This Upstate New York Art Barn Is a Panoramic Paradise
Nineteen years ago, the Manhattan gallerist Sean Kelly and his wife, Mary, visited what their real-estate agent described as the most beautiful piece of land in Columbia County, New York, albeit a property no one would ever want to buy. “It took us hours walking through the woods to find it,” Sean recalls. “It was all virgin forest. Finally we did—and there was no view.”
Or so it seemed. After climbing to the top of a pine tree, Sean pulled back the foliage to discover a panorama seemingly unchanged since the time of the Hudson River School painters, with rolling hills and vast swaths of farmland. (He also realized that the tree, half dead, was cantilevered over a precipitous drop.) Safely back on the ground, he and Mary offered to buy the property on the spot.
That vista has since set the stage for the Kelly family’s modernist compound, designed with the help of their longtime friend Toshiko Mori. “There is something very spiritual about the land,” says the AD100 architect, who in 2009 completed the main house, an orthogonal assemblage of glass and aluminum-foam panels (AD, November 2011). Sean and Mary, meanwhile, continued to walk the woods, eventually buying an adjacent parcel that overlooks the treetops and lake beyond.
“It feels like a different location, even though it’s a contiguous site,” attests Mori, whom the Kellys called upon to build a second structure as private exhibition space and storage for their personal art collection. “We told Toshiko we wanted the opposite of the house, something with very little light, something peaked,” reflects Sean. Together they came up with the idea of an extruded barn, whose 140-foot-long form reminded him and Mary of the 14th-century tithe barn in Bradford-on-Avon, England, not far from where they grew up.
The question then became how to break up the structure’s considerable massing. “When Toshiko made a model, I asked if I could have a scalpel and cut the roof off its center,” Sean recalls of the decision to add a courtyard. “It was a moment where you kinda knew you got something.” To give the primordial form a contemporary twist, meanwhile, they opted to wrap its roof and walls in standing-seam aluminum, the custom graphite color of which, Mori observes, “seems to shift from gray to green, depending on the time of day.”
The 6,000 square feet of space is divided between storage to one side of the courtyard, and exhibition and living spaces to the other. In the main gallery, works by artists from Sean’s own roster (among them Sam Moyer, Jose Dávila, and Idris Khan) mingle with recent acquisitions from the family’s travels, including a large Dorothy Cross sculpture that re-creates Mount Everest to scale in marble. Installing it beside the floor-to-ceiling windows, from which Bear Mountain can be seen in the distance, was made all the easier by three ingenious sets of doors that allow vehicles to drive through the entire length of the building. For a proper arrival, however, Sean ushers guests through the gothic doorway, salvaged from an English monastery, that he found online. If Mori was “horrified” by the purchase, as Sean jokes, she soon came around. “It’s very mysterious, like a fairy tale,” the architect notes. “I think it’s Sean’s Game of Thrones obsession.”
See Sean Kelly's Incredible Collection In the Toshiko Mori-Designed Space
He certainly has ample opportunity to exercise it in these wild parts, where winters regularly deliver upwards of ten feet of snow, and nosy neighbors include bears, mountain lions, and wolves. But for Sean, who was raised on a farm, all that just feels like home. “It’s really an antidote to the nonstop world we live in. Two and a half hours up the Taconic Parkway and we’re here,” he says, gesturing to the sweeping view. “Suddenly I feel human again.”
