Pleased to meet you!
Hi, I'm Phyllis, a Brooklyn native, and my husband Luke is originally from Dublin, Ireland. We live in a Bed Stuy brownstone with 2 dogs and 6 cats, but we aren't strangers to the Hudson Valley and Catskill Region.
I spent childhood summers going up to the Borscht Belt with my family. They even moved up to Wurtsboro briefly during the early 1970's. Fast forward to the mid 1990's when Luke and I were living in Park Slope and decided to get a second home upstate. We landed in Marbletown, which we had never heard of. The house was close to Stone Ridge, High Falls, Rosendale and Kingston. We loved it so much that we decided to move up there full time!
Turns out we aren't full time country people. But we weren't ready to head back to the city, so we chose to move to the larger town of Beacon, NY. After six years of trying to tell ourselves we were happy there, we finally came back to Brooklyn.
We had spent the last ten years or so renting vacation homes when we wanted to escape the city. Finally, in the summer of 2019, we decided to get one of our own. We apply our experience as guests to host the perfect place!
My background is in photography and Luke is a structural engineer, so we make a great team when working on a house. I'm the creative and Luke puts the ideas into play. Blue House is our sixth DIY renovation. Yes, we are serial renovators! It's an addiction. In fact, I retired from photography and got a real estate license and now my career is in real estate and renovations. I even had a blog back when that was a thing. Reclaimed Home is still online although it hasn't been updated in awhile.
We are pet people. This house is as much for dogs as it is for people. They need a vacation too! So, book a weekend and enjoy with your furry family! (Non furry humans welcome as well).