Joanne Kaufman

Josh Sapan has slept here too — as often as his schedule permits. But 33 years ago, when Sapan learned of Milford’s many charms from a friend, he knew nothing about the town’s past. Still, he was sufficiently captivated to buy a waterfront cabin.

It was enough that he could look out his windows after dark and see no illumination but the moon, enough that the Delaware rolled along mere steps from his door.

“I just love houses on rivers and I really love this house,” said Sapan, 67, the president and chief executive of AMC Networks, a Manhattan-based company that owns and operates cable channels including AMC, BBC America and SundanceTV. “I don’t know what it is. I find it quite magical, if that’s the right word.”

Sapan had yet to learn that novelist Stephen Crane had camped out for a summer in Milford with friends and published a satirical newspaper during his stay, that Milford was the birthplace of the conservation movement, and that in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the red hot center of the science fiction writers’ universe, even figuring in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” because several big names in the genre, notably literary agent Virginia Kidd, had settled in town.

Now, three decades later, Sapan is fully conversant with the rich cultural and literary history of Milford. And somewhere along the way, he’s become one of the town’s biggest boosters, guiding a visitor around the Hotel Fauchère, which dates back to the middle of the 19th century, and the recently revitalized Milford Theater, a former silent movie house that’s now a venue for special events like the annual Readers &amp; Writers Festival. Since its founding four years ago, the annual event has attracted large crowds (average attendance is 1,000) and the likes of Alan Alda, Gloria Steinem, biographer Patricia Bosworth and thriller author Lee Child.

“Josh loves Milford the way I do,” said Sean Strub, the town’s mayor and owner of the Hotel Fauchère, where Carnegie, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit — the notorious “Girl in the Red Velvet Swing” — Robert Young and Leachman all checked in for a spell.

In fact, Sapan is doing his bit to add to the town’s luster. Perhaps because he knows a lot of creative people who know a lot of other creative people, perhaps because he likes to share, and perhaps because he’s a staunch proponent of the “love me, love my house” philosophy, his cabin has become something of a retreat for writers, photographers and composers.

“Certain people are finicky about certain things. I’m probably finicky about something but I’m not finicky about the cabin,” said Sapan, who is in residence several weekends a year. He’s sometimes there with his wife, Ann Foley, a former television executive, sometimes with the couple’s children and sometimes with college pals.

During the summer months, Sapan rents the cabin out to friends and friends of friends, strictly by word-of-mouth. The rest of the year, out go the invitations to stay there free of charge. “The more it’s filled the better. I love it when people go there,” he said.

Guests have included Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award in 2009 for his novel “Let the Great World Spin,” who checked into the cabin on four separate occasions in the last two years, sometimes for as long as 10 days at a time, to work on his new novel “Apeirogon,” due out in February.

In 1994, when Frank McCourt was a summer renter, he wrote the first part of his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes” out on the porch — there’s a historic plaque acknowledging this achievement affixed to the side of the cabin.

The cabin, built in the 1940s and decidedly unprepossessing when Sapan bought it — “really teeny and funky” is his description — has been renovated twice and provides all the comforts of home with none of its distractions.

During the first go-round, Sapan winterized the 1,000-square-foot structure that was built in the 1940s, opened up the kitchen and put in a fireplace using stones from a nearby creek. Later, he had the ceiling ripped out exposing the rafters, added a sleeping loft, redid the sleeping porch and added a bathroom. Wisely, he didn’t touch the built-in day beds. Depending on where guests choose to flop, they can have a view upriver or down.

The décor hews to the rustic theme: wood stools, leather sofa, Ikat patterns. The sole outlier is the rolling desk chair that McCann bought during his first stay and left behind after his last. “Architecturally and design-wise it’s not to my liking,” said Sapan, who tucked the chair in a corner of a bedroom upstairs.

Once he gets going on something, just try and stop him. That’s why there are so very many throw pillows. “I went crazy,” Sapan said. “For a year or two I kept buying them.”

No one is complaining. Certainly not McCann, who knew immediately that here was a place he could work. “You look out the large plate glass windows and you feel like you’re part of the river, carried along by it,” he said.

“One of the joys of being there was the absolute sense of isolation; you feel completely removed from the world, and yet it is a 10-minute walk to a fine restaurant or a good bar,” continued McCann, who met Sapan through a mutual friend at a dinner party in 2016. At some point in the course of the evening he was offered the keys to the cabin, to say nothing of the keys to Sapan’s car. (That generosity is noted in the acknowledgments of “Apeirogon”: “My deepest thanks for the cottage in Milford, Pennsylvania — what a place to work.”)

“I loved the sense that I was walking into a home where Frank McCourt had written,” McCann said. “There was something so welcoming about that: Come in, McCann, have a glass of whiskey, not too much, mind you. You’ve got writing to do.”

Like McCann, Ellen Frey met Sapan through a mutual friend at a party, in this instance a gathering in 1991 to watch the Oscars. He told her he had a house in Milford; perhaps she’d be interested in spending time there. Intrigued, Frey checked out the cabin with her boyfriend, one Frank McCourt, “and we thought ‘Yeah, of course,’” she recalled. “It was a peaceful and joyous place to be.”

