For us, home is New York’s Hudson Valley, one of America’s most beautiful and historic areas. We love its rural character, vibrant Main Streets, historic houses and majestic landscapes. We feel strongly about doing our part to help the area’s character-defining buildings—farmhouses, barns, town and village buildings, and other vernacular structures—survive into the future with integrity.

We love the Hudson Valley, but we also love to travel. And when we do, we enjoy making ourselves “at home” wherever we go—in houses, landscapes, neighborhoods, towns, and cities that have a deep sense of place. We’re not alone—a Forbes article cites local experiences, sustainability, and personalization as significant travel trends, especially among millennials. Our (proudly GenX) experiences staying in a 12th-century hillside villa in France, a Georgian house in Dublin, a Venetian palazzo, a cottage in Cornwall inspired us—starting back in 2004—to build a network of historic houses available for short-term vacation rental here in the United States.

And then AirBnB took off. We joined the fray, listing a 19th-century farmhouse we had rehabilitated on the Main Street of Germantown, NY. The next project was a circa-1800 “New World Dutch Vernacular” house placed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places – commercial use as a rental makes it eligible for federal tax credits to support its meticulous rehabilitation. These houses are two of the many (hundreds of) vacation rentals in the Hudson Valley. But, they are special (remember what we said about old houses being like children?).