Upstate, Redone: A Lakeside Ranch House Reborn

  |  March 2, 2012

If you have a upstate house you’d like to share with Upstater, drop us a line.

Last week, the Upstate Redone column looked at a gut-renovated ranch house in Gardiner. This week, we’re going over the river to Clinton, where this incredibly humble cottage on a private lake was reinvented by architect David Borenstein. For somewhere in the neck of $150,000, Borenstein recreated this 1,200-square-foot house, building on the basic box of its ranch foundation (you can still see the original windows and front door on the bottom right of the new house).

Borenstein has a special talent for knowing what buildings have potential to be reinvented. He sometimes suggests clients by “crappy houses” for peanuts in great locations or with good views, and either tear them down or massively gut and rebuild, as was done here.

Hard to see from the photos, but the interior has views of the private lake, especially from the deck on the upper floors, now visible thanks to expanded windows.

Perhaps the house’s most extraordinary feature is the basement. When the owner’s got the place, the basement had been flooded; the water table is very high around the lake. So they excavated, added an elaborate system of pumps, put in a sauna that the owners bought from a kit and a walk-in steam shower.

More photos on the jump.

Borenstein also likes to use reclaimed materials in his projects, like the handrails made from old copper pipes.

He coats countertops in epoxy; clients can paste their recipes below the epoxy so they can look at them while cooking (though you can’t switch them out, of course).

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