When Laurie Umanoff Goldstein and Steven Goldstein decided to move from Philadelphia to upstate New York a few years ago, it meant leaving the house they’d lived in for 40 years. Mrs. Goldstein’s perennial garden was still growing, as was the community and clientele that she’d cultivated as an artist and interior designer.
But their two children had long since left the house, and Mr. Goldstein had recently retired as a psychotherapist. And really, moving to New York was a homecoming of sorts: The Goldsteins met in Manhattan in 1972, when he was a program director at the United Cerebral Palsy of New York City center and hired her as an art teacher. They were married at her aunt and uncle’s home in Westchester a few years later.
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When Mr. Goldstein got a job in Philadelphia at a nonprofit focused on youth crime prevention, the family moved down there and settled in. Four decades later, the kids were grown up and living in the lower Hudson Valley, and Mr. Goldstein, now 82, was commuting to Manhattan two days a week to see patients at his private practice.
Moving north “was the best possible thing we could do because we wanted to be closer to our children,” he said.
He was familiar with the area, about two hours north of Manhattan, having spent summers there as a boy. His mother had opened a small antiques shop in the Catskills, and he and Mrs. Goldstein, now 76, continued to run the shop seasonally until they sold his mother’s house last year.
“He was aging, I’m aging,” Mrs. Goldstein said. “You’re living your life and doing what you want to do, and raising kids, and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m older.’”
The Goldsteins started looking for a house in 2021 with a $500,000 cash budget, focusing on riverfront Dutchess County towns like Hyde Park and Rhinebeck. Their wish list included extra rooms for guests and an art studio, but they didn’t need anything as large as their 2,200-square-foot house in Philadelphia. “People asked me if I was going to downsize,” Mrs. Goldstein said. “And I said, ‘Not really. I’m right-sizing.’”
They wanted a first-floor primary suite and enough space to house their furnishings, including a newly reupholstered antique wraparound sofa that once belonged to Mrs. Goldstein’s grandmother. And they were curious about the area’s townhouse developments.
“I had lived in a house that had walls, and I said, ‘I just want it all open,’” Mrs. Goldstein said. “I wanted to experiment to see how I can make it my own and make it cozy. If we were to move into something old, you almost have to gut it. You have to paint it, you have to update the electricity.”
Among their options:
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