Step inside a moody and maximalist house that’s loaded with purpose in upstate New York

George Abbott and Michael Lupo were missing that “prolonged-dorm-early-20s kind of time with friends,” when they decided to buy a home in the Hudson Valley just north of New York City. “During the early pandemic, we rented houses with friends and we had such a wonderful time hanging out with them,” Abbott says. “It was so great that we thought, What if we got a place and the entire point was to just bring friends and do adult sleepovers?”

It didn’t take long for them to find—and fall in love with—an 1859 Greek Revival home privately set on 25 balmy acres in Germantown. Abbott and Lupo took charge when it came to the home’s purpose—in addition to being a place for friends, they also envisioned the space serving as a retreat location for queer and BIPOC-owned or -oriented organisations and artists.

Soon, they hired Nina Garbiras, the founder of FIG NYC, to oversee the property’s design. Abbott and Lupo were attracted to Garbiras’s “never do it twice” design style, while Garbiras was impassioned with the couple’s mission for the home. It, therefore, didn’t take long for a collaborative partnership to be born.

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Abbott and Lupo were eager to create something lush and opulent—the antithesis of the minimal New York City apartments they’ve lived in for the past decade. “We wanted to create an environment that balanced being offbeat yet elegant, warm yet sophisticated, and one definitely veering towards decadence,” Garbiras explains. “They wanted me to establish a dialogue between the more refined Greek Revival house and the more naturalist, ambling, and even overgrown grounds, pond, and farm.”

The den, which Abbott described as one “of the ugliest rooms in the house,” became the genesis for the entire project. The room had a quirky layout and an overwhelmingly large fireplace, which the couple was ready to rip out, but Garbiras insisted these constraints could be opportunities, and that there was a way to make it work. “It’s the only working fireplace, and it seemed like a shame to remove it, especially up here where it’s going to be cold in the winter,” she said.

A custom mantle embraced the fireplace’s asymmetry, and Garbiras suggested Phillip Jeffries’s Flight wallpaper, which could hold its own next to the chimney’s imposing footprint. “One day she sent us this wallpaper, and we never looked at anything [else],” Abbott says, “We were all like, ‘Yeah, obviously we’re gonna do this.’” A granite table in the corner mirrored a breakfast nook, and a curved, vintage sofa in original velvet pulled the rest of the room together. “That was a slam dunk, and it became the first real layer of the house,” Garbiras said.

From there, everything was built. “It was vital that we created a balance between rooms—bolder in some, softer in others,” Garbiras says. “We tried to push color and pattern where we could, without making it feel like too much.” She was determined to make the design feel collaborative, and nearly every decision—big and small—was made as a group. Pandemic supply chain issues pushed them to vintage, and group trips to vintage markets and sales became the norm. “Nina was really wonderful at editing because we were just texting her constantly and being like, ‘What if we did this? What if we did that?” the couple says.

After two years, the house is finally at a place many would call complete—though the three of them do have some ideas up their sleeve for an attic renovation and few landscaping projects. “It’s funny that this project took so long,” Garbiras recalls, “but [George and Michael] loved the insane amount of choice in all fabrics, wallpapers, wall colors, and every type of chair and sofa known to man and I, for one, was not going to stop that journey.”