Catskill Perch: Gabriel Piedrahita’s Tree House

by Anne Pyburn and photographs by Deborah Degraffenreid, February 24, 2011

You can take a man out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the man. So Gabriel Piedrahita was to learn. He’d studied architecture in Argentina before heading home to Colombia in the late 1990s to practice the art, but something was still missing. “I just knew if I stayed, I’d look back in 20 years and say, ‘This is not the life and work that I wanted,” he says.

So Piedrahita, following in the footsteps of countless yearning folk and without a word of English or a definite plan, headed to New York on a tourist visa. The language barrier melted into nonexistence when he encountered the fluent espanol of Betsy Gude, daughter of a Colombian-American marriage, a California girl working for the Council on Foreign Relations. Very shortly, he swapped the tourist visa for working papers and found a job working on the East Side Access project, bringing the Long Island Rail Road through a new tunnel into Manhattan. “I spent five years working on megaprojects and living in Manhattan,” he says. “The tradition I brought from home is, you might live in the city but on weekends you head to las fincas. [Rough translation: the farm in the country.] Manhattan is a stunning place for an architect, but it’s dark and overstimulating.”

“That wasn’t me,” says Gude. “I was, ‘Nobody’s dragging me off this island. Central Park’s plenty green.’ I was from Palos Verdes, and had lived in Westchester. I assumed that outside of the city, you found suburbs.” She shudders expressively. “I couldn’t have begun to picture this.”

Piedrahita’s friendly persuasion prevailed. In 2006, the two began scouting lots from Ellenville to Shandaken for the right five acres, with a $50,000 land budget, a maximum commute, and a vision. A ski weekend in Hunter put them on the right track. “It was love at first sight with this lot,” Piedrahita says. “The bottom part is all full of ferns.”