Tucked into a leafy street in Sleightsburgh across from Kingston’s Rondout waterfront sits a freshly reborn 19th-century Second Empire home with a mansard roof that gleams like an epaulet in the autumn light. It’s the site of the seventh annual Kingston Design Showhouse—an event that’s equal parts creative laboratory, professional showcase, and social mixer for the Hudson Valley design community—that runs through October 26.
The house at 271 Second Avenue had good bones when designer Ana Claudia Schultz of Rhinebeck-based Ana Claudia Design took on its gut renovation earlier this year. The transformation added a third bedroom and bath, and—hallelujah—closets in every bedroom. Schultz oversaw the architectural overhaul and designed the showhouse’s open kitchen and dining room, a bright, breezy space that wears its sophistication lightly. Her bird-patterned green wallpaper from Fromental flutters above a handcrafted dining table, bench, and stools by Stone Ridge woodworker Andrew Finnegan. Ceiling lights and sconces from Kingston-based RBW cast the room in warm modern light, while clear switch plates by Corston add a note of barely-there precision. It’s the sort of room that makes you think life could be this orderly and elegant, if only for a weekend.
A design showhouse is, by definition, an exercise in fantasy. It’s where designers can push past the practical and flirt with the improbable—rooms that make emotional rather than rational sense. The 2025 edition delivers a range of dream states: playful, moody, serene, and strange. Limewash is having a moment—chartreuse, lilac, and other understated hues—while improbable materials like a custom metal shower screen (in the primary bath, no less) remind visitors that rules exist mainly to be rewritten.
A Tour Through the Fantastical
Downstairs, the Groove Room by Salisbury, Connecticut–based Casa Marcelo channels midcentury cocktail culture through a kaleidoscope of color and pattern. It’s warm and sociable, with a record player and hand-painted wallpaper from Porter Teleo that looks like someone translated jazz into brushstrokes.
The Powder Room, by Taupe Stories Studio (Delaware County and Brooklyn), proves that whimsy is compatible with rigor. Its hydrangea-inspired chartreuse limewash walls glow around a cherry vanity by Beacon’s Palmer Works and ceramic wall hanging by Kingston artist Demetria Chappo. A stool by Poughkeepsie’s Dean Babin brings a chunk of modern functionality to the small space.
In the To Be Free Library, Ellenville’s Aphrochic Home explores the intersection of design and cultural narrative. Their serene, book-lined space—with shelving by California Closets, who it turns out make much more than closets—houses a collection entirely by Black authors, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Jesmyn Ward. The result is part reading room, part gallery, part quiet assertion of presence.
Upstairs, Catskill-based designer Lyndsey Alexander transforms a study into a seductively self-contained world. A Room of One’s Own feels like a femme Don Draper retreat—pinkish moiré wallpaper by Dedar Milano, a mirror and chair by Kingston’s Sawkille Co., and, tucked discreetly into the closet, a bar by SP Woodenworks in Catskill with a quartzite countertop from Caliber Granite in Kingston. Because inspiration, like writing, benefits from proper hydration.
The Primary Bedroom, designed by Goshen’s House of Brinson, looks to the Hudson River School for its palette of dusky violets and warm earth tones. Heavy antique furniture from Port Ewen’s Ball and Claw Antiques grounds the room, while delicate wallpaper and window treatments soften the edges. A custom closet by Kingston craftsman Thomas Winslow conceals a large built-in laundry hamper, because even dreamers have dirty socks.
In the Primary Bathroom, Methods of Assembly (Catskill and Brooklyn) channels Shaker restraint through a 21st-century lens: paneled wood, geometric precision, and that aforementioned custom metal shower screen—utterly impractical, totally gorgeous. Nearby, the Second-Floor Bath by Brooke Cotter Design Co. (New York City and the Hamptons) floats in a wash of watery tones and organic textures, with sketches of the human form that suggest sensuality without saying it aloud.
The Rose Music Room, from Troy’s JL Caccamo Design, pays homage to the house’s 19th-century roots. A cello and a clarinet rest by music stands beneath soft lighting, evoking an era when family entertainment meant playing together rather than streaming separately.
Outside, on the patio, Ken Landauer of FN Furniture in Cottekill provides sculptural seating that bridges art and utility, a fitting coda for a house that revels in both.
Building More Than Beauty
A portion of ticket proceeds supports Ulster County Habitat for Humanity, aligning high design with housing access. It’s a neat inversion of the usual equation: luxury design underwritten by a sense of social responsibility. The event runs weekends through October 26, with $38 tickets available in advance—a small price for the chance to wander through so many parallel design universes.
Each room in the Sleightsburgh house functions as both a finished composition and an open question: What if we lived this way? What if we chose daring colors, honored artisanship, and treated the home as a site of experimentation rather than retreat? Kingston Design Showhouse operates on the belief that the answer doesn’t have to stay hypothetical. Designers return to their clients and studios with ideas tested at the outer edges of feasibility. Visitors leave reminded that imagination, like paint, comes in infinite finishes.
Kingston Design Showhouse 2025
271 Second Avenue, Sleightsburgh.
Open weekends, October 10–26. Tickets $38.
Proceeds support Ulster County Habitat for Humanity.
