Interior Design in the Catskills

The light in the Catskills moves differently than people expect. Steep ridgelines clip the sunrise, the valleys hold mist into mid-morning, and by late afternoon the light flattens against the mountains and turns the rooms inside a house golden — or, on a February day, a very particular blue. We design for that. We pay attention to how a window is hung relative to the ridge, how a stain on white oak reads against snow versus against summer green, how a stone hearth holds heat through a January night when the wind comes down off Slide Mountain. Materiality is not a finish schedule here. It is a climate response.

What we know about Catskills homes is that they were built for a region that does not forgive shortcuts. The old farmhouses settle. The A-frames leak heat through their rooflines if the envelope was never properly addressed. The mid-century cabins that scatter the back roads of Ulster and Delaware counties were never meant to be year-round — and now they are. Dutch colonials hold their bones beautifully and ask to be honored rather than gutted. Contemporary builds along the ridges face a different question: how do you sit a glass-and-steel house in this landscape without arriving as an invader. None of these problems are solved by shiplap.

We work throughout the region. Phoenicia and Mount Tremper, where the Esopus narrows and the houses turn small and particular. Woodstock, where the design conversation is older and the clients usually want more than the easy answer. Margaretville, Roxbury, and Andes — the western Catskills, slower, more agricultural, the homes more often farmhouses or contemporary builds on real acreage. Livingston Manor and Callicoon in Sullivan County, where the river towns are quietly becoming something. We cover Ulster, Sullivan, Delaware, and Greene counties — the four counties that actually make up the region as it is lived in.

Our trade network is regional and it is earned. The good millworkers, the stone masons who know the difference between Catskill bluestone and an out-of-state lookalike, the painters who understand lime wash on old plaster, the cabinetmakers tucked into barns off Route 28 — we know them, and they know our drawings. That ecology matters. A home in the Catskills built with materials sourced from inside the region and assembled by people who live in it carries a kind of honesty that imported finishes cannot reproduce. It is also, quietly, more sustainable. The sourcing logistics are part of the design work.

Projects in the Catskills include A-frames, farmhouses, and contemporary builds across Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster counties.