The Return of Big Country House Energy
New Yorkers have been escaping to the Hudson Valley for decades. Audrey Gelman's "country store" tells us a lot about the place, and ourselves.
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A potentially apocryphal piece of trivia about Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, was that she used to blow off steam by dressing up as a peasant and dabbling in a bit of farm work at a fake country hamlet she’d had constructed on the grounds of Versailles. What I can say for sure, because I’ve been there, is that the fake country hamlet was real. Its thatched roofs, non-functional windmill, and dovecote were designed to look like something out of a 17th-century Dutch or Flemish painting, making it the perfect place for the Queen to retreat to whenever she needed an escape from the obligations and decorum of courtly life.
There was at least a little bit of cosplay going on. Sometimes, Marie Antoinette would pay a visit to the hamlet’s functional farm, where a real-life staff would milk real-life cows and then process the milk into cream and butter inside a stone dairy building. When the milk products were ready for tasting, the farmers would bring them over to a second dairy building, which was essentially a duplicate of the first but with a faux-marble floor and a trompe-l’oeil coffered ceiling. Here, the Queen would sample the stuff while interacting with a display of objects that looked nearly identical to the stone and tin utensils that the farmers had used next door: milk jugs, settling pans, and the like. It was almost as though she were a real-life dairy girl pausing to enjoy her handiwork after a back-breaking day of labor, only the accouterments were made of gilded porcelain.
It’s been almost a year since I took a vacation, so I am feeling a bit more sympathetic than usual to the idea of building a Potemkin country village just a short walk from your house, as long as you have the resources to do so and don’t feel morally conflicted about LARPing the lives of people (in Marie Antoinette’s case, peasants) who spend 90 percent on their income on bread. I’m not alone in falling down the fake village rabbit hole: There’s another one that’s been making the rounds of late, and it’s inspiring a touch of the self-satisfied ire that French revolutionaries must have felt when they finally arrested their Queen and accused her of depleting the wealth of the nation. It’s called Barrow’s Green, population 640, and it’s a central part of the lore behind The Six Bells, an artisanal homewares store in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn that happens to be Audrey Gelman’s new business venture.
In case you aren’t familiar with Gelman, she’s probably one of our generation’s most iconic examples of the 2010s “Girlboss” archetype, in both the empowering and the snarky sense. After cutting her teeth as a flack for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, she raised millions of dollars to start a woman-focused social club and coworking space called The Wing, only to resign from her position as CEO four years later amid allegations that the company had failed to adequately address incidents of racism and mistreatment experienced by staff. (Disclosure: I once wrote an article for No Man’s Land, the Wing’s in-house publication. It was about the emotional labor that women perform in the workplace, which is something I coincidentally had to perform after a reporter I was managing at another publication tried to report a story on The Wing: Gelman talked us into delaying it by promising us better “access” in a few weeks’ time, only to cancel the meeting last-minute. Hey, she was good at her job.)
If that all sounds like a familiar cautionary tale about capitalism, white feminism, and trying to make it on the right side of the start-up craze of the 2010s, then Six Bells feels like the logical second act: After duking it out in the cutthroat trenches of the corporate world reveals itself to be the pointless, zero-sum game that it was always going to be, why not take a pause from it all, get out of the city for a stretch, and reconnect with your inner propensity for whimsy and childhood make-believe?
The Six Bells website, accordingly, feels like what would happen if a focus group sourced from a pool of New York magazine subscribers got together in a room and collectively conjured a pastoral post-pandemic escape in the form of a work of outsider art. While perusing the store’s catalog of wares, which consists of things like a $38 bar of olive oil soap in the shape of a bunch of grapes and a $138 woven fruit basket, we’re invited to a splash page telling the story of Barrow’s Green, a fictional “civil parish” in a “land far away.” Here, we are told, a quirky cast of villagers engage in petty small-town intrigue and stock up on essentials and home goods during daily trips to… The Six Bells itself, which is apparently both a brick-and-mortar on the gentrified thoroughfare of present-day Court Street and the fake village’s sole commissary.
You can clock the fictional version of the store, with a thatched roof and sloping dormer windows, on the upper right corner of an interactive map, just a short walk from a post office, a church, and Cranbook Manor, “the stately home of Lord Henry Ashbourne and his wife, Lady Pamela,” designed in the “Jacobian style” and featuring “oriel windows” and “a large Parterre garden.” Whoever designed this town was thinking at least a little bit about diversity and inclusion (there’s a rabbi, and a synagogue, and the village’s weekly newspaper is run by a Black woman), but a list of residents beneath the map gestures heavily at the sort of pre-war English village you might discover in the pages of an Agatha Christie book — or, more accurately, a fantasy English village that an American might dream up after binging on too much British mystery TV. There’s a parlour maid, a “spinster” town gossip, and even a “well-known mystery writer, who [...] sets many of her books there.”
