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.
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