Our Hudson Valley adventures began here in Linlithgo: an abandoned ca.-1900 house, probably built for workers at the nearby Hudson River waterfront, once a busy landing and railroad depot, or the mine at Iron Mountain (now the global document-storage facility). While modest, the house was a time capsule, its layers revealing a history of working-class interior decoration up until the 1960s, when its previous owner—Alice Rockefeller—did one last round of improvements (indoor plumbing and a knotty-pine kitchen with atomic-pattern linoleum
In our first go at hands-on rehabilitation, we preserved and restored what we could (original doors, box locks and tiger-eye knobs, double-hung wood windows), introduced things we loved (vintage clawfoot tubs and pedestal sinks, a 1946 Chambers stove), replaced the asphalt roof with standing-seam metal, made the agonizing choice to replace the badly damaged plaster with sheetrock (after documenting all of the many layers of wallpaper), and settled for leaving the mid-20th-century asbestos exterior shingles intact, even though we know the original clapboard is underneath. One day…
