The Upstater: Cool Contemporaries

Every Friday at 11AM, the Upstater blog brings you a selection of homes for sale (and occasionally for rent) within three hours north (and a little east or west) of Brooklyn. This week: architect-designed contemporaries.

Our favorite is this “Glass Shell House” in Roxbury, an up-and-coming Western Catskills town (and home to the hip Roxbury Hotel, a good place to stay while checking out local real estate).

The half-dome house, designed by architect Seymour Rutkin, seems like a pretty incredible deal to us at $599,000, although we’d tweak the furnishings and try to make the kitchen a little more accommodating if it were ours.

In addition to the stunning space and the views, it has three beds, two-and-a-half baths, 2,400 square feet and five hilltop acres. More about its green aspects from the listing: “Designed with the hope that his concept of building would meet the future needs to ‘go green’ with passive solar heat and limited footprint providing twice the size of the average home with less ecological impact.”
Glass Shell House, Roxbury, NY. $599,000. GMAP.

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52 Raybrook Drive in Woodstock was designed and built in 2004, and has wonderful clerestory windows and great light, and a kitchen to die for. It’s 3,400 square feet, on three acres, and taxes are just over $1,000 a month, which counts as reasonable for the Woodstock area.

Three beds, three-and-a-half baths, walnut floors, central air — lots of good stuff to crow about. The price seems a tad high to us at $575,000, despite the babbling brook in the backyard and the list of amenities.
52 Raybrook Drive, Woodstock, NY. $575,000. GMAP.

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In the luxury green department, 9 Disanto Court in Ulster Park is half space-age, half-hippie. We think it could use a bit of a designer’s touch and a kitchen worthy of its soaring spaces, but otherwise we appreciate the combo of reclaimed materials and modern lines. For instance: the bathroom, with its clawfoot tub atop radiant-heat concrete floors.

It’s officially a two-bed, two-bath but has a lot of open, loft-like space, a deck, and a creek running through the property. It has geothermal heating (which costs a lot upfront but ends up being cheaper if you stay in a property long enough — that investment might be reflected in the price) and a separate studio. It also has a lot of land: 25 acres.
9 Disanto Court, Ulster Park, NY. $920,000. GMAP.