Neither of them knew about Milford, Pennsylvania, “but Frank knew he had a book in him,” said Frey, who married McCourt under a tree outside the cabin in August of 1994. “He started writing ‘Angela’s Ashes’ in October of that year. I remember distinctly, sitting with a friend on the lovely deck with that spectacular view of the Delaware and having a glass of wine. Frank read us the first couple of pages of the book and we toasted it because we thought it was spectacular.”

At one point, she and McCourt tried to buy the cabin. Sapan wanted to hang on to it, so they bought elsewhere in town.

Some months back, one of Sapan’s AMC colleagues, Lary Tuckett, was invited to use the cabin. A photographer, Tuckett left behind some moody black and white pictures of the Delaware. He had been preceded by Sapan’s friend Bruce Wolosoff, a classical composer.

“I know Josh wants to make his cabin an artist’s retreat,” said McCann. “It’s a great idea but it’s also a terrible idea, because I want to keep it a secret.”

This article originally appeared in

MILFORD, Pa. — Charlie Chaplin slept here. So did Sarah Bernhardt, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Franz Liszt, Warren Harding, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Wolfe, Cloris Leachman and Arlene Dahl. Likewise, D.W. Griffith, who, in 1912, shot two movies — “A Feud in the Kentucky Hills” and “The Informer” — in this dot of a town in the foothills of the Poconos.

A Cabin With a Literary Pedigree

NEW YORK — For a dozen years, Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress and singer Kristin Chenoweth lived just off the Hudson River on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Hard by a pier, the location was grand in the summer, but left something to be desired in the winter. The winds were such that every time the petite Chenoweth ventured outdoors she was just one stiff gust away from making like Mary Poppins.

A few years ago, she moved inland to calmer climes and a two-bedroom condo in Midtown West. “I was literally walking by and said, ‘I wouldn’t mind living in that building.’ It’s on the newer side, but in an old neighborhood,” said Chenoweth, one of the few Broadway stars (“You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” “Wicked”) to make the leap into the broader pop culture, thanks to roles in series like “Glee,” “The West Wing” and “Pushing Daisies,” and movies like “Four Christmases.”

Chenoweth, 51, has also released several CDs, including “For the Girls,” which came out in late September and features appearances by Jennifer Hudson, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire and Ariana Grande. It will be the centerpiece of Chenoweth’s limited engagement concert (Nov. 8-17) at the Nederlander Theater on Broadway.

The large windows in her living room let in abundant light and let Chenoweth see all the way down to Hudson Yards. “I didn’t know a view like that was important to me,” she said. “But it became important to me when I saw it.”

Even more important, the apartment didn’t need a jot of work.

“I am a big lover of walking in and the place being ready,” said Chenoweth, who is equal parts charming and voluble. (She carries around business cards inscribed with the exhortation “Stop Talking,” a reminder to herself and others to put a lid on it.) “Some people love to move walls around. They can see it, they have a vision; they have the time and the wherewithal. As the daughter of a man who was an engineer and owned a construction company, you’d think that would be something I would enjoy. But that isn’t me. That has never been me.”

Her aesthetic is an evolving thing. The starting point was Ikea. From there, Chenoweth progressed to shabby chic, then to what she calls modern chic. A turning point was her starring role in the 2015 revival of “On the Twentieth Century,” a musical inspired by the 1930s screwball comedy “Twentieth Century.”

“There was a lot of Art Deco in the show,” Chenoweth recalled. “And I was like, ‘I like that.’ And I kind of took note and came to this.”

“This” is a mix of Art Deco and Hollywood Regency, with a bit of the 1960s thrown in: chrome-and-glass bar cart; two-tiered glass coffee table; area rug patterned in circles; acrylic chairs; faux-fur and jungle-print pillows. The palette, mostly earth tones, is relieved by a low, tufted rose-colored bench behind the sofa. A Kawai baby grand piano anchors the space, which, just to be clear, would be nothing to Chenoweth without her assertive companion, a mixed breed named Thunder.

All the world’s a stage, and Chenoweth wants to buy the set. “In a store, I’ll see the whole bedroom — with the carpet and the lamp and the nightstand and the bed and the bedding and the picture on the wall — and I’ll say, ‘I’ll take it, the whole thing,’” she said.

Still, it’s very easy to distinguish the apartment from a showroom. There is, first off, the bow and arrow on the wall. (“I’m from Oklahoma; I have shot a bow and arrow. But not at anyone,” said Chenoweth, whose heritage is part Native American.) There’s the string of Christmas lights in the master bathroom. (“I just like the feeling of Christmas all year.”)

A framed playbill heralding Chenoweth’s performance at the Metropolitan Opera; the framed certificate celebrating a record that went platinum; the photographs taken with people like Carol Burnett — all speak to a glittering career. So does the one-of-a-kind Kristin Chenoweth Barbie doll encased in plastic, part of Mattel’s Role Model collection. “As I always tell people, it’s life-size,” she said.

But Chenoweth, who grew up in suburban Tulsa and sang gospel music in local churches, is hardly one to forget her roots, either temporal or religious. A photograph of Florence Birdwell, her beloved music teacher from back home, hangs near the piano. The wall unit in the living room holds a cowboy hat and a handbag fashioned from an Oklahoma license plate. Nearby is a plaque etched with the prayer of Saint Francis.

“This is very important to me because of what it says,” Chenoweth said, quietly reciting the words: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

Other sources of inspiration include a framed quote by Elizabeth Edwards — “When the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails” — that was a gift from a fan, and a copy of a letter from Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille about creativity and its dissatisfactions, a gift from Birdwell.

