THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020 MBRE 9homes have begun embracing those places
with newfound devotion and are converting
them into their primary homes — at least
for the foreseeable future. While there are
some who cannot wait to return to their
busy city lives, many others have discov-
ered the joys of living outside the city and
are considering whether and how best to
prolong their time there.
Some second-home owners are buying
new furniture and reconfiguring their prop-
erties to better accommodate their new
habits, like remaking guest bedrooms into
home offices and getting the necessary
items to work and school from home. Others
are considering more expansive renova-
tions to their properties, such as upgrading
aging kitchens or building additions. There
are those who have relocated their busi-
nesses to their weekend houses — poten-
tially for the long-term — and others who
are adding their children’s names to school
rosters in these towns as an option come
September.
While living full time in places that usu-
ally get much less wear and tear, these
homeowners share many of the same diffi-
culties as anyone dealing with the coro-
navirus lockdown — working in communal
spaces where their children now are
present 24/7, discovering items in their
homes that need updating, and then reno-
vating a home while they are living in it. In
addition, these homeowners must adjust to
living in relatively unfamiliar towns, often
far from friends, family or creature com-
forts like a favorite bagel shop or longtime
barber.
Then there are the inherent tensions be-
tween second-home owners and year-
round residents, who initially feared the
spread of Covid-19 and who were resentful
of the weekenders who arrived in the off-
season and never left.
MICHELLE SMITH,who lives on the Upper
West Side, decamped for her weekend
home in the Hudson Valley with her son in
March, when the pandemic was just begin-
ning to take root in Manhattan. The house,
in the town of Newburgh, is large with a
pool, “a family compound meant for enter-
taining — not work,” said Ms. Smith, who is
the chief executive of Source Financial Ad-
visors, a boutique wealth management
company. As the single mother of Dylan, 18,
who has special needs, Ms. Smith has found
the experience challenging.
“I’m working more than normal, and
there is no downtime,” Ms. Smith said. “I
used to leave the office and go to Starbucks
for a vanilla latte, or just take a walk around
the block. Now, if I want coffee I have to
walk by my son into the kitchen, so there is
no break between work and being a mom.”
Ms. Smith spends her days working from
her bedroom — locking the door when she
doesn’t want to be disturbed — while during
the school year, Dylan attended classes on
Zoom from the butler pantry.
Ms. Smith’s mother has come to live with
them to help out, but “I feel like my life went
from 100 m.p.h. down to 10 m.p.h. in a day,”
she said. When the pandemic hit, she went
from dining in restaurants multiple nights a
week and having the help of a sitter who did
much of the meal prep for her son, to shar-
ing full-time cooking duties with her mother
and not eating a single meal outside her
home in four months.
Living in Newburgh is also a return to
home, of a sort, for Ms. Smith. She grew up
in the town where she now has her country
house and has a unique perspective on the
sometimes difficult relationship between
weekenders and full-time residents. “There
is definitely an attitude up here of ‘the city
people’ rushing with all their money to rent
or buy anything they can get their hands
on,” she said, adding that there is fear, par-
ticularly in popular hiking areas, that it is
now “full of city people exhaling Covid
germs.”
Still, despite the challenges, Ms. Smith
would rather be in Newburgh than in Man-
hattan, where her family would be squeezed
into an apartment and isolating would be
harder. Looking toward the fall, Ms. Smith,
a co-founder of the school that her son at-
tends, the IDEAL School of Manhattan, is
keeping an open mind. “I will likely do some
combo of remote and in-class, depending on
the safety and what unfolds,” she said, add-
ing that her work plans also remain “up in
the air.”
To accommodate their new realities, Ms.
Smith is making some changes to the house,
including upgrading her bedroom work
area with office furniture, and is consider-
ing building a separate office space using a
prefabricated office shed, so she can con-
duct meetings with colleagues and have
some space away from her family.NED BALDWIN HAS also been making
changes to his weekend house, now that his
family is spending nearly all of their time
there. Mr. Baldwin, the chef and owner of
Houseman, a restaurant in Hudson Square,
temporarily closed his business in March
and relocated to Orient, on the North Fork
of Long Island.
“I packed up the entire walk-in and I took
everything that was perishable and sent a
spreadsheet to friends in Orient,” said Mr.
Baldwin, who is also the author of “How to
Dress an Egg.” “Everyone placed orders,
and I packed up 40 shopping bags and drovethem out in a friend’s pickup.” He waited at
a shuttered farm stand, huddled against the
wind, while his friends came by to pick up
their food. “And that was it. It was basically
the last time I was in New York.”
Mr. Baldwin’s weekend home, a
circa-1968 kit house that he bought some 15
years ago, needed upgrades to work as a
primary residence. Chief among the
changes was a larger bed for his 13-year-old
daughter, Hazel. “The bed was a foot too
short,” recalled Mr. Baldwin, who also lives
with his wife, Jordana, the director for cul-
tural engagement at Everytown for Gun
Safety, and their 15-year-old son, Irving.
“For two weeks she had been sleeping on
the couch, or with us, and I hadn’t even no-
ticed.” Mr. Baldwin built his daughter’s new
bed himself, then he built her a desk so she
could do her schoolwork.
