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"View Slideshow\n\nPrivate investor Alex Reese has all the attributes of what used to be called a gentleman farmer: a courtly yet easygoing demeanor, a fondness for worn velvet smoking jackets, a deep love of the land, and a country house that has been in the family for generations. Six generations in the case of Obercreek Farm, the estate in Dutchess County, New York, that Reese took over in 2005. Like his late mother, Franny, was, Reese is active in historic preservation and environmental efforts in the Hudson Valley, but he recognized that the eight-bedroom white clapboard structure, parts of it more than a century and a half old, required a serious update.\n\nJust as he began looking for someone who could steer the renovation\u2014everything from wiring to baths needed attention\u2014 Reese found himself at a dinner party seated next to Alison Spear, a vivacious architect known for modernist showrooms and apartment buildings in her native Florida as well as intriguing interiors for Katie Ford, the activist and former modeling-agency CEO, and George Lindemann Jr., the art collector and president of Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art. \"I admit to incredible luck in finding the love of my life at the exact time I needed a brilliant architect,\" Reese says. \"And they happened to be one and the same.\" The couple wed in 2007. Six years later, the rejuvenated Obercreek is a testament to Spear and Reese's generous blending of furnishings and families (they have a son and two daughters from previous marriages).\n\nArchitecturally, the house is a blend, too, having begun life as a relatively modest Federal Style dwelling in the mid-19th century. An Italianate makeover soon followed, the next step in what Reese refers to as a \"long walk down the road of American styles.\" In the 1920s a Colonial Revival remodel by his paternal grandparents expanded Obercreek to around 20,000 square feet and added, among other delights, a two-story portico \u00E0 la Mount Vernon and an exquisite Gothic Revival chapel carved from red oak by Russian sculptor Gleb W. Derujinsky.\n\nIn developing the renovation plan, recounts Spear\u2014who is now a senior designer at Manhattan-based Ennead Architects\u2014it was important to establish a closer relationship between the residence and its rolling, wooded site. Though Obercreek is embraced by about 240 acres of farmland (today five passive-solar greenhouses produce 30 varieties of greens for markets, restaurants, and community farm-share clients), the building merely gazed upon the landscape and did not engage with it. So Spear came up with smart solutions, such as installing exterior French doors that invite visitors to step outside and planting an enchanting garden whose low walls are extensions of the redbrick foundation.\n\nView Slideshow1 / 15Architect [Alison Spear](http://www.alisonspearaia.com/) and investor Alex Reese stroll along the drive of their home, Obercreek Farm, in Dutchess County, New York.\n\nHer grandest gesture in merging house and land, however, is the deep veranda she constructed on Obercreek's west side, facing a painterly stretch of the Hudson River and connecting two mismatched '20s wings. Crowned by an Egyptian chandelier with red glass shades and curtained with sweeps of sheer white drip-dry synthetic fabric, the 40-foot-long space is where family and friends relax during warm weather, amid aluminum armchairs from the architect's former office in Miami and homespun wrought-iron tables that Spear smilingly calls \"vintage Obercreek.\"\n\nThat fresh, unfettered sense of style invigorates every corner of the venerable residence, where walls are boldly painted in subtropical shades like persimmon and lime-green. Furniture that was neither original to Obercreek nor especially fine was unsentimentally jettisoned. (Much of the awkward '20s attic was sliced off, too, leaving the building less top-heavy.) \"I come from a long line of pack rats and fervently want to kick the habit,\" Reese explains. The treasures that remain have become ingredients in a heady cocktail shaken with the architect's edgier belongings and garnished with clean-lined upholstered seating made to her specifications. What was old-fashioned and frayed is now kicky and a bit bohemian, with a raffia-and-leather carpet the couple found on a trip to Marrakech spread out before a Victorian marble mantel, and a fleet of Lucite chairs parked under a 19th-century folk-art landscape.\n\nIn the taxidermy-dappled library, a Hans J. Wegner lounge chair and a Bhutanese mandala bring a counterculture jolt, and a bold geometric-pattern rug percolates beneath the dining room's aristocratic mahogany antiques. Spear and Reese also stripped the rooms of Dutch, English, and American ancestral portraits and concentrated the works in the marble-paved great hall that bisects the home. The dozens of gentlemen in periwigs and ladies in cartwheel ruffs or filmy fichus are now hung literally shoulder to shoulder, to spectacular effect, above antique settees sharply dressed in a mod yellow flame stitch.\n\nSpear's most surprising addition to Obercreek is just outside the kitchen: a proudly sculptural two-story garage/gym, set at a striking angle to the main structure. The unsparingly modern outbuilding, though a dramatic contrast to the house at its side, echoes Obercreek's own masonry elements, among them 1850s brick (salvaged from a nearby warehouse), a decorative row of soldier coursing, and an arched side door. Spear's design is yet more proof that up-to-the-minute ideas and a respect for history can make a sublimely happy union.\n\nClick here to view the slide show of this eclectic country house."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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