“It’s what Florence taught: You’re the vessel through which art can flow. Don’t block it,” Chenoweth said earnestly. “When I would have a hard time in college, she would tell me to read the letter out loud.”

But let it be said that Chenoweth is as practical as she is spiritual. With closet space at a premium, she has filled the four rows of bookshelves in the master bedroom with an impressive collection of shoes.

“There is just no room,” she said, adding a touch defensively: “A lot of my books are in storage. I’m sure that’s going to go over very well with your readers.”

(What I Love)

Kristin Chenoweth's Private Stage

But at some point it occurred to them that perhaps they were being a mite dismissive. Really, at the very least, they should consider the possibilities.

“Houses cost a lot of money to maintain, and I thought maybe we could get some of that money back,” said Bennett, 65, a musician. “So we let a location scout take some pictures.”

The couple’s home, where they have lived since 1985, wasn’t quite right for the project then in the works, but the photographs were tucked into a file at a production office for future consideration.

Lo and behold, five years ago, the house, which sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in the West Midwood section of Brooklyn, was cast as the Bridgeport, Connecticut, residence of Julia Bowman, a principal character on the Amazon Prime series “Sneaky Pete.” It appeared in five episodes over three seasons before production moved to Los Angeles, where a replica of the interior was built on a soundstage.

“For us, it was fun, easy money,” Bennett said of the five-figure sum he and his wife collected. “They make it worth doing if you don’t mind letting them do what they want.”

Seventy television shows were shot in New York City during the 2018-19 season, according to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, a sharp increase from 2013-14, when the number was only 29. And there have been some 300 movie shoots in the city annually in the past few years.

Producers and directors whose story lines call for gritty hovels, classic capes, bungalows, grand beachfront properties and every sort of residence in between have an incentive to make do with the housing stock in the five boroughs. A shoot that’s outside “the zone” — more than 30 miles from Columbus Circle as the crow flies — generally means travel-time payments for union workers.

“It can get expensive,” said Keith Adams, the location manager for the third season of the HBO period drama “The Deuce.”

The high volume of production makes these flush times for New York City residents whose homes have what it takes. Often, that means generously sized rooms, high ceilings, big windows, good light and few if no stairs to climb. Because of all the equipment involved, walk-ups tend to be nonstarters.

“Location fees have gone through the roof in the last decade,” Adams said. “It’s crazy what amounts people ask for and what amounts they get. On a tight schedule, you’re over a barrel at a certain point, and the negotiating power switches to the property owner.”

Compensation can start at $1,500 and run as high as $50,000 per episode, depending on a production company’s budget and how long it intends to stay on a client’s property. But the level of disruption can be similarly stratospheric — if not equal to that of the owners of the Albuquerque house that played Walter White’s home on “Breaking Bad;” they’ve had to contend with fans throwing pizzas on their roof to commemorate an event from the show’s second season.)

Consider this: As many as 100 crew members crowd the premises. Furniture, artwork and other personal possessions are frequently moved out for the duration of the shoot (although Bennett and Oser can point to a “Sneaky Pete” scene that included some of their very own mugs). Walls are sometime painted, as are exteriors (such was the case when Patrice Stambovsky and her husband, Jeffrey, allowed parts of their Victorian house in Nyack, New York, to be used as the residence of Susan Sarandon’s character in the 1998 tear-jerker “Stepmom.”)

Trucks filled the driveway for the “Sneaky Pete” filming at Bennett and Oser’s house in Brooklyn; a compressor took up residence out front. Because the director had allergies, the family cat had to be boarded — at Amazon’s expense — every time the show made itself at home, typically for three days and nights.

When the schedule called for an all-night shoot, Bennett and Oser decided they wanted to be boarded elsewhere too, a courtesy frequently extended to location hosts. They were put up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, “and they paid for us to go out to eat, too,” Bennett said.

The terraced Union Square penthouse that served as the home of hedge-fund executive Taylor Mason, played by Asia Kate Dillon, during Seasons 2 and 4 of the Showtime series “Billions” was just perfect — except that the elevator opened directly into the apartment.

Why was this a problem? It got in the way of the drama for a scene involving John Malkovich’s Russian billionaire character, Grigor Andolov. “They wanted John to knock on the door, so they built a doorway and made a fake wood door,” said Robert Fisch, the owner of the apartment and an entrepreneur. “My wife and I were having a little bit of a heart attack about this.”

Fisch was perhaps soothed by the sum he was paid for two episodes — in the neighborhood of $100,000, he said.

A location team does a certain amount of “cold-scouting,” like ringing doorbells and pushing flyers through mail slots. They also exchange tips and photos with colleagues from other production units, count on the power of word-of-mouth and rely on their memories.

“It’s like casting,” said Mark Lake, the location manager for “Law &amp; Order: Special Victims Unit.” “You might go with a certain actor, but you remember another actor from the audition and you bring him in for something else. If an apartment we see isn’t right for a particular scene, we make a note on the file that it would be good for X situation.”

In some instances, location scouts turn to agencies like Location Department, which represents more than 2,000 properties in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

“We are looking for a dramatic, old townhouse with gravitas to film as part of our finale episode,” a location manager wrote in a brief to Location Department’s director, Kate Collings-Post. “In the show, the home belongs to a Russian oligarch, who intends to renovate the house once he’s purchased the neighboring buildings so as to aggregate them into a palace.”

