92 ELLE DECOR
A MERE FOUR MONTHS AFTER MEETING MY
now husband, Jeremy, I found myself stomp-
ing through knee-deep snow to check out a
big white house on a hill in Millbrook, New
York. Boasting 100 acres of fields and woods,
two ponds, a creek, and tons of furry residents,
the property had a winter coat that left a lot to
the imagination. But Jeremy and I were falling
in love and feeling just a little bit crazy. I still
don’t know why I didn’t immediately run back
to my TriBeCa rental. But like all great love
stories, the house, which we called Whiskey
Ridge, required diving in blindly, headfirst.
A blistering summer day six months later
proved to be the end of the honeymoon, both for
our relationship and our new home. I cried hys-
terically on move-in day when we discovered
that not only was there no internet in the house,
but it was also impossible to run the cables up
the mile-long driveway. As the digital editor
of Harper’s Bazaar, being offline was career
suicide. How did we not think to ask about the
Wi-Fi? Country houses, it seems, suffer no fools.