For over a solid decade, we collectively watched Stacy London strategically dismantle women’s wardrobes as co-host of TLC’s long-running reality TV behemoth What Not to Wear. The beloved makeover show centered itself around a handful of style rules, but beneath its snappy and sparkly facade, it exposed the vulnerable and transformative power of change while opening the door to a more evolved sense of self through a closet revamp. 

When you first meet Sunny Ruffalo, what strikes you is the unmistakable suspicion that she is a “somebody.” With her tousled blonde mane, her slim gray wool blazer, her pristine Adidas Stan Smiths, and a level, assured voice, she exudes a stealthy glamour that makes her stand out, even in a stylish town crawling with stylish city weekenders like Narrowsburg, NY.

Melissa Auf Der Maur speaks from a lifetime lived at the intersections of music, visual art, and performance, yet never entirely within any one of them. Auf Der Maur is a traveler between worlds — Montreal, New York, Cape Cod, Hudson Valley — and between selves: artist, musician, curator, and activist. What threads through the story is an insistence on vision, on integrity, and on the small revolutions that shape a life. Even now, decades into her career, she moves with purpose, carrying the weight and freedom of having always followed her own beat.

“We like to text message more than to hear the voice of somebody talking. So you isolate yourself and technology becomes your friend, which never can replace the human touch.”

Our childhoods inimitably define us. And it is only when we are adults that we glean just how much. It came as little surprise, therefore, to hear that Anie Stanley grew up in the Catskills with romantic aspirations of a beautiful homestead. I stayed in her house a couple of seasons back with a girlfriend in the fabled Smokey Belles, named after the many women who have visited (Southern Belles) and the property’s 7 campfires. 

When throwing a small dinner party this winter, the best advice Goshen Green Farms founder Ana Hito could give is to leverage whatever the season offers—from the tablescape to the menu. The balaboosta herself abides by the same rule of thumb when preparing for her monthly farm-to-table dinners—the last of which happens to be tonight.

To cross paths with Stephanie Cavalli is a precious thing. She is one of those rare people who emanate the kind of lived-in beauty that instantly makes you feel as though she has a story to tell. There is an enviable self-assuredness to her— a comfort in her own skin that somehow manages to strike just the right balance of wise and carefree. Perhaps, it is her Italian Caribbean roots at play, or, maybe, she has just done enough to recognize the beauty that resides in the un-doneness. For most of her twenties, Cavalli traveled the globe as a fashion model. Today, she is a mother to two boys and a shopkeeper of a vintage clothing boutique in Callicoon. Though at first, these two lives seem in total opposition, it’s precisely in this ability to walk the line between the exotic and the familiar where Cavalli’s magic lies. She’s statuesque but warm, seasoned, but grounded, and she believes that there is just as much beauty to be had in a simpler life as in any other.

Arriving at Marine Penvern’s “humble little abode,” her eponymous clothing atelier on Hudson’s Warren Street, is like being welcomed into a jewel box. Handmade garments beckon: boiled wool jackets with red zippers running down one side, her signature; playful capes and silk chiffon skirts in shiny metallic; “protective gear” made of aluminum-coated wool sheathed in polyurethane, a sardonic take on 5G conspiracy theories; and a striking floral house dress in soft, fine wool, her version of pandemic loungewear.

I am sitting at a table inside the private quarters of bed and breakfast, The Milliner, located in Hudson, NY, owned by artist Charlotta Janssen and her partner, photographer Shannon Greer. Their carefully crafted space is a world populated by artists, activists, visiting neighbors, old paint trays, and good food. The late morning light is coming through the guest room window, which catches Janssen’s crisp blue eyes as she sits on a stool. The fine lines around her face tell a story of a life well-lived. 

Alexandra Climent’s story has many layers, much like the extraordinary material she uses to make her art. As the self taught woodworker walks me through it from the sun-soaked living room of the new home she shares with her partner and pup in Narrowsburg, I catch myself interrupting to gasp out awestruck questions like, “how did you not give up?” which I asked not once but twice during our conversation. Her answer is accompanied by a hearty laugh and an easygoing humility that comes naturally: “I still ask myself that! I asked myself that yesterday.” 

Marcia Gay Harden’s 2018 memoir opens with a passage from that quintessential figurehead of upstate folklore, Washington Irving, about Rip Van Winkle’s decades-long nap in the Catskill Mountains. The anecdote is a metaphor for Harden’s relationship with her mother, of time passing and memories lost, but also reminds us that the Oscar-winning actress is intimately familiar with the territory. Her own Catskills home is a supremely private property on Gossamer Lake in the Catskills, where Harden and her family had congregated and escaped to, canoed, gardened, and cooked together since 1997 when she and her former husband acquired the initial 150 acres and continued to snap up surrounding chunks of land to accrue the current 300-plus. 

After fulfilling big goals in Los Angeles food media, Alexis Deboschnek moved back home to her family’s hundred-acre farmhouse in the western Catskills. There, among her mother’s gardens and her childhood kitchen, is where things really started to click.

Jodie Patterson is proof of how full a life can be. In her fifty-three expansive years, she’s mothered five children, been an acrobat in the Big Apple Circus, directed public relations for a major fashion brand, got married twice, owned a beauty business, wrote a memoir, and the list can quite literally go on and on. She’s always creating and forever ideating, but when we finally connect, she’s in both a mellow zone because of the incessant rain New York City is getting and concerned about the state of the world in this current moment.

These musings played in my mind as I meandered from Bovina, where I call home, to Stamford, where Remy Holwick has made hers. A quietly inspiring morning that pulled us closer to winter also brought me into conversation with Holwick, a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and mother who has made a home here in the Catskills since 2022. We talked about her nomadic upbringing, the ways in which this town of 2,000 has inspired her career, and what it means to contribute to community in a meaningful way. 

They say you can’t go home again, but there are some places you outgrow and some places that grow with you, claiming a corner of your internal landscape and imprinting on who you are by reminding you of who you were. For Rendón, a seasoned and successful actor who splits her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, this place is Tivoli. 

Christi Johnson exemplifies the coexistence of creativity and sustainability. From repurposing discarded treasures to nurturing a lush garden, the designer’s life upstate is a masterclass in the art of unhurried living, where each decision is sewn with intention and purpose. 

Life moves in seasons, and that measure shifts our sense of cause and consequence. Emily Johnston works within is long view. She lifts pigment from stone born eons ago and grinds it with river water. She calls the practice integrity of intuition; through it, art binds to land and to time. Color on the canvas becomes a record of fossil and tide, joining medium with maker, place with era.

Taylor Foster has moved through many worlds: first Miami, then New York City, and now the subtle expanse of Upstate New York. She began with pastry, slipped into modeling, and later built a small café called Heaven, a gathering place as much as a business. Today she lives in a cabin, where her attention has turned to holistic skincare. 

The supermodel, actor, film producer and native New Yorker has been a fashion industry darling virtually since birth. Leaving Greenwich Village behind for a full time life in Woodstock, NY, she tells us about challenging mainstream ideas and her Pursuit of Consciousness. 

Let’s start with the basics: Helena Christensen is a globally famous photographer and model, one of the “magnificent seven”—along with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and Claudia Schiffer—who inspired the term “supermodel” in the 1990s.