Mr. Baldwin has returned to work at his
restaurant, which has reopened, but his
wife is likely to continue working remotely
for the foreseeable future. The family is
planning to return to Manhattan in Septem-
ber as the children’s schools expect to open
with a combination of remote and in-person
learning.
Not everyone is convinced that the fall
school semester will necessitate a return,
and some are contemplating remaining in
their secondary — now primary — resi-
dence until the pandemic subsides. Joshua
Rahn, co-founder of the venture fund Ocean
Ventures, his wife, Jessica Contrastano, and
their three children have been living in their
home in Amagansett since mid-March. “It’s
great here,” he said. “I mean, if I didn’t know
there was absolute chaos in the world, and if
I didn’t have teenagers who miss their
friends, I could do this forever.”
Mr. Rahn’s children were set to attend the
Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant
High School and the NYC Lab School for
Collaborative Studies in September. “So
they are all going to high-density envi-
ronments,” he said. “As owners in Long Is-
land, we pay taxes and the schools are great
here, so we will wait and see.” He expects to
make a decision on schools in the nextseveral weeks.
Some are taking the changes in stride. “I
work on a lot of charity boards with Covid-19
funds, donating and doing fund-raising,”
said Jean Shafiroff, a philanthropist who is
on the board of the Southampton Hospital
Association and is a national spokeswoman
for American Humane’s Feed the Hungry
Fund, which cares for animals abandoned
during the pandemic. “It puts everything in
perspective. If we can’t go out for a year, we
will survive. It’s fine.”
Ms. Shafiroff, whose primary residence is
an apartment on Park Avenue, has been liv-
ing at her weekend home in Southampton
since mid-March. “It is my husband, two
grown children, a boyfriend and our house-
keeper, who is fabulous and we love like a
family member,” she said. They also have
five rescue dogs. “I’m grateful that my fam-
ily can be together, and no one has to be
alone.”
While the house is spacious and everyone
has enough room to work, Ms. Shafiroff
never got around to decorating her bed-
room, and has no plans to do so now. “The
walls are bare, but empty is good. Less is
fine with me.”
Lorraine Heber-Brause and her husband,
Ken Brause, who purchased their home in
Litchfield County, Conn., in 2008, partly in
reaction to 9/11, have spent much more time
in the home than they normally do. Ms. He-
ber-Brause’s stepmother died in the terror-
ist attack, and the family wanted “a Plan B,”
she said. “We weren’t the people who were
like, ‘Let’s leave the city.’ But we were like,
‘Let’s get a place where we could go, a
safety net.’ ”IN ADDITION TOpurchasing some office fur-
niture to make the quarantine more com-
fortable, the couple, who have two college-
age children, also felt it was an opportune
moment to begin upgrading the property.
“We were there, looking up during a rain-
storm, for example, and saw rain coming
into the skylight, and thought, ‘Maybe now
is a good time to replace it,’ ” Ms. Heber-
Brause said. So far, the construction has
been going well. “There isn’t a lot of new
construction right now, so the builders were
wonderfully accessible.”
While some homeowners see this as a
good moment to begin some renovations,
contractors are urging clients to hold off on
major changes. “Now is not a great time to
tear apart your house,” said Jared Loveless,
the president of Vector East, Ltd., a general
contractor on the North Fork of Long Is-
land. “We just came out of a shutdown, sup-
plies like lumber are really sparse, delays
are inevitable.”
Towns have had to put their permitting
and approval processes online, adding to
the confusion, he said. Then there is the un-
ease around Covid-19. “The etiquette of so-
cial distancing — what to do if a client isn’t
wearing a mask and you feel uncomfortable
asking them to put one on, for instance — it
can be a challenge,” Mr. Loveless said.
While renovations may not be easy right
now, they may be necessary, said Chuck Pe-
tersheim, a homebuilder based in Sullivan
County. “My biggest concern as families
transition their weekend homes to their pri-
mary residence is about safety,” he said. A
home built in the 1970s, for instance, was
not intended to have multiple computers,
iPads, phones and other devices plugged
into its electrical outlets, and could pose a
fire hazard. Overworked septic systems
and the safety of well water are also a possi-
ble concern.
The advent of Covid-19 has been a major
boon for Mr. Petersheim, whose company,
Catskill Farms, designs and builds homes.
“In the months of April, May and June we
did a year’s worth of business, while turning
away twice that number,” he said.
A majority of those who own second
homes recognize their good fortune.
“I was born and raised in Manhattan, so
at first I thought it was better to stay put,”
Ms. Fischer said. “But we are so happy to be
out here. You love the one you’re with, as the
saying goes.”Second Home, Full Time
Michelle Smith, above, says her
Hudson Valley weekend house,
top, in Newburgh, N.Y., is “a
family compound meant for
entertaining — not work.”
Above right, Sally Fischer has
owned her home in
Southampton for many years,
but “we have never spent an
entire spring here,” she said.
Bottom left, Jean Shafiroff lives
on Park Avenue, but has been
staying at her weekend home,
also in Southampton; Main
Street there, bottom right, was
relatively quiet one recent
afternoon. Right, Lorraine
Heber-Brause and her husband
bought their second home, in
Litchfield County, Conn., in
2008, partly in reaction to 9/11.TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMESSome country-house
owners are reconfiguring
to suit new habits.CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
ERIC STRIFFLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMESTONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMESABOVE AND LEFT, ERIC STRIFFLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES