Words Glenn Adamson Photographs Jason Schmidt
Originally published in No 12
The house, which was completed in 2007, from the architect Thomas Phifer — known for his recent expansions to the Glenstone Museum, in Maryland, and the Corning Glass Museum.
My third thought, on visiting Cristina Grajales and her wife Isabelle Kirshner at their home, was: Where’s the art? My first thought had been sheer amazement at the place, a determined block of modernist genius, smack in the middle of a pastoral forest in Salt Point, New York.
My second thought was of beavers. Before showing me indoors, Grajales and Kirshner took me out back, past their elaborate array of squirrel-proof bird feeders, to a small lake. Where a stream fed into the larger body of water, a colony had been busily building a dam, in an attempt to enlarge their watery habitat. Kirshner is obliged to regularly disassemble their construction of sticks and debris, to prevent flooding. This does little to discourage the beavers, who invariably go right back to their Sisyphean labors.
The stairs in this stunning hallway lead up to the sleeping quarters. On wall, Sunset on the Lake, 2018, by Jamie Lyn Kara.
Like a jewel box. The warm light is inviting
In the late afternoon light, Cristina Grajales and her wife Isabelle Kirshner sit on the porch with their girls.
It was only when I got inside, via a breathtaking vertical space — the Taj Mahal of covered porches — that I began to wonder where the art was. For I know Grajales as one of New York City’s most fascinating gallerists. Originally from Colombia, she runs a program of wide geographical range, with a pronounced emphasis on design. Where Grajales’ voracious interests run, others tend to follow. She has brought widespread attention to figures as diverse as the great fiber artist Sheila Hicks, the Bogotá-based artist-weaver Jorge Lizarazo (whose firm is Hechizoo, Spanish for “bewitch”), and the Hudson River Valley’s own Paula Hayes. Grajales also serves on the board member of Creative Time, New York’s leading non-profit organization for public art.
Nikki cruises past chairs by Friso Kramer, c. 1967, and a ‘60s era dining table.
So, I was surprised that in Grajales’ home, there is hardly any art to be seen. She explains it like this: “When you live in a sculpture, you don’t need to hang paintings.” And she’s not wrong. She and Kirshner commissioned the house, which was completed in 2007, from the architect Thomas Phifer — known for his recent expansions to the Glenstone Museum, in Maryland, and the Corning Glass Museum. It is widely considered to be among his masterpieces. The exterior is clad in screens of perforated stainless steel, the inside entirely in maple plywood. Illumination filters down from hand-sculpted skylights, square at the top and round at the bottom. The building encloses its interior volumes lovingly but austerely, rather as a Savile Row suit clothes a body.
The Black Box; a frequently used outdoor shower.
Skylights seen in the illuminated west-facing part of the home.
Stevie, one of the couple’s two rescue doggies, on the daybed.
When I visited it was late summer. We sat out on the aforementioned porch, which soars upward in a column of steel-enclosed air, seated at elemental black furnishings, eating ribs off the grill. Grajales and Kirshner told me some good stories about the challenges of maintaining an avant-garde house in the woods. While the mesh enclosure of the house seems to be a pedestrian industrial material — very much in the modernist functionalist spirit — it turns out to be extremely particular, available only from one producer in Europe. When a tree came down and struck the house, distorting a section of the mesh, Grajales and Kirshner were obliged to order a replacement panel. While they were at it, they ordered extras and left them out in the forest, to weather at the same rate as the house’s cladding.
The cozy library on the 2nd floor.
One of the home’s more unusual features is a glass walkway, completely transparent, that bisects the upper floor; this allows light to cascade down to the ground floor. The thick glass floor rests on several steel beams. Grajales reports the findings of an informal psychological experiment: Apparently, most men find it extremely unnerving to walk across, and gingerly place their feet above the supports. Women sail across without difficulty. (True to type, I found it completely nerve-wracking.)
Presiding over this walkway is the house’s one major artwork: a photograph by Fergus Greer, showing the legendary London club denizen, high concept self-fashioner, and living sculpture Leigh Bowery. In a dramatic garment of red velvet — a cape that never stops — his shrouded head poking out of its gaping mouth. He is a monument to himself. It’s a great placement for the picture, a reminder of Grajales’ curatorial skill. When you stand before the portrait, the whole house seems to snap to attention, re-organizing itself as a shrine to Bowery’s inspired outrageousness.
The 2nd floor glass walkway with work by Fergus Greer and Penelope Krebs.
The kitchen and the entire interior are in maple plywood.
It so happens that when I visited the Salt Point House, I’d just been to Art Omi, the outdoor sculpture park near Hudson. One of the main attractions there is ReActor, a house that rests on a single pivot point. It was designed as a temporary residence by two artists, Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, each of whom lived in one of its halves. As one of them moved about, the other had to mirror his motion, lest the house tilt crazily from the imbalance of weight.
The pond.
Grajales and Kirshner’s house could not be more firmly set on its foundations. It has a supreme, self-sufficient solidity that perhaps only extreme architectural abstraction can achieve. Yet there is something uncannily similar to ReActor in the building’s proportions; the way that this perfectly balanced couple occupied it; and Bowery’s pride of place, right at the fulcrum. As I headed back west of the river, I was left with a fourth and final thought. Art at its best is not something you can own. It’s something you have to live.
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian who works at the intersection of craft, design and contemporary art. He is the former Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. Adamson’s recent publications Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018) and Craft: An American History, 2021 are published by Bloomsbury.
Jason Schmidt is a photographer and director specializing in documenting artists and cultural figures as well as architecture and interiors. His books, Artists and Artists II, were published by Steidl and he is currently at work on his first documentary. Schmidt is repped by ba-reps.com