In collectors’ circles, Mark McDonald has been called the godfather of midcentury modern design. His first gallery, Fifty/50, which opened in downtown Manhattan in 1983, jump-started the market for vintage furniture by Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto, the Eameses and their contemporaries. Twenty years later, exhausted by the growing competition, he relocated to the upstate New York town of Hudson, where he turned a former department store into a showcase for classic modern design.
It’s becoming ever harder to make discoveries from that era, so McDonald and his partner Dwayne Resnick closed the store and commissioned Steven Holl to design a house on a vacant plot behind it to serve as an office, library and showcase for pieces they want to sell. There’s an upstairs bedroom, but their main residence is in nearby Hillsdale, and it’s there they keep the treasures they cannot bear to part with.
Walk through this furniture gallerist's dream live-work space
‘During the pandemic, I found I didn’t like working from home – too many distractions and not enough space,’ says McDonald. ‘I interviewed Steven at the beginning of his career and followed his work over the years. So, when we decided to build, I sent an email to ask if he would be interested, and half an hour later, he replied: “That would be a nice project for me”.’ Architect and client are near contemporaries – and near neighbours since Holl moved home and archive to Rhinebeck, while keeping his large office in Manhattan. Though McDonald had a limited budget and wanted something straightforward, nothing is simple when two perfectionists collaborate on a project.
There were many discussions and, as the client recalls, ‘a lot of push and a little pull – Steven can be quite persuasive’. Other architects they admired enriched the exchange, notably Rudolph Schindler, the Viennese architect who emigrated to the US to work with Frank Lloyd Wright and then had an adventurous 30-year practice in Los Angeles. Holl calls him ‘the greatest space-maker, who combined open plans with shifts of level in tiny houses that are full of energy’.
The influence of Schindler’s buildings and furniture is clear in the sharp angularity, planar composition and asymmetrical placement of windows. Named the L-House for its shape, it features a south-facing garden and reflecting pool, with an outdoor lighting fixture salvaged from a 1912 Wright house in Minnesota. The walls are clad in powder-coated aluminium, a custom design with finger-width corrugation that Holl developed for his archive building.
It’s less expensive than stucco, requires no maintenance, and the horizontal lines catch the sun and play off its clapboard neighbour. The inner sides of the ‘L’ are a soft cerulean green, the outer façades are white, and the underside of the projecting canopies are pale blue – a local tradition that may be intended to evoke the sky. An invisible asset is the geothermal well that delivers almost all the power needed for under-floor radiant heating and cooling.
Luminist paintings of the 19th-century Hudson River School are a big influence on Holl, who is himself an accomplished watercolourist. Light floods the interior from above and from the windows on four sides that open to provide cross ventilation. Soft-toned birch ply lines the open-plan interior as a foil to the colours and shapes of the furniture. Inside the entry, a pine staircase ascends from the dining area to the mezzanine bedroom and bathroom. A catwalk leads to a pop-up roof lantern from where you can step out onto a flat roof and admire the sun setting over the Catskills.
The roof slopes down over the double-height living room to the single-storey studio in the base of the ‘L’. A powder room projects from the inner angle like a hinge between the two strokes, marking the division between public and private space. To add emphasis, the door is also right-angled and a window wraps around the corner. That’s just one of the playful geometric moves of an architect who delights in complexity and surprise.
In his larger projects, Holl gives full rein to his invention and you can experience it yourself by renting the Ex of In House on his Rhinebeck estate. By contrast, the L-House is a modest 1,700 sq ft and part of the urban grid. But there’s at least one reference to the early days of his career and those of his client. In 1983, Holl designed a New York apartment as a composition of lines, planes and volumes, and a lighting sconce, custom-designed for that apartment, turned up unexpectedly and is now installed over the staircase.
A version of this article appears in the April 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 6 March 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today
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