To be clear, I am not saying that Gelman’s country fantasy makes her a modern-day Marie Antoinette. New York, perennially self-aware, published at least three articles poking fun at the store, but I do think Gelman is a savvy business person, one who understands her South Brooklyn target audience enough to bottle an aesthetic that speaks to the little bit of Marie Antoinette that exists within all of us. Pandemic-era fashion, for perfectly understandable reasons, has been circling around “big country house energy” for a long time (think: cottagecore, coastal grandmother, old money). And while these internet-native aesthetics tend to be more about democratizing the signifiers of luxury escapism than actually participating in it, Gelman seems to have triple-distilled the perfect amalgam of those vibes for the type of New Yorker who can actually foot the bill.
Another way of putting it is that The Six Bells feels expressly designed to tap into a very specific combination of privilege, occupational burnout, and NYC-myopia that makes a certain kind of yuppie become really, really obsessed with the Hudson Valley. I know this because I grew up in South Brooklyn, and my Boomer-aged parents unknowingly helped cement the tradition some 30 years ago when they purchased a couple acres of land in Columbia County, built a log cabin on top of it, and started making the three-and-a-half-hour drive out of the City every Friday so we could enjoy the fresh air and touch some grass.
Between weekends and summer vacations, I probably spent about a third of my childhood in the Hudson Valley. This made my childhood a distinctly privileged one, but it also makes me especially sensitive to the effects that New Yorkers have on the places to which they escape.
Back in the ’90s, Hudson, just 30 minutes away from my parents’ house, was a former whaling and factory town full of bombed-out-looking buildings and boarded-up storefronts. Aside from an Amtrak station and a handful of antique stores that had popped up along Warren Street, the city’s main commercial strip, there wasn’t a ton for “Second Homers” — the shorthand locals used to describe NYC folks with country houses — to do. (I have also heard people use the term “citiots,” as in “idiots.)
The constellation of smaller towns within easy driving distance run the gamut from depressed to Norman-Rockwell picturesque, though the businesses on Main Street seemed to cater more to the everyday needs of the people who lived there than ’90s yuppies with money to spend: In Chatham, just a short drive from my parents’ cabin, there was an old Spanish Renaissance movie theater called The Crandell that screened a limited selection of the latest blockbuster movies for just a couple bucks a ticket. (This summer, their calendar of upcoming films includes a heartwarming French comedy about a woman who runs a rose farm and a documentary about a bookstore).
Back then, the second-homers trickling in to the Hudson Valley would sometimes refer to it as “the Un-Hamptons,” meaning that it was for city people who either couldn’t afford a house in the Hamptons, or who found the whole scene a bit too high maintenance for their taste. Still, this cheaper, less fussy version of Long Island’s East End offered plenty of diversions for those looking to escape the anxieties and responsibilities of city life. One such pastime was taking excursions to sites of historical interest like Olana, a hilltop mansion in Hudson once home to Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, or The Hancock Shaker Village, a museum in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts preserving an actual 19th-century village where members of that utopian Protestant sect used to dip candles and weave baskets.
A destination that stands out as particularly Barrow’s Green-esque was The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, MA, a grand, Federal-style hotel and tavern that dates back to the early years of the Republic. It appears in at least one actual Norman Rockwell painting, has a cavernous ladies’ bathroom that looks like somewhere Eloise would hide, and is believed to be haunted by a ghost with a top hat. For a long time, it should be noted, The Red Lion Inn was also home to a curtain retailer called Country Curtains, whose old New England-inspired offerings coincidentally wouldn’t look at all out of place in the linens and textiles section of Gelman’s store.
Other popular ’90s second-homer pastimes included taking horseback riding lessons, wearing baseball caps to signify that you were “just a regular guy,” and joining one of a small handful of members-only lakeside beaches, where if you were a lawyer or advertising executive from the city you could fraternize with other lawyers and advertising executives from the city without having to worry about the locals giving you dirty looks. Mostly though, the second-homers were a fairly inconspicuous presence, disappearing down winding forest roads in their navy blue Saab convertibles and living out their own private fantasy of “country life” as the retail workers and municipal employees and farmers who lived there year-round commuted to work and picked up their kids from school.
Twenty-five years later, the costs of rural gentrification are clearer. In 2020, when the pandemic spurred thousands of New Yorkers to flee the city in search of a gentler existence and more space, the enclaves of Hudson and Kingston, a city in nearby Ulster County, experienced the highest rates of net migration in the entire nation. Their arrival accelerated a trend that had been in the works for decades: With homes selling for a million dollars or more and housing costs rising a whopping $50,000 on average across the Hudson Valley in 2021, newspapers in the region are lamenting devastating affordable housing shortages. A 2021 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that in all of the Hudson Valley’s nine counties, renters had to work more than a full-time job to cover the cost of a two-bedroom apartment.
