The new luxury is space and silence

The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #63

When my husband and I first began dating, we never imagined spending our life together in the countryside of rural Pennsylvania. Yet, ten years later, here we are, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Just a couple weeks ago we closed on a charming little house on six-and-a-half acres in a quiet town not far over the New York border.

We spent a lot of our time together in the city when first dating; in fact, we met at a bar in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I stopped after leaving work in Manhattan, grabbing a glass of wine while waiting for the next train back to the Hudson Valley. He was there with friends, grabbing a drink before heading into the city. While I didn’t really have a hankering for city life, being drawn to nature and a quieter pace, my husband often talked about us possibly living in the city, or at least nearby. Rural Pennsylvania, I assure you, was never on our radar.

Life goes that way. If you’ve been with me a while you’ve heard me talk about my parents and their immigration story. They were never supposed to stay in America. They were supposed to work here for a few years, make money, and go back to Southern Italy with my siblings and me in tow. Life had other plans, and now my father is buried in a cemetery in New York and my mother would never dream of living in Italy again. There are a lot of reasons why people leave their homes. But chief among them is the decisions made by so-called leaders that trickle down onto us regular, everyday people, who have to live with the outcomes.

The fact is, I don’t want to leave New York. I always imagined I’d raise my kids here, and, again, if you’ve been reading my work for a while or listening to me on my podcasts, you know that I’m very fond of home—home life, hometowns, the rooted life. I resent having to move, but I’m joining some nearly one million people who have left New York since 2020. It’s the largest population drain of any state in the union, and the largest New York has seen since the 1970s. A friend who lives in another state recently sent me a poll that found a family of four in New York now needs to make something in the range of $350,000 to live as middle class. She couldn’t believe it. I assured her it was true, as the price of everything from homes to groceries to taxes is officially unbearable. How did people like my parents make a life here? Well, it was a different place then, and similarly to my parents who were pushed out of their home by a need to raise their children in a more hospitable place, so are we.

While my husband and I still very much like nice things, in those early days of dating and even marriage, luxury looked very different than what it looks to us now. Luxury was nice handbags, sleek clothes, nice dinners, shiny cars. And while all those things still appeal to us, with two kids and a new outlook on life, we’ve come to see luxury differently, and we’re shedding what we don’t need to be able to have what we truly desire—space, silence, nature, a slow pace to our days. Luxury is me being able to stay home with the boys. Luxury is looking out the back door and seeing sky. Luxury is a home that we design to reflect our taste and a life where we get to spend a lot of time inside and near it, instead of rushing out the door to catch trains and attend various vapid events. Luxury is the space to have a garden that can feed us year round; space to have animals that we can tend to, who bring a sense of the holy and natural into our everyday lives and the experience of our children. Luxury is resisting the culture of speed and noise and distraction and convenience.

The view from the back door of our new home in the Pennsylvania countryside. We need to rebuild the deck, so for now we have these beams across for safety.

So now that the why is laid out, we move on to the fun part, which is the new adventure. This will be our third home renovation. When we first got married, we gutted the second level of my childhood home and transformed it into a two-bedroom apartment, which gave us a place to start our lives together and helped my mother by eliminating the need for her to care for an entire home or climb stairs to get to her bedroom. Our second renovation was in the Catskill mountains. My husband and I love to renovate, and he’s very handy, so we do most of the work ourselves. We had a lot of help from our family with the upstate house, who came many weekends to nail in shiplap and help install floors, and for that we’re very grateful. Two years ago we sold the house. It wasn’t an easy decision, but work life was changing for my husband, and the market in that area was so high, it was difficult to not take advantage on getting a good return on our investment.

We transformed our Catskill Mountain house from this…

To this….

And from this….

To this….

The Catskill house was our first taste of rural life, and we really took to it. Cooking outside, spending time outdoors even in the winter, interacting with the natural world around us daily, the days unfolding slowly as if on a different clock, no longer filled with unnecessary errands, noise and distractions. We found trips to the farm and the lake were exactly how we wanted to spend a Saturday morning. We played records, cooked fresh food, rode the tractor….Because our house was set between both Windham and Hunter Mountains, the area is a resort destination, so Monday through Wednesday almost everything closed and was quiet, and then on Thursday restaurants and stores began to open, and by Friday the energy of visitors filled the area. It was a nice mix; a nice ebb and flow.

We’re looking for the same kind of pace in our new home. A place where the boys can run and get dirty and grow strong, and a place where we can rest our minds and connect with what feels most meaningful to us; a place where we can put our hands in the soil, swing an ax, build, work under the sky, and be creatively inspired.

The previous owners had horses, so there are stables on the land and a long stretch of fencing to protect animals. There are six enormous blueberry bushes already bearing abundant fruit, and just this weekend we found an apple tree on the property, heavy with ripening apples. Angelo was beyond excited to discover both, as fruit—blueberries and apples in particular—is his favorite.

The house needs a little fixing up, and of course we want to change things around to put our style and touch on it. I plan to create a hybrid English cottage, old-world farmhouse look that I think suits the house and the property just right. Next week I’ll share some photos of the inside, what we’re remodeling and what’s to come.

I plan to share our new life and the progress of the renovations here on Substack for paid subscribers. So if you’re not a paid subscriber yet and love to see home transformations, as well as the magic of country life, you can join me as a paid subscriber for less than $5 per month. Becoming a paid subscriber not only gets you access to exclusive content, it helps me to keep creating the work you see here and across other platforms. To those of you who are already paid subscribers, thank you so much for your support.

Thanks for being here with me, truly.