Among the 230 townhouse possibilities on the company’s website is a “modern contemporary” Gramercy Park property with floor-to-ceiling windows and a terrace, and a recently renovated, 25-foot-wide Greek Revival townhouse in Cobble Hill with an open floor plan that “gives it the feel of a loft.” The third floor “boasts a dark and moody family room with a library wall and skylight.”

Just as certain parents overstate the intellectual, athletic or artistic capabilities of their children, certain homeowners may be a bit misguided about the desirability of their homes for a location shoot.

“They tell me how beautiful their backyard is,” said Debbie Regan, the owner of Debbie Regan Locations, which books properties for movies, television shows and special events. “They think that their koi pond is what a location scout is coming for.”

But it is true, Regan said, “that TV shows and movies aren’t necessarily looking for a wood-paneled library or the most beautiful kitchen. Sometimes they want a vintage kitchen where the appliances haven’t been changed since 1970.”

The big motivator for homeowners is the payout. “More often than not people like the money because rarely am I making the check out to a charity,” said Regan. But there are other lures: vanity, bragging rights and a great story to tell at cocktail parties. Some simply want to be part of a show they love. Mark Lake, of “Law &amp; Order: SVU,” tells of being in the residence of a “very high-net-worth individual. He told me that he and his family were big fans of the show and he thought his kids would get a big kick out of having us shoot there.”

For Ian Reisner, a real estate developer whose Central Park South penthouse has been seen on “Law &amp; Order: SVU,” ” Billions,” “Elementary” and “Blue Bloods,” the attraction, at least in part, is seeing the many ways his apartment can be transformed. “They’ve brought in new furniture. They’ve painted the white walls brown,” said Reisner whose side career started when a friend introduced him to an associate producer on “30 Rock.” “It makes your home more dynamic.”

He regularly hosts a Thanksgiving Day party. “Friends and friends of friends come over to watch the parade. I get a thrill out of that. Having a location shoot is another form of entertainment,” said Reisner, whose apartment is on the market. Now he’s contemplating more location shoots as he plans to move into another unit in the building.

One should certainly not underestimate the power of a location scout to charm homeowners.

“The one who came to see us talked about how we would really be in showbiz,” said Andy Arons, who, in summer 2018, opened his family’s townhouse in the West Village to the producers of the Netflix movie “Otherhood.”

“My wife and I saw it as a good way to bring in extra income,” added Arons, a founder of the boutique grocery chain Gourmet Garage. A bonus was getting to meet one of the stars, Felicity Huffman.

There is also a certain element of “fame by association.”

“People call and say: Was that your apartment on ‘Billions’?” said Fisch. When he celebrated the recent publication of his book, “Fisch Tales: The Making of a Millennial Baby Boomer,” with a party at his penthouse, he attributed the high turnout, in part, to the “Billions” connection.

Still, despite the pleasing addition to a bank account and the brush with the big time, an at-home location shoot is definitely not for everyone. “If you get stressed when someone comes to fix something under the sink, you are not cut out for this,” Regan said.

“It’s at least a 12-hour day,” she continued. “If you think it’s going to be done by the time the kids come home from school, forget it. I had one client say, ‘I don’t understand why it took them 12 hours. I could have done it in three.’”

Homeowners who sign on with Location Department are sent a packet of information about the process including dos and don’ts. There is also a conversation during which Collings-Post offers some version of “you’re not unwelcome during the shoot, but you need to stay out of the way.”

For his part, Fisch wouldn’t have permitted filming if he couldn’t be around to monitor his property. “They redid the scene so many times, by the end I could have played John Malkovich’s role,” he said.

Savvy homeowners are clear about the terms of engagement. “Everything is negotiable,” Arons said. The Stambovskys, for example, made the exterior and the grounds of their house available for the “Stepmom” production but only a small slice of the interior.

The bathrooms were off-limits to cast and crew. “They ended up building a bathroom for Julia Roberts in the basement. She doesn’t use a porta-potty,” said Patrice Stambovsky who, in 2011, sold the house, which had also been used as a location for the 2010 feature “The Bounty Hunter,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. The property recently went on the market again, and promotional material touts its glittery past.

Location managers are sympathetic to jittery homeowners — up to a point. “We try to treat people with respect and try to make it as good an experience as possible,” said Adams of “The Deuce.” “But you made this decision, you rented out your property, you have to allow us to do our work. It’s a business arrangement, and I’m not going to be walked over.”

That goes double for Emile L’Eplattenier. A year ago, the Netflix series “Iron Fist” was preparing to use his block in Bushwick for a night shoot. To add atmospherics, the creative team wanted the residents of some of the street-facing lofts to keep the lights on from 9 p.m. until the 3 a.m. wrap.

One of those apartments belonged to L’Eplattenier, the managing editor of TheClose.com, a real estate strategy website. He and a production assistant agreed on a fee of $500 to be handed over on the day of the shoot, preferably before the cameras started rolling.

An annoyed L’Eplattenier was still waiting for the payment as shooting got underway. His ire increased when he went to get dinner and returned home, the journey slowed by lights, cameras, cables and the man who stood directly — and belligerently — in front of the door to L’Eplattenier’s building. Shouting ensued and the set quieted.

