trasks joined the cause and bought Crosbyside, a mid-19th-century lakeside hotel and cottages. (Though the couple initially leased the property to Fuller at no charge, they soon handed it over to her for one dollar and a bouquet of flowers.) That…

Yes, it’s an extraordinary house—smartly designed, beautifully appointed, looking out onto one of the loveliest lakes in the Adirondack Park. But there’s way more happening here than four (very tall) walls and a roof. There’s the reason Deborah Allton-Maher and Rob Maher are in Indian Lake in the first place and why they’ll stay here for the rest of their lives. Rob’s visits to the Adirondacks started 25 years ago, when he’d bring his kids to camp on Indian Lake’s islands. They’d paddle and hike, embracing what Rob calls “the wilderness experience.” He says, “I fell in love with it and dreamed of having a place here. I even sketched my future home before it existed.” He needed his Adirondack getaways. “During rough times in my life, nature would…

When I asked Compost for Good cofounder John Culpepper “why compost?” he gave me the simplest answer—he pointed to his granddaughter, Rowan. A blonde toddler on her mother’s lap, Rowan chomped on a cucumber bigger than her arm. Rowan’s mother, Compost for Good cofounder Katie Culpepper, helped her daughter navigate the vegetable while elaborating on John’s answer. “Composting is at the intersection of so many things,” she said. “We all eat, and we’re all part of the food system whether we acknowledge it or not. Composting is one way to empower yourself within that system. The environmental movement is always framed around this question of how humans can do less bad, but we’re asking: what if we have the capacity to do more than that, to actually do good, by…

Growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, the cinder-block walls separating my family’s yard and the next-door neighbors’ were not to be breached. My brother discovered this when he climbed over to retrieve a ball and was bloodied by a pair of Irish setters defending their turf. Otherwise, we had little interaction with the people whose daily lives and personal dramas were playing out a few feet away from ours. It was the same in the half-dozen other places I’ve lived since then, urban and suburban, apartment tower and townhouse—even the “planned community” my family moved to when I was in high school. Community isn’t something that can be planned. So it’s a little ironic that, when my husband, Matt, and I moved to Upper Jay 15 years ago,…

I’ve always gravitated toward color—at school I took notes in rainbow pens,” says Maya Judd. “I think color brings life and joy into mundane or utilitarian spaces. And I think it’s fun to play with different organic and natural textures.” Maya knows her stuff. She’s had the ultimate mentor—her mom, Marion Jeffers, who has been curating the women’s clothing, accessories and home goods at The Birch Store, in Keene Valley, for almost four decades. And now, with mother and daughter working side by side, the store is even more of a High Peaks institution. We asked Maya about her approach to Adirondack decor, about her favorite things and how she brings light and color to woodsy interiors. “We think of the classic old camps as being dark,” she says, “but…

Gardeners the world over have a love/hate relationship with zucchini. They love how easy it is to grow in most temperate climates and how productive the plants are, but they also know what a challenge it can be to use up that bounty, even when they resort to sneaking around the neighborhood leaving bags of it on doorsteps. But is there really such a thing as too much zucchini? Not in my book! In fact, I think zucchini is the most versatile of all the vegetables. You can use it raw or sautéed to keep the garden-fresh flavor, or bake or roast it to transform its taste completely. The zucchini’s name comes from the Italian word for squash, zucca. And although zucchini is usually served as a vegetable, botanically it…