Barbara De Vries

Barbara de Vries is a creative director, designer, and bookmaker. After studying design at the Royal College of Art in London, she had her own critically acclaimed fashion label in the UK, before moving to New York in the late eighties. In 1991, she created and launched the CK collections at Calvin Klein. Barbara subsequently started her own fashion company with namesake collections in the US and Japan. In 2008, she co-founded Gordon de Vries Studio and has since produced, designed, photographed, and written, books on design, architecture, fashion, and lifestyle. Barbara has been a passionate anti-plastic pollution activist since 2005 and uses art, design, and education to raise awareness of this urgent environmental issue. Her most recent books Coming Home: Modern Rustic, Creative Living in Dutch Interiors (2021, Rizzoli USA) and Living Upriver, Artful Homes, Idyllic Lives (2023, Rizzoli USA), feature creative, unique homes that reflect the sustainable lifestyles of their owners. She lives in Milford, PA, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is working on her next book: Catastrophic Beauty; From Art to Activism, The History of the Plastic Pollution Movement.

@barbaradevriesgordon

Carter Harrington & Todd Carr from Hort & Port

Carter Harrington graduated from Pratt Institute in 2010 in interior architecture and subsequently worked in New York as a graphic artist, product designer and fabricator. 

Todd Carr is a master gardener, ceramicist, designer and visual stylist, who has worked in the horticultural world for more than two decades. He was the Senior Garden Editor at Martha Stewart Living.

Todd and Carter met in 2015 and the following summer they rented a summer cottage in Oak Hill, New York, about thirty minutes northwest of Hudson. They made new friends, and when August came, they didn’t want to go back to the city. In September, they heard about a little 1850 farmhouse that was for sale nearby. When they realized the purchase price was close to their annual rent in the city, they threw caution to the wind, bought the house, and moved Upstate. Once they had settled in, they rented an 1869 former carriage barn nearby and combined their talents to create a mixed retail and art space. Todd reintroduced Hort and Pott, the name of a boutique he had owned in Maine, and together they imagined a mix of botany, antiques, and horticulture-inspired pottery. Back at the farmhouse, Todd planted an extensive garden, which became another source of inspiration for the carriage house. The subsequent visual storytelling of their social media posts evoked an idyllic life—from farmhouse to garden to studio to home—and people travelled from all over to experience their environment. As they outgrew the carriage house, Carter and Todd found a large property in Freehold, which included an Italianate house, a former boarding house, two outbuildings, and a stream, all on twenty acres of land. When life slowed down in 2020, they started by renovating the boarding house and reopened Hort and Pott the following summer. With Todd as the artist in his studio and Carter the maker in his workshop, they’ve created more than a nursery, flower shop, or gallery. They extended their unique vision into their environment and created a community that comes to them for inspiration. They recently completed the restoration of the Italianate House and moved in over Christmas 2023. To Carter and Todd, horticulture is an essential part of life, presented in a dense green environment that helps people reimagine the way they live inside versus outside.

www.hortandpott.com

Jorge Colombo

Jorge Colombo has worked as an illustrator, as a photographer, and as graphic designer for the past 40 years. He's best known for the digital images he has been creating since 2009 (initially finger-painted on an iPhone, currently done on an iPad), namely a series of covers for The New Yorker, as well as drawings in multiple publications. He was born in 1963 in Lisbon, Portugal, and moved to the USA in 1989. He has lived in Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, and Brooklyn. Since 2017 he and his wife, artist Amy Yoes, have relocated to Narrowsburg, in the New York Catskills. They use their barn on Main Street as their full-time residence and studio, but also as a space to host community-oriented cultural projects. Since living in Narrowsburg, restricted by not being able to drive, Jorge has focussed his photography and illustrations on the town, its immediate vicinity and the local population, and created, in black and white, an extensive record of the town that is like a modern version of historic images of the late 19th century. 

www.thejorgecolombo.com

Nadia Yaron

Sculptor Nadia Yaron carves weighty, organic forms from wood, stone and metal in her home studio in Hudson, New York. Her pieces are hewn with chainsaws and grinders, a necessarily violent practice that contrasts with the tranquil sculptures. “Using a chainsaw is such a cathartic thing,” says Yaron. “There is a push and pull to it, and out of the chaos comes some quiet.” In her studio, a 19th-century barn in the grounds of her home, her pieces are heaved up with a chain lift rigged from the rafters and stacked on top of one another in teetering totemic structures “My work is purposefully imperfect, which reminds me of the fragility of nature,” she says.