Just then, the production assistant and a colleague, all smiles, hurried over to the man in front of L’Eplattenier’s building — as it happened, a stunt man — urged him to move and ushered L’Eplattenier through his door.

He demanded his agreed-upon sum. They demurred, at which point he walked upstairs to his apartment, waited until filming resumed and began flashing his lights on and off, Morse code style.

The check arrived in five minutes.

NEW YORK — For years, flyers from movie and television location scouts turned up in Alan Bennett’s mailbox. And for years, Bennett and his wife, Melanie Oser, reflexively tossed them. The couple had no interest in serving up their Dutch Colonial as a setting for a TV series or feature film.

So Your House Wants to Be a Star

“What about buying a weekend house together?” she asked Marla D’Urso, a close friend.

The two women, who lived in Manhattan, had traveled together frequently and very amiably, and were always looking for places to go on weekends. It was 2008, the stock market had recently crashed, with home prices tanking in tandem, so there were bargains to be had. And at the time, neither woman was in a relationship.

“So we thought, ‘What are we waiting for? We don’t need to have our own families to do this,’” said D’Urso, who is now 50 and the real estate manager for a family business.

For the past decade, she and Hembree, 52, a speech language pathologist, have jointly owned a Cape Cod-style house on 6 acres in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for which they paid $380,000.

D’Urso oversees matters pertaining to décor; Hembree handles administrative details. They each make monthly contributions of $700 to a Berkshires bank account to cover maintenance costs, and sometimes there are special assessments to, say, repair a leak in the roof or buy a new water pump.

An Octoberfest, spearheaded by D’Urso, draws weekend guests to come choose pumpkins. Hembree’s July 6 birthday is part of the Fourth of July celebration at the house. What they grandly and waggishly refer to as the homeowners association annual meeting convenes in the spring; it basically involves cleaning out the garage. Boyfriends have come and gone, and D’Urso got married last year, but no one has come between the women and their home away from home.

“When we were looking, my mother said, ‘You’re crazy. You don’t go into business with a friend; you’ll end up fighting,’” D’Urso recalled. “And she was so wrong. It’s been pretty smooth sailing.”

So much so that D’Urso’s brother Gary was inspired to team up with his wife, Marina Brolin, and their friend Julia Jones to buy property in Cold Spring, New York.

There is an understandable appeal to buying a weekend or vacation house with friends (or family members). On a practical level, co-owning may be the only feasible path to ownership. And even those who theoretically could go it alone may quickly discover that two checkbooks are better than one. More buying power means more square footage, more acreage and more amenities (a pool! a tennis court! a hot tub!).

The arrangement is also a great way to reduce shame and anxiety when owners decide they would rather hunker down for the weekend at their primary residence than load up the car and fight traffic.

“We know people who buy a weekend home and feel guilty over the fact that they don’t use it enough,” said Gary D’Urso, 57, who is in the real estate business. “It makes more sense when you only have a share of the house.”

And how nice to have someone who will shoulder half the costs of pool cleaning, grass-cutting and snow removal, share the hosting responsibilities at the annual Labor Day barbecue and take on the job of telling off difficult neighbors.

“It’s a ‘Golden Girls’ phenomenon,” said Jessica Lautz, the vice president of demographics and behavioral insights at the National Association of Realtors, a trade group. “Marriage rates in the U.S. have dropped drastically, but people still want homeownership, be it primary or vacation houses. However, affordability is out of reach for many individual Americans, so partnering up with a friend becomes an ideal solution.”

Well, not always ideal. And not always a solution.

“Homeownership is so emotional, and it’s not easy even when you’re sharing the house with your romantic partner,” said Diane Saatchi, an associate broker at Saunders &amp; Associates, a real estate agency in the Hamptons.

“I suspect that some friends who buy together think it’s a good idea because they really like the idea of having someone at the house for company or they think they won’t be at the house much, so it won’t be a problem,” continued Saatchi, who worked with two women in their 40s who were buying a weekend home in Montauk, New York.

“They were both strong and opinionated and sort of cranky, and neither had lived with anyone for a long time,” she said. “They didn’t agree on paint colors for the house. They didn’t agree about whether they should rent the house out to help cover their costs. They knew they had to have a pool for resale purposes, but they couldn’t agree on what kind to have and where to put it. I could see it was going to go sideways very quickly.”

Five years on, the two women have finally agreed on one thing: selling the house. “But they can’t agree on a price,” Saatchi said.

“When friends buy together, it’s a risky thing,” said Edward Burke, a lawyer in Southampton Village. “They come to my office, they’re excited and they have stars in their eyes: They’re going to be partners!”

Burke usually offers a reality check: “We always tell them to have an exit strategy in case things don’t work out.”

For eight years, Ben Dixon owned a house in upstate New York with his boyfriend and a friend. The end of Dixon’s relationship also meant the end of the shared house. Even so, the arrangement was so successful that he was eager for a reprise.

Two years ago, Dixon, now 41, a certified public accountant and associate real estate broker for Douglas Elliman, joined forces with his friend Shane Hogan, an insurance broker, to buy a four-bedroom Cape Cod-style house in Sag Harbor, New York. They paid $950,000 for the property, which included a pool, and spent $150,000 on renovations.

“There’s something comforting about having a co-owner,” Dixon said. “If I could afford exactly what I wanted and a manager to manage it all, I would do it on my own. But there’s something nice about making the decisions with a friend.”

