Georgia Pellegrini wasn’t just looking for a house—she was looking for a place where she could write, test ideas, and build a life around her work. An author and host of the PBS series Modern Pioneering, Pellegrini and her husband began searching the Catskills in early 2021 for a property that could support both creative focus and family life. Though she grew up in the Hudson Valley and he works in commercial real estate, the timing was unforgiving. Every open parcel seemed to attract a chorus of competing visions. Offer after offer fell through.
After six months of bidding—and losing—her husband heard about a different kind of opportunity: a woman retiring to Florida, quietly selling off her land. “We made an offer before touring it,” Pellegrini recalls. The leap paid off.
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Perched above the village of Margaretville, New York, the nearly-17-acre property unfurled from the end of an abandoned town road, dense with pencil-thin pines and uninterrupted woodland. Any early thoughts of light renovation quickly fell away—the couple ultimately purchased the land alone, opting for a full teardown and a true blank canvas. When Pellegrini first walked the site, she was pregnant with the couple’s first child. “Someone had told me not to do two major life events at once, but naivety was working to my advantage,” she says. “I remember walking around, pregnant with our daughter, imagining where our home should go.”
Though Pellegrini describes her parents as “constantly renovating,” this project marked her first experience building a house entirely from scratch. She and her husband wanted expansive views within a restrained footprint—one that preserved as many trees as possible. Their vision leaned unfussy and familiar, a house that felt at ease in its setting. Once they identified the right site, an A-frame emerged as the natural choice: aligned with the local vernacular and perfectly suited to framing views from trunk to treetop. Construction began on a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath home built from the ground up. “It was important for us to respect the environment while still creating something distinctive,” Pellegrini says.
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As the couple navigated labor shortages, material delays, and the practical puzzles of siting a well and septic system, Pellegrini sent regular progress updates to her friend, Jennifer Bienvenu. The designer encouraged the home’s generous window placement to maximize natural light and supported a kitchen layout designed with filming in mind. She also appreciated the way the front door opens to the lower level, turning the ascent into the living room—with its soaring ceiling—into a kind of reveal. But when Pellegrini began asking for feedback on furnishings for the newly completed house, Bienvenu’s role shifted from sounding board to something more official.
“At that point, we had been talking about this project for a year,” Bienvenu says. “I knew how hard they had worked. But everything was so pristine. When there’s too much new and not enough old, it changes how a home feels.”
With a background in antique sourcing, Bienvenu was eager to use Pellegrini’s freshly built home as an invitation to bring in the past. From her base in Arkansas, she embarked on a series of 14-hour road trips up and down the East Coast, stopping to source along the way while mentally composing the rooms she would eventually assemble. Once her Volvo was packed with vintage tables and textiles, rediscovered art, and weathered mirrors, Bienvenu would pause the hunt to install everything in situ—on one occasion hauling the load up the mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm.
Sifting through local antique shops for additional treasures and beneath the trees for sticks and stones is how Bienvenu and Pellegrini got acquainted with the area. And when Bienvenu suggested color-drenching the basement in a terracotta shade, it was one more example of how much she wanted Pellegrini to feel at home. “We said, ‘Let’s just blast some music and stay up late and do this ourselves,’” Bienvenu remembers. “It was a fun challenge to give this home character, but it also was a way to reconnect with my friend.” They wrapped up their handiwork in August 2024.
Today, guests tend to remark first on the home’s craftsmanship—and then on the smaller, more idiosyncratic details layered throughout. Viewers of Pellegrini’s television work might clock the kitchen island’s green hue, a suggestion from Bienvenu, while off-camera Pellegrini often finds herself drawn to a vintage writing desk that overlooks the A-frame. The project didn’t unfold as she initially imagined, but it has become a sustaining source of creativity all the same. “Jen turned something hard into something joyful,” Pellegrini says. “She’s taught me to just let things be.”
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