Yaron began her practice in 2017 and has a background in wood furniture making and textiles. Her mother was an art teacher and encouraged her to create from a young age. She was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1978 and raised in New York, and read Women’s Studies and Sociology at Hunter College, NYC. In 2018, she showed her wood sculptures for the first time at an Architectural Digest Design show, and won best in show for fine art. She has since shown at Jeff Lincoln gallery in Southampton, NY; in Ojai and Los Angeles as part of Frieze; and at November Eleven Gallery in Brooklyn. 

Her sculptures are inspired by small, transient events, such as a fallen leaf, a gust of wind, a pink iris pushing itself up through the spring snow, or a cloud passing overhead. “I love observing nature every day. We are in a valley surrounded by mountains, and there is so much movement,” she says. These encounters are rendered in stone, a process which begins with grinding outside and turns to the slow, quiet movements of sanding and shaping with hand tools, with one curve sometimes taking several days of repetitive motion to be achieved. “It is something you have to surrender to,” she says. “You have to give yourself to the stone and let it be.”

www.nadiayaron.com

Gary Graham

 Gary Graham is an artist who approaches fashion design as a material culture of elegance and decay. His work often combines historical narratives with fictional characters, blurring distinctions between past, present, and future in mysterious and unexpected ways. For over 20 years, Graham worked in the fashion industry as his own label, Gary Graham. Known for his engineered jacquards, knitwear, intricate detailing, embroidery, and his own signature prints, Graham’s ready-to-wear collections have been featured in stores such as Barneys New York, Barneys Japan, Dover Street Market, If Boutique, Trois Pommes and boutiques across the globe. Each iteration of Graham’s distinguished brand and aesthetic efforts to forge new realities through process, collaboration, style, and drama. 

Graham’s latest project GaryGraham422 is a site-specific, multidimensional operation stationed in Franklin, NY. Launched in 2018, Graham designs intimate collections drawn from local histories, using vintage and antique textiles as well as jacquards and wovens from domestic mills. In 2020 he collaborated on a capsule collection with Joyce Hong Kong resulting in one-of-a-kind pieces all manufactured in Franklin, NY. As a studio, storefront and living space, GaryGraham422 is the physical and conceptual reincarnation of the Gary Graham brand and a reflection of his aesthetic mission: looking back to look forward. 

www.garygraham422.com

Ricky Boscarino

Ricky Boscarino was born into a family of artists whose Italian heritage can be traced back to the time of the Medici, and continues the lineage of artistry and craftsmanship. His largest work in progress is his home and atelier Luna Parc, near the Delaware River, in Montague New Jersey. He bought the simple ranch house 1989, and has reimagined it into a castle in the style of Henry Mercer’s Fonthill Castle in Doylestown, PA. Luna Parc is Boscarino’s atelier, home, playground and museum to his seemingly endless collections of literally almost everything man and nature made. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1982, Ricky is prolific in his art as well as his construction projects. He creates whimsical, sophisticated work, from jewelry and ceramics to paintings and sculpture, in various media including metal, clay, glass, wood and cement. Ricky also started The Luna Parc Atelier Foundation, with the goal to facilitate creativity in young people by demonstrating the creative process through hands-on art projects.