So far, he and Hogan have disagreed only about renting the property to help offset operating costs. “I tend to want to use the house more,” Dixon said. “Shane wants to rent it out for more income.” Their 10-page operating agreement comes in handy at times like this.

Such a document, referred to by some co-owners as a prenup, spells out the terms of engagement. For example: how bills are to be paid, how often friends are permitted to visit, how frequently one owner can have time at the house without the other owner. (“We can ask for 14 days up here alone, but none of those days can be on a holiday,” Hembree said.) And of course, there are the what-ifs: what if one party marries, has children, moves, has a reversal of fortune or just wants out.

But not every possible sticking point can be dealt with on paper and notarized. Some co-owners rely on their long friendship to come more casually to an amicable accord. When, for example, the three owners of the Cold Spring house are contemplating a furniture purchase, “our approach is that two of us have to agree and the third one can’t vehemently disagree, or we don’t buy it,” Jones said.

A decade ago, when David Waymire, Roger Martin and the men’s wives bought a condo at Boyne Mountain, a ski area in northern Michigan, scheduling was a problem. “But now we have a rhythm where there is a sit-down early in the year, when we work out the weekends we each want to be there,” said Waymire, who owns a public relations firm in Lansing, Michigan, with Martin. “We’ve been close friends for 30 years, so we know how to deal with conflict.”

And they know how to deal with code. “There are some weekends that we’ll be there together,” Waymire said. “But sometimes Roger will mention something about a family weekend, and I know he means, ‘You can come if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t.’”

There was no operating agreement, no document of any kind when, in 1997, Beth Carter and her then-husband bought a weekend home with Carter’s parents almost 90 minutes from their primary residence in Fairfield, Connecticut.

The family had long owned a vacation getaway in Groton Long Point, Connecticut. But as Carter and her brother grew up, married and had children of their own, that house couldn’t handle the population explosion.

Nearby, there was a property on the market that Carter’s mother had always coveted. It had five bedrooms and another room for any overnight spillover, and was near the water. “My parents couldn’t afford the house if we didn’t share in the expense, and initially I thought it would be wonderful,” said Carter, 56, an executive recruiter and professional coach. “The grandkids could all be together.”

But her parents quickly began issuing diktats about schedules and everything else, she said: “They acted as if it were their house.”

Carter’s mother wanted to name the house Fulfilled Dream. Carter wanted to call it something that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

There were arguments about chopping down a tree, about the acquisition of a sofa, about the advisability of getting a television, about window washing, about cigarette smoke wafting in from the porch. Particularly aggravating, Carter recalled, were the naps her mother took without fail every afternoon from 1 to 3, forcing the other residents into silence and pantomime. “It was a nightmare,” Carter said.

When, after four years of co-ownership, flood insurance rates skyrocketed, both parties agreed to sell, “and we did make money,” said Carter, who used part of the proceeds to buy her own small weekend home.

There is a lot to be said for doing some version of a trial run. Hogan and Dixon, for example, rented a house together first. For four years before the Cold Spring purchase, Gary D’Urso and Brolin shared ownership of an old Porsche 911 with Jones and her boyfriend.

“It worked out perfectly,” D’Urso said. “That, in concert with how well things had gone with my sister buying with her friend, made us think, ‘Why not look for a house together?’” They settled on a Sears catalog home from 1923: A selling point was the absence of a master bedroom — one less thing to adjudicate.

The three partners thought they would alternate use of the house as they had done with the car, “but it didn’t shape up as we thought,” D’Urso said. “What we discovered is that we really liked the idea of spending time at the house together.”

And, added Jones, who works in the media business, it was an automatic play date for her daughter, Sophie, and D’Urso and Brolin’s son, Ryan.

Dennis Paget was hoping for just such togetherness when he and his wife, Nancy Pelz-Paget, joined forces with several friends 14 years ago to buy a seven-bedroom villa in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

“Initially, there was a real esprit de corps, and a lot of us came at the same time,” said Dennis Paget, the founder of Language American Style, a company in Redding, Connecticut, that teaches business English and culture to foreign executives.

To encourage continued team spirit, a stretch in February was marked on the calendar as partners’ week, a time to gather at the property and frolic together. “But it never happened,” Paget said. “People had other vacation homes, and life just got in the way. It was a disappointment then, and it still is.”

Of course, many co-owners look forward to as much “me time” as possible.

“Ben and I are very close, but there is a lot of stress,” Hogan said of his Sag Harbor housemate, Dixon. “I could lose my best friend over too much together time. He’s not my boyfriend or my life partner. He wants to have kids one day, and I think it’s wonderful, but do I want to have screaming kids around?”

It helps that they are both “very reasonable” people, Hogan added: “Nothing has come up yet that has been a problem. You just have to make sure you’re buying with the right person.”

Marla D’Urso was sure when she bought. She’s still sure. But her husband has been making noises about buying a place at the beach.

“I tell him, ‘We can’t have two houses,’” she said. “‘And we’re certainly not getting rid of the Berkshires house.’”

Six Things to Do Before Buying a House With a Friend

Once you’ve decided to buy and share a vacation home with a friend or family member, there are a few steps to take to make sure things go smoothly.

— Create a limited liability company that will buy the property. This will help protect your other assets if something goes wrong.

