An Eccentric Upstate Home That Some People Confuse for a Restaurant

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/t-magazine/art/cary-leibowitz-simon-lince-upstate-home.html

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When the artist Cary Leibowitz and the creative director Simon Lince purchased their farmhouse in upstate New York in 2005, they intended to use it first and foremost as a quiet weekend retreat. The fact that it also provided a second home for the enormous trove of antiques and art objects that already filled their main residence in N.Y.C. was an added bonus.

“When I first met Simon, I was already in Harlem,” says Leibowitz, who also goes by the name Candy Ass. For the past 21 years he has lived in the same townhouse, which is packed with dazzling works by the likes of Peter Saul, Andy Warhol and McDermott & McGough. “But I had been a hoarder for years, and it was impossible for someone to just move in and feel comfortable. So that’s when we started looking up here,” he says of their upstate property. “Everything here is much more of a deliberate process between the two of us.”

Indeed, the couple’s home, set on 27 acres of fields and overgrown apple orchards in Ghent, N.Y., is a quirky exhibit of their shared passions — for everything from early Americana to Old Hollywood collectibles to modern art. It also happens to be a thoroughly astonishing sight: a sprawling structure with a towering, two-dimensional, hand-painted facade depicting an 18th-century illustration of a Chinese building — designed by the husband-and-wife architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown — all nestled among black locust trees along a winding country road.

When Leibowitz and Lince bought the home, it consisted of a one-room structure built in 1795 and a larger 1820s addition, with charming rustic floorboards and original floral wallpaper, much of which they have left intact. But the couple soon realized they needed to expand. Leibowitz, a lifelong admirer of Venturi and Scott Brown and an obsessive collector of Venturi objects, wrote a letter to their Philadelphia-based firm, VSBA, to propose working together. The resulting extension, called “The Room,” is a cavernous, 700-square-foot space with floor-to-ceiling glass windows; it now serves as the couple’s dining room, sitting room and gallery, displaying works such as a wall-mounted Jonathan Borofsky still life that spins with the flick of a switch. But without a doubt, its most striking feature is the enormous, pastel-colored facade, based on a 1700s chinoiserie etching by the English father-and-son architects William and John Halfpenny that Venturi and Scott Brown translated into one of their trademark highway-sign-like adornments.

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The architects’ head-turning design has made for some unusual encounters over the years. One night, some would-be diners walked through the front door, thinking it was a Chinese restaurant. “They came into the living room and said, ‘We have a reservation at 7:30 for four people,’” recalls Lince with a hearty laugh. Others have pulled into the driveway just to gawk.

Inside the house, each room is a dizzying mash-up of styles and periods, with plenty of winking juxtapositions: The walls of a stairway, for example, are covered with historical photos of groups of visitors to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s famed plantation home in Virginia, with a 1975 painting of Washington by the artist Alex Katz nestled in among them. Many of the objects — such as a triptych by McDermott & McGough depicting Kaaterskill Falls — nod to the geography of upstate New York.

But perhaps the most meaningful design feature on the property is the word “Linceowitz,” a portmanteau of the couple’s names, spelled out in large aluminum block letters on a balcony at the rear of the house. In 2016, Lince and Leibowitz were married beneath the sign, with their bridesmaids showering down confetti from above. “This home is very personal, and it is something that we both can be proud of,” says Leibowitz.