Aya Maceda and Kurt Arnold really didn’t want a second home in the country — or so they thought. But that was before the pandemic coaxed them into sampling rural life in upstate New York.
“It was never this attractive thing for us,” said Ms. Maceda, 45, a founder of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm ALAO. “I thought it would be so tedious to pack up your family, go on the weekend, and then have to come back to the city.”
But in 2020, when Ms. Maceda and Mr. Arnold, 46, who works in records management at a bank and as a photographer, were largely confined to their 660-square-foot Brooklyn apartment, they began to waver. Stuck in such a tight space with their children, Kosi, now 14, and Lulu, 8, they decided to rent a house for a week in Bethel, N.Y.
Spoiler alert: They absolutely loved it. So did the couple’s friends, Ana and John Divinagracia, and their two children, who they invited to visit.
As the adults sipped cocktails one glorious summer afternoon in Bethel, Ms. Maceda and Ms. Divinagracia, who are longtime friends with family connections in the Philippines, started musing about what it would be like to buy a weekend property together.
Ms. Divinagracia began with the same mind-set that Ms. Maceda had. “It seemed like just a pain to have to maintain a property, with all the expenses,” Ms. Divinagracia said.
But sharing the burden with friends made the idea seem less intimidating. A few days after returning to New York, Ms. Divinagracia recruited a real estate agent and told Ms. Maceda it was time to start looking for a property upstate.
The friends drew up a list of requirements for their shared weekend home: They wanted at least five acres of land, access to water and a house with at least three bedrooms in an area that attracted other creative people.
After a few months of searching, they found the winner: a mobile home with additions on 20 acres, which bordered a creek in Callicoon, N.Y., in Sullivan County. They closed on the property, together, in December 2020 for $329,000. They lightly renovated the house and filled out a calendar detailing who would get to use it when.
Before long, both families treasured their weekends upstate, with one exception: splitting use of the house meant they actually saw each other less often than they used to.
“We went from hanging out together all the time to hardly ever seeing each other,” Ms. Divinagracia said, “because when we were in the city, they were up there, and when we were up there, they were in the city.”
So, at the end of 2022, they devised Plan B. The friends would subdivide the lot into two properties, the Divinagracias would take the existing house (and buy Ms. Maceda and Mr. Arnold out of their share) and Ms. Maceda and Mr. Arnold would build their own new house next door.
No stranger to living in compact homes, and aiming to keep construction costs as low as possible, Ms. Maceda designed a box of a house with a 710-square-foot footprint, clad in black-stained pine.
Inside, there is one large room containing the living room, dining area and kitchen under a sloped ceiling. The couple wanted plenty of glass to open the home to the outdoors, “but big sliding doors are really expensive,” Ms. Maceda said. “The solution I came up with was to get standard-size doors and then fixed windows of the same size above them.”
There is also a bathroom, a primary bedroom and a bedroom with bunk beds for the children. As Ms. Maceda refined the design, Mr. Arnold encouraged her to add a painting studio.
“I’m a frustrated artist,” Ms. Maceda explained. To add space for painting, she redesigned the roof higher and built a 270-square-foot loft reached by a yellow steel spiral staircase, which doubles as a sleeping area for guests.
Throughout the home, she used space- and cost-saving features, including a peg rail with integrated shelves that stretches the full length of the house, wall-mounted speakers and hooks for hanging guitars, and Ikea kitchen cabinets with Baltic birch plywood doors made by her friend Jon Besch, a millworker in Brooklyn.
It took Just-In-Time Contracting about eight months to build the house, which was completed in January for a little less than $400,000.
Since then, Ms. Maceda has also built key pieces of furniture, including a heart-pine dining table; a music-production and photo-editing station for Mr. Arnold; and a bench with an integrated planter.
Despite their new home’s small size and simple materials, “it’s very, very comfortable,” said Mr. Arnold, who described family walks in the forest and being amazed by the wildlife they see. Connected to the Divinagracias by a footpath, the two families now have shared dinners nearly every weekend, just like they used to.
For all those reasons, Mr. Arnold said, “it’s like paradise.”
Living Small is a biweekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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