— Be upfront about your finances and your credit scores. The lowest credit score will determine the mortgage rate — and whether you can get a mortgage at all.

— Create an operating agreement listing monthly and annual expenses, including property taxes, insurance, utility bills and maintenance costs (landscaping, pool cleaning, snow removal).

— Come up with a plan to cover the cost of incidental and unexpected expenses like a new roof.

— Set guidelines for access to the property. Do you plan to be there at the same time? Will the property be rented to offset your costs, and if so, how often?

— Plan for the future. Consider what would happen if one of you wanted to sell.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/realestate/buying-a-weekend-house-with-friends-is-it-really-a-good-idea.html" id="858bb8d2-950a-36e2-a546-d2f6fe9bba1a">The New York Times</a>.

Buying a Weekend House With Friends: Is It Really a Good Idea?

Amanda Hembree casually raised the topic over martinis 11 years ago.

“It doesn’t take much after having two kids for the walls to start feeling like they’re closing in on you,” said Douglas, 46, a member of the Roots, the hip-hop house band for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” “When this apartment opened up, it was exactly what we wanted.”

No need for Douglas to move out of his beloved Brooklyn neighborhood? A view of Prospect Park that makes him feel as if he were living in a treehouse? Neighbors who never complain about the strumming and thrumming of his six string? If this is a dream, please don’t wake him.

“I love the central-ness of where we live,” said Douglas, whose first solo album, “Turbulent Times,” recorded under the name Hundred Watt Heart, was released at the end of May. “I’m a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op. I love being close to the Brooklyn Museum. I love being close to the Botanic Garden. I love being able to take a Saturday and hit the places I love to go, on foot. I love being a half-hour from 30 Rock, where I have to be four days a week. Convenience is kind of high on my priority list.”

At home, art is what’s high on the priority list. “Essentially, me and my wife — we’re both artists,” Douglas said. “So it’s important for us to look around and feel inspired by the things that are on the wall.”

He pointed those things out one by one: a mixed-media likeness of Jimi Hendrix, a gift from its creator, Paul Gerben; a portrait of Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, by Sophia Dawson; and a few works by Charlotta Janssen, among them a collage that incorporates photos of Douglas’ family.

“One of the first things I did when I was able to do more than just pay my rent was to frame the art I’d had for a long time,” Douglas said.

Sentimental favorites include a pair of very large cardboard unicorns, props for a segment on “The Tonight Show” that he rescued from the trash and brought home as a keepsake for his daughter, and a three-dimensional likeness of the three bears that has followed Douglas since infancy.

“I could probably find a photo of me on my changing table getting a new diaper with that same painting over my head,” he said. “Now I have my own children, and we’ll be having dinner, then I look up and there’s that picture again!”

The increased square footage has been a boon, of course. Finally, there is sufficient space for the large, reclaimed-wood coffee table that was responsible for so many bruised shins in the previous apartment. Douglas and Holst Douglas, who have been married for 17 years, now have a dedicated, if shared, space for making clothes and making music.

“It allows us to be productive in our home, and I think it inspires our kids to see it,” Douglas said. Also, they can actually use the leaves that came with the Formica-topped table they bought for a song at Housing Works.

“We were there trying to furnish the apartment, and we saw a pile of clothes,” Douglas recalled. “Then we looked at the table under the pile, and said, ‘How do we get this?’ The sales people said it was just for displaying stuff, and they offered it to us for something super cheap.”

Many people talk about their home as a haven. Douglas takes it a step further, repeatedly — and very earnestly — calling his home a sanctuary. “This is the incubator for what we do creatively,” he said. “This is the place where we can be ourselves completely.”

Here, songs are composed and played. Here, leather is shaped into corsets and men’s coats. Here, meditation is practiced early every morning. Here, sometimes, the Douglases host a sound bath, which uses an assortment of instruments — in this case, a very large gong from the cymbal manufacturer Zildjian — to calm the nervous system, or so adherents believe. On such occasions, the living room is cleared to make room for participants to lie down and take in the vibrations.

“I joke that this is the house of migrating furniture,” Douglas said. “If we have guests for dinner, we’ll move the kitchen table to the foyer, and we’ll sometimes leave it out there for a month because there’s a better view from the living room windows. If, because of the gong bath, we move the couch to the foyer, we let it stay there for weeks.”

That sofa, a Jennifer convertible, has its own special history as an object of creativity. Upholstered in white leather, it proved irresistible to Uma when she was a toddler armed with a box of crayons. Douglas’ first reaction to his daughter’s choice of canvas: “Oh, no” (and maybe a few stronger words). His second reaction: We need a new sofa. His third reaction: We just need a new cover for the sofa.

The very skilled and unflappable Holst Douglas took on the project — no small job — and reupholstered it in a faux-alligator fabric.

The sofa still folds out. It still sleeps two. But now it’s so much more, Douglas said: “It’s a thing of beauty and a testament to my wife’s artistry. I walk into our home, I see that couch and I’m inspired.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/realestate/the-roots-guitarist-on-finding-sanctuary-in-brooklyn.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

The Roots' Guitarist on Finding Sanctuary in Brooklyn

(What I Love): NEW YORK — Four years ago, when the Grammy Award-winning guitarist “Captain” Kirk Douglas began scouting new quarters for his family, he didn’t have to look long and he didn’t have to go far. There was a three-bedroom apartment a few floors up and several doors over from the one-bedroom rental he shared with his wife, Charlotte Holst Douglas, a clothing designer, and the couple’s children, Jaden and Uma, who are now 14 and 11.