The stats bear out anecdotally: Last time I walked down Warren Street, during a trip Upstate last August, the sea of athleisure-clad women pushing baby strollers and confused-looking European art collector types was so thick that it felt like rush hour on the Upper East Side. And though the second-homer crowd had taken a visibly “Hamptons-y” turn, it was the turnover of the storefronts that got to me, as though the town was remaking itself in the image of the citiots’ bucolic fantasies and selling those fantasies back to them.
While trying to find quarters to feed a parking meter, my partner and I stumbled into a grocery store that sells heritage French mustard in stone jars and a kind of $39-a-pound cheese that had been aged in a “Kaeskuch cave in Bavaria,” under a “shower of dried Alpine edible flowers and herbs.” Over the course of the trip, my partner and I started calling these places “provisions stores”: You can find everything you need there if you imagine that you’re a cobbler going out to market in a geographically agnostic old European village, but they never seem to stock laundry detergent or cereal.
The longing all this is speaking to, of course, is the desire for a simpler life: To be able to afford these pleasures at all, you probably have to work a job back in the city that keeps you tethered to the internet 24/7 and requires you to do things that you’re not proud of to survive. When we spend most of our time competing with each other over resources, it’s only natural to wish we could escape to a fairy-tale past when people lived closer to nature, the world felt smaller, and everybody felt like they had their own unique and special role to play in the functioning of civic life. I feel some version of that longing when I think of the Hudson Valley, just as my parents did in the ’90s. And surely, back in the 19th century, the Hudson River School painters were feeling it too: Inspired by a Romantic movement that pitted the beauty of untapped nature against the rising tide of industrialization, Thomas Cole took a steamboat up the Hudson River in 1825 and started sketching landscapes, setting off an initial wave of tourism to the area that is still playing out today.
When we escape to the country, though, we become unwitting accomplices to the same forces of colonization and domination that we’re trying to catch a break from. The Lenape, Wappinger, and Mahican people who populated the Hudson Valley long before Cole and his acolytes began celebrating it as an “untapped expanse” know this story better than anyone. And it’s notable that as the 19th century pressed on, and the Hudson River School gave birth to a second wave of painters who started venturing further out into the American wilderness, the sun-dappled renderings of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite that they took home functioned essentially as advertisements for a Manifest Destiny-fueled Westward expansion.
Even the trope of the storybook British village smacks of city people imposing their fantasies on the world: In an essay about Gelman’s store for Curbed, writer Grace Lavery reminds us that “offering craftwork and artisanal labor as the solution to the alienated conditions of modern-day consumption” is an idea “as old as the English village, which is to say a 19th-century fantasy concocted to compensate for the alienation of the industrial city.” William Morris, she writes, referring to the pioneer of the arts and crafts design movement, “would be proud.”
Perhaps “big country house energy” isn’t historically contingent. Maybe it’s just human, and there will always be something compelling about retreating to a world that seems closer to nature, less tarnished by the wrecking ball of human civilization, than our own. At bottom, The Six Bells is selling this reactionary fantasy to people who may or may not be able to afford an actual country house, but who can at least afford to spend a pretty penny on hand-made home goods that bring a bit of the country into their day-to-day lives. And while there’s nothing wrong with using a grandmotherly patchwork quilt, or a cutting board in the shape of a pig, to ground yourself after a day of Zoom meetings, I fear that these objects can only do so much to satisfy what is ultimately a much bigger and more urgent need.
It’s hard to describe what that need is, but I can remember the last time I felt in touch with it. It wasn’t on the Hudson Valley trip: About 10 minutes from my house, at FDR Park in South Philadelphia, there is a 146-acre parcel of land that, up until 2019, was home to a public golf course. The City had hatched a plan to turn it into a shiny new facility with soccer fields and a driving range, but the pandemic got in the way, and the site quite literally began to return to nature. Show up on a Sunday afternoon in the spring, as I did on the cool April day I fell in love with it, and you can still find the odd golf ball, but also otters clambering through the brush, marshlands full of billowing reeds and snapping turtles, solitary birdwatchers training their binoculars on vesper sparrows, blue grosbeaks, and other species they’ve never spotted there before.
Even in the middle of a major city, it’s amazing what a little time without human intervention can do. Which is why fans of “The Meadows,” as the locals call it, are now petitioning the City to keep it that way: “In the Meadows, many of us feel, at last, this relinquishing of control, this psychic break, this abnegation of a colonizing will,” writes Anisa George in a heartbreaking essay for The Philadelphia Citizen. It’ll probably get covered up by AstroTurf, which is what the city’s master plan calls for, but for now, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to an escape where it actually feels like we’re escaping.