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 st…