The Roots' guitarist on finding sanctuary in Brooklyn

“Art school was my dream,” Marvel said.

Dream dashed, she bummed around London for a while and saw lots of theater, including a production of “A Touch of the Poet” starring Vanessa Redgrave, a revelatory experience.

“I was fascinated by her and what she was doing,” said Marvel, who decided to audition for Juilliard, where, she had reason to believe, high school grades and test scores (as well as deportment) mattered not a whit. She was accepted, and so began a life of many parts — a presidential candidate on “House of Cards” and the president on “Homeland,” to name two — and many apartments.

“So many places,” said Marvel, who plays Goneril in a new gender-bending Broadway production of “King Lear,” with Glenda Jackson in the title role. “But I never went above 23rd Street.”

For years, she and her boyfriend, now husband, the actor Bill Camp, owned a fifth-floor apartment in a walk-up on Charles Street, in the West Village. “It was beautiful, like living in Paris,” Marvel said, smiling at the memory. “It was just a fantastic building full of artists and artists’ families.”

But one by one they left, and the neighborhood went with them. “It was all finance people and models,” she said. “The bodegas went away. Our local grocery store, Strawberry Fields, went away. Bleecker Street turned into Rodeo Drive, and there was no neighborhood left.”

Thirteen years ago, when Marvel became pregnant with the couple’s son, Silas, locating a new neighborhood became a top priority. They found their spot on the edge of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a place where, in a delightful throwback, stickball games were plentiful, street life was vibrant, and one or another local elder was always outside in a folding chair to keep a watchful eye on the children.

There, too, they found the ideal place to put down roots: a loft in a converted factory.

“When we walked into the building, we knew it was where we wanted to live,” Marvel said. “It’s a great industrial space with great industrial light, and it suited us both.”

The look and feel of the two-bedroom unit could be best summed up as evolved commune crossed with cosmic dormitory.

“I was a Deadhead for a long time,” Marvel said. “That’s the cloth I’m cut from. I’m sort of an accidental actor. My husband, too, is a hippie.”

A hippie who plays hockey. There are, at casual count, 11 hockey sticks stashed around the apartment, and as many guitars, because the residents are, as Marvel put it, “music monsters.”

But not design monsters. “There is no thoughtful, mindful decoration,” Marvel said. “What stays in this house is anything that makes us smile when we look at it.”

Therefore, two brightly colored paper chandeliers dangle from the ceiling in the living room. And, therefore, the walls are hung with many posters advertising shows by George Clinton’s Funkadelic and Parliament-Funkadelic. And, therefore, visitors will also encounter several pictures of Frank Zappa by rock photographer Neal Preston, a framed pen-and-ink sketch from one of R. Crumb’s notebooks — “I’m a big R. Crumb collector,” Marvel said — and a framed sheet of acid blotter paper, a 1970s drug-delivery option.

“Johnny Depp once told my husband that we need to have a little gold hammer attached to it and the words ‘break glass in case of emergency,’” Marvel said with her big, infectious laugh.

She would be hard pressed to explain the provenance of the furniture, which is basic and comfortable. Her focus is more on the rugs, of which there are a bazaar’s worth. They are part of a disparate collection of objects from trips around the world.

Some of those objects — including a Humboldt squid’s beak and a garfish — are stored in a glass-fronted case referred to as Silas’ cabinet of curiosities. “We’re a happy traveling family,” Marvel said. “We spend our money on travel, and we bring stuff back.”

There was little opportunity for getting and spending when she and Camp, 57, began keeping company 30 years ago (they married in 2004).

“One of the first Valentine’s Days my husband and I spent together when we were young and on fire and had no money, he stood out in a storm with a glass vase and collected raindrops,” Marvel recalled. “I think that was the first gift he ever gave to me.”

Last year, Camp made up for it with a multimedia confection by New Orleans-based artist Chris Roberts-Antieau: an embroidery-covered deer’s head. “It’s just extraordinary,” Marvel said.

Since moving into the building a dozen years ago, she and Camp have learned that they share the space with ghosts. “There are absolutely ghosts,” Marvel said. “There’s one that comes by the elevator near the garbage chute. It’s definitely a cold spot; it’s intense.”

She added: “There’s also a something in the hall near our bedroom, a visitor that comes and goes — not malevolent, but it makes its presence known.”

They’ve adapted. “With industrial space, there’s a lot you have to get used to,” Marvel said. “Yes, it’s creaky, but so are my husband and I. We’re well suited to it.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="5763cede-7f85-4403-9c91-6d0c4625eb09" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/realestate/elizabeth-marvel-on-sharing-space-with-curiosities-and-ghosts.html">The New York Times</a>.

Elizabeth Marvel on sharing space with curiosities and ghosts

(What I Love): In the mid-1980s, Elizabeth Marvel got into some unspecified trouble at Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding school in Michigan, got the boot, and was thus unable to complete the portfolio required for admission to Cooper Union and the Rhode Island School of Design.

She loves listening to the garbage trucks as they make their early morning rounds. She is equally charmed by the other street sounds (horns, car alarms) that serenade her for the rest of the day. She is even delighted — so she says — by the sight of trash piling up curbside. It is just so very New York.

Joanne Kaufman

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