At the height of the pandemic, gazing longingly at listings on Zillow was its own form of therapy. Moving wasn’t top of mind for the founder of glassware and textile brand Upstate, Kalen Kaminski—she had a loft and studio in New York’s Chinatown already rented, but scrolling through pages of houses around the Berkshires became a compelling “hobby,” as she puts it.
The day the 200-year-old schoolhouse on the Konkapot River popped up online, Kaminski scheduled an appointment for her and her boyfriend, commercial artist Ryan James Giese, to meet with a broker. The airy inner sanctum that housed classes of students until the ’80s was unlike any of the pedestrian, low-ceilinged homes the broker had offered otherwise. “We walked in and right away we were like, ‘This is our place,’” Kaminski recalls.
The country sunlight itself, which Kaminski describes as having a special, mercurial “warm green and shadowy ambient” quality that changes from season to season, felt different than the light in the city. There was also a peculiar triangle slab stone table in the bathroom that Kaminski says was, “weirdly, a selling point” for her.
Around 90 days later, they closed on the house. “People we consulted with who are more real estate savvy said, ‘A 200-year-old schoolhouse? Don’t buy that. The value won’t go up,’” Kaminski recalls. “But we didn’t listen.”