www.lunaparc.com

Laura Chávez Silverman from the Outside Institute

Laura Chávez Silverman is a writer, naturalist and the director of The Outside Institute, which offers nature-based education and events in the Catskills. Through guided walks, foraging, wildcrafting workshops and botanical mixology, she nurtures our innate affinity for the wild and invites participants to experience the healing and transformative powers of nature. The Outside Institute has published three volumes of its Field Guide to the Northeast and recently opened its first brick-&-mortar outpost in Callicoon, New York.

www.theoutsideinstitute.com

Anna Aberg and Tom Roberts from Homestedt

Anna Aberg grew up in Sweden, in Gotheburg and Stockholm, and spent the summers in Skane and the remote islands of the west coast. Her varied background left her with a passion for historic buildings, design and rugged nature. While working in marketing and hospitality in New York City, she met Tom and they started spending weekends Upstate New York.

Tom Roberts grew up in England where he too spent time in rugged nature in Scotland, Cornwall and the Lake District. Before moving to New York, where he worked for an ocean activism organization, Tom traveled around the world working on sailboats, and trekking around Borneo and the Himalayas. It isn’t surprising that the couple felt at home in the foothills of the Catskills, with its rugged farmland and endless forests, waterfalls, and streams.

While still working nine-to-five jobs in New York City, Anna and Tom would spend weekends in various rented cabins, farmhouses, and converted barns Upstate New York. Sitting by the fire, they dreamt up plans and looked at real estate online, and eventually they found two dilapidated buildings in Livingston Manor with six hundred feet of New York’s Willowemoc Creek. Over the first six months, their friends came up from the city and helped with restorations and constructing dining tables, tents, and a sauna. When they completed the work, there was a large celebration, and everyone realized that others would also love a Livingstone Manor fly-fishing experience, and thus the two houses on the stream organically grew into a space to share with friends. The success of the “Fly-Fishing Club” forced them to rethink their lives in the city and Anna and Tom needed their own local home. They bought a small Victorian house nearby, which they named the Lady Pomona, and this also became a Bed and Breakfast. The third house they bought and renovated, featured in Living Upriver, is now decidedly their own home.

Over time Anna and Tom’s business evolved from Airbnb hospitality to a significant design studio that restores and builds homes. Homestedt’s first big design project was the Boarding House at Seminary Hill, a boutique hotel in the former Callicoon General Hospital, which had been derelict for some time. Anna and Tom also design and market the Homestedt House, a partially modular structure that comes in several sizes and layouts and can be constructed within six months.

In a search for a space large enough to consolidate their growing business under one roof, Anna and Tom came across the dormant North Branch Cider Mill, an iconic community destination. They re-opened before Christmas 2023, creating another community hub that caters to locals, visitors and the new, younger creative community that has settled in the area over the past ten years. It also houses their design studio.

www.homestedt.com

Lidewij Edelkoort Co-Founder World Hope Forum

One of the world’s most renowned trend forecasters and colorists, Li is an intuitive thinker who constantly tracks how socio-cultural trends evolve. She is also a publisher, humanitarian, educator and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2020 she was the Dean of Hybrid Studies at Parsons and she also founded New York Textile Month each September. She wrote the Anti_Fashion Manifesto in 2014 and is the co-author of A Labour of Love (Lecturis, 2020), presenting the work of a very new generation of conscious designers and makers. Her most recent endeavor is the World Hope Forum, dedicated to spreading hope across the globe through design in a post-pandemic landscape.

@lidewijedelkoort 

Philip Fimmano Co-Founder World Hope Forum

A trend analyst, design curator and writer, contributing to Trend Union’s forecasting books, magazines and strategic studies for international companies in fashion, interiors and lifestyle. Fimmano along with his partner Lidewij Edelkoort, has co-created exhibitions for museums and institutions around the world, including Tokyo's 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Design Museum Holon and the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2011, he co-founded Talking Textiles; an ongoing initiative to promote awareness and innovation in textiles through touring exhibitions, a trend publication, a design prize and free educational programmes – including New York Textile Month, a citywide festival celebrating textile creativity each September. Fimmano teaches a forecasting master at Polimoda in Florence and is on the board of directors for the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe.

@philipfimmano