Deep inside the contemporary cabin of Gracie Coates and Sam Margevicius there’s a basement. Deep inside that basement, there’s a woodshop. And deep inside that woodshop, there’s one solidly constructed table. At the back corner of that table, hidden under plywood, there’s one artfully constructed table joint. “For the past few years I’ve been in a conversation with a Zen Buddhist monk,” explains Margevicius, a former Cub Scout and now artist working in and around the space of photography.
“Seventy-five percent of our conversations goes over my head—but I sometimes pick up little flashes of wisdom.” Margevicius had enlisted the help of his father, a former scoutmaster, sometime accordion and piano player, and now engineer working in and around the space of circuit boards, to help build the woodshop where Margevicius creates frames out of trunks and branches culled from the surrounding woods.
Son and father were building the large worktable from a felled pine when they came to the table joints in the back. “They were just functional and going to be completely covered up,” says Margevicius. “The aesthetics didn’t matter at all. But I thought we should make one beautiful joint, just for its own sake, and no one would ever know it’s there but us.” His father loved the idea, so the two went to work crafting the perfect corner with reverence. “Then we covered it and never saw it again,” Margevicius says. (He did, however, snap a photo first.)
The idea of crafting something artfully for its own sake, even when no one else will see it, and the corresponding flow between the crafter, the process, and the materials at hand—or, as the Japanese put it, monozukuri—describes how both Margevicius and Coates approach their respective creative work. It also describes how they’ve designed their almost 1,600-square-foot cabin, which is an artful mix of flowing, open spaces, ingeniously framed art, and secret, masterly crafted details. Spread over three floors, the open-concept home centers around a heptagon shaped great room with cathedral ceilings and a convex wall of double-height windows looking out onto the woods. While there are few interior walls or doors dividing the free-flowing interior, the couple have used the few walls they do have as a personal gallery where Margevicius’s framing often upstages the art.
Levon Helm Calling
It was Coates’s winding musical journey that led the couple to their Woodstock home. One half of the orchestral pop duo Gracie and Rachel, Coates has been composing songs and playing piano since childhood. “The piano is my core instrument and the place where I evolve the majority of my work,” she says. “I write alone, I write with others, I write when I need to cry and when I need to laugh.”
She began collaborating with violinist Rachel Ruggles during high school in Northern California. After college, the two moved to Bushwick and completed their debut album. The album’s ethereal soundscape, mixing Coates’s vocals and piano with Ruggles’s classical violin, defines its complex underlying tension. The debut caught the ears of many—including artist Ani DiFranco, who signed Gracie and Rachel to her label Righteous Babe Records and invited them on tour.
By the end of 2019, Gracie and Rachel had been touring for the better part of five years and were completing a run with DiFranco when they performed at Levon Helm’s Studio in Woodstock. The town and venue left a lasting impression on Coates. “Being on tour in a different city every night can be beautiful but can also feel lonely,” says Coates. “The show at the Helm Studio felt like receiving a giant hug. Not only is the physical space magical, but the way performers are quite literally wrapped by the audience is so impactful.”
After the show, local artists introduced themselves to the duo, including Amanda Palmer. “She just made a beeline to us, and said, ‘You’re moving in with me next week,'” remembers Coates. “That performance gave us a beautiful passageway into the community.”
Artist‘s Rescue
Meanwhile, Margevicius, also a Bay Area native, was in Brooklyn apprenticing with a master printer. “There’s this jack-of-all-trades mentality in California,” he says. “Coming to New York I had the intention of focusing my art. So for four years, I did the exact same thing: I was in the same room, every day, making one picture. It was a slow, deliberate task. I felt just like the Karate Kid.”
The couple had already been flirting with the idea of moving upstate and so decided to take Palmer up on her offer to visit. “She really sucked us in, but in a beautiful way,” says Coates, who also reconnected with a mutual friend, singer-songwriter Holly Miranda. Coates and Margevicius became regular visitors at Palmer’s property, where they worked in the on-site studios and took in the natural setting. Coates appreciated the opportunity to slow down and focus on new work, and after 10 years of hyper-focused city life, Margevicius appreciated reconnecting to a forgotten part of himself. “Growing up on the West Coast, being in nature was a huge part of my life,” he says. “I realized I’d completely ignored that whole part of myself.”
The couple decided to move upstate the winter after Coates’s Helm Studio show. “That show felt like a big welcome-home party, even though we’d never been here before,” Coates says. “So, it seemed obvious Woodstock would be where we would land.” They soon found their contemporary home and loved its story. It was first constructed in the 1990s, and a previous owner had begun renovating the house in 2016 with the intention of creating an animal rescue. “She had a three-legged dog and a pig, so a ramp leading to a shower was added,” says Coates. “It felt like a glorified chicken coop.” However, the two-bedroom, two-bath “coop” was completely updated, requiring little work by the couple.
It was also surrounded by 10 wooded acres of white pines and one gnarled old hemlock overlooking the house. Bordered by DEP lands, the property has access to a stretch of the Little Beaverkill. The couple made the home-buying plunge within weeks of the 2020 lockdown. “We can’t believe how fortunate we were,” says Coates. “We really struck gold.”
An Open-Open-Shut Case
They spent the first months of the lockdown putting their distinct touches on the space and learning to steward the surrounding landscape. “We have an affection for a minimal, modern style but with colorful, playful flairs,” says Margevicius.
A built-in bookshelf lines one living room wall. To amplify the coziness, the couple installed a gas stove in the opposite corner and added a plush velvet couch. The baby grand piano was a gift from Margevicius’s father and matches the wood ceiling and trim. A first-floor guest room with an open double shower accessed the yard (a remnant of the home’s almost-animal rescue days) and the open kitchen and dining area features stainless steel appliances and custom tiles.
The primary bedroom suite fills the entire third floor loft. It includes an ample bathroom and cavernous walk-in shower (open), a separate freestanding tub in a bedroom nook (open), Coates’s work space (open), and access to the home’s high-tech mechanicals (hidden by a specialized sliding frame crafted by Margevicius). A second-floor balcony looks out over a swimming hole in the Little Beaverkill.
In Japan, There’s a Word for It
As the world began reopening in 2021, the couple decided to open their home a bit as well. Coates teamed with Holly Miranda to create “Golly Presents,” producing open-air shows on the lawn around the hemlock tree that quickly enjoyed packed audiences. Soon Palmer joined in, and, realizing they were on to something, the trio opened Graveside Variety, a musical and performing arts space in Woodstock. The venue’s growing popularity has inspired an expanding roster of events.
Margevicius’s father also visited to help build the basement wood shop, along with the one perfect table joint. “He also bought me a tool shed,” says Margevicius. “Actually it was the same tool shed his father had once bought him.” One of Margevicius’s first projects in the new workshop was building a frame from the first pine he felled with tools from the shed. “Then I took a picture of the shed for the frame and sent it to him as a thank you. “Hidden on the back was a secret picture of the table joint the father and son crafted artfully, for artfulness’s sake. “He loves it,” says Margevicius. “In fact, he sends me pictures all the time of himself looking at the secret picture.” For that picture, Margevicius is artfully crafting the right frame.
This article appears in March 2024.
