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"View Slideshow\n\nMake no mistake: Architect Jim Joseph knows how to live with the past. For years the New Yorker\u2014whose firm, Hottenroth + Joseph Architects, is known for sensitive updates to historic residences as well as for supremely comfortable modern spaces\u2014spent weekends at a well-preserved mid-1700s Dutch stone house in the Catskills. \"The floorboards had never been sanded, and original delft tiles were around every fireplace,\" he recalls admiringly. \"But it was like living in a museum.\"\n\nSo about ten years ago Joseph and his partner, Broadway composer Scott Frankel, began to feel that, history-wise, the time had come to move forward, into something of a slightly later vintage. \"When you go from an 18th-century house to a 19th-century one, you understand the idea of progress,\" Joseph says. \"The ceilings are higher, there's more light, and it's more commodious.\"\n\nThough not yet actively looking, the architect happened upon photographs of a grand, elegantly proportioned Greek Revival residence known as Forth House, just across the Hudson River, in Livingston, New York. Before he ever saw it in person, he knew it was the one. Built in the 1830s by the Livingston family (early settlers who gave the town its name), the four-bedroom structure featured soaring windows and a generous 5,000 square feet of living space. Joseph and Frankel ended up buying it in late 2004, moving in the same day they closed. \"This house is a very calming place,\" says Joseph, \"partly because it's so symmetrical and so beautifully laid out.\"\n\nMoving in was just the first step in what has been a long and thoughtful renovation\u2014a process Frankel playfully concedes has involved only modest input from him. \"Jim has such a brilliantly honed eye, I am happy to defer to him,\" says the composer, who received a Tony Award nomination for his work on Grey Gardens and most recently wrote the score for the musical adaptation of Far from Heaven. \"All I said was that I didn't want it to feel like some sort of museum piece. I wanted it to really be a working home as well as a beautiful one.\"\n\nPart of Forth House's appeal was that the place had suffered little in the way of previous renovations. One exception was the kitchen, which was originally in the basement\u2014as was customary in the mid-19th century\u2014but had been relocated to the main floor in a rather jerry-rigged manner, probably in the 1960s or '70s. Never fully finished, with cheap plywood cabinetry and outdated appliances, the space was, as Frankel bluntly puts it, \"depressing.\"\n\nAnother issue was the conservatory, a large postmodern-cum-Regency structure with pink and teal accents that had been added to one side of the dwelling in 1982 and had fallen into disrepair. It threw off the house's otherwise perfect symmetry, and the couple didn't need a conservatory. They considered simply razing it, but Joseph cleverly decided to keep the addition and convert it into a kitchen instead. (The former kitchen is now a palatial powder room.) Frankel swore that he would do all the cooking if Joseph cooked up a kitchen worth cooking in, and Joseph responded by outfitting the skylit space with an antique hood and pendant lights, a massive black soapstone sink and counters, a Belgian-petite-granite floor, and a sprawling island topped with antique wood.\n\nJoseph's decor throughout the rest of the home owes as much to Dorothy Draper as it does to Dolley Madison. Splashes of vibrant red, yellow, and green add invigorating jolts to the classically inflected spaces, playing off the layers of pattern in the bold ingrain carpets Joseph collects and the gleaming chinoiserie wallpaper that was already installed along the stairway and only needed a bit of repair.\n\nWhen it came to the furniture, Joseph bought most of it in nearby Hudson's renowned antiques shops (Vincent Mulford's in particular). \"A house like this requires a few big pieces to anchor the rooms, but beyond that,\" he notes, \"it just needs a lot of little stuff.\" While focusing on 19th-century objects, he made judicious use of a few contemporary artworks, hanging an abstraction by local painter Frank Faulkner, for example, in the traditional dining room.\n\nThere's still plenty of space for tinkering\u2014outdoors as well as indoors. The grounds came with some splendid old trees (including an all\u00E9e of 25-foot-tall hemlocks) but had largely been ignored, so the couple undertook extensive editing and restructuring, adding a rustic walk profuse with rhododendron, witch hazel, and azalea\u2014all of which look as enchanting under snow as they do in full bloom.\n\nAlmost a decade on, Joseph isn't ready to declare the place finished, relishing Forth House and its property as an ongoing, ever-evolving project. \"I love the rhythm of going there and getting totally obsessed with what we are doing,\" he says. \"But I need to return to the city after two or three days. If I were there all the time, it would cease to be an escape.\"\n\nTour the rejuvenated upstate New York retreat."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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