Hyphen House

Hudson, New York

Hudson Valley’s historic Van Rensselaer Lower Manor comprises two stand-alone 18th-century houses, joined by a hyphen. That physical yet poetic connection served as the conceptual anchor, a guiding metaphor, for our ambitious reimagining of the 1700s farmhouse. A mediator and connective thread, the hyphen informed every choice, allowing the imprint of the past to echo through modern interventions. The hyphen is an invisible, lyrical theme, reconnecting layered, fragmented spaces and inherited materials into a singular, unified home.

Hyphen House is the second act of artist Michele Lobo’s home in New York. When she moved in, the property still had traces of its past life as a working flower farm—nearly every corner subsumed by florals, down to the wallpaper. As a love note to this history, we preserved some of the original wallpaper in cosy upstairs bedrooms, the sun-filled living room and downstairs powder room. These whispers of the past remain, scattered among more refined and elevated updates, forming a cord between the home’s visual lineage and its practical reinvention.

The house is full of charming quirks: parallel staircases, thick stone walls, duplicate rooms, odd junctions. Rather than erase them for modern perfection, we treated each irregularity as punctuation – a charismatic link between past and present, domestic and creative. Beyond being a family home, Hyphen House is a working compound: the former flower shop is now a sculpture studio, the barn reimagined as gallery and gathering space. Paths between house, studio, and barn mark shifts in tempo – from everyday life to experiment, from private to shared.

Layered into the home's process of becoming is Michele’s own history: years spent traveling, finding pieces from Indonesia and London, which now inhabit the rooms. These obejcts—collected across geographies and chapters—unite Michelle's eye and story with our own. A co-creation binding the home’s inherited character to the life unfolding within it. The result is a property that feels unbuttoned and alive, a place where the flowers on the wall grow alongside you.

Favorite details: remnants of the silk-screen wallpaper wind around pipes like invasive, beautiful weeds. A preserved wax melter for candle making (it’s hidden behind a fireplace in the northern living room.) The bare mantle that was stripped back to the original wood after many hours of removing infinite flecks of paint.