Tony Osborne spent decades hauling fieldstone, and six years building, tearing out, and rebuilding a two-story house that still isn’t finished—and that’s exactly how he likes it. “Some kids like puzzles, some like games,” he says. “I was the kid that loved putting things together.”
Osborne has been pushing rocks up hills his whole life. A sculptor by passion and landscape designer by trade, he’s spent the last three decades executing intricate projects that often stretch on for years. He’s built walls and patios with stones that fit together like jigsaw pieces; dug amphitheaters out of hillsides; laid winding driveways; constructed gazebos; and dug, planted, and maintained endless Hudson Valley gardenscapes. When his clients didn’t like the results, he began again. “I’ve had clients work on houses for years and then put them on the market,” he explains. “I even had a client take a whole interior and put it in a Dumpster.” Osborne doesn’t take his clients’ feedback personally. “It’s like everyone lives their lives through Post-it notes,” he says. “They say ‘We need a pool,’ check; then we need a deck,’ check. But no one takes the time to soak any of it in and enjoy. So many people go through life with a checklist and then just die.”
So, in 2019, when Osborne set out to build a house for himself, he wanted to savor every step. “It was really about the journey,” he explains of his 1,300-square-foot, two-bedroom home. He wanted to build a place he could enjoy—but also easily walk away from. He wanted to work with his hands and test his skills. But mostly, he wanted to have fun.
Set on five acres of family land in Gardiner, he crafted the home from scrap metal, salvaged barn wood, and (of course) stones—each carefully rolled into place and chiseled by hand. When an idea didn’t work, he let the stone roll back down the hill. “If I didn’t like it, I tore it out and started over again,” he says. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to show off or sell it. I did it because it’s what I love to do.”
Mistakes Are Great
Osborne first came to the Hudson Valley as a child to visit his grandfather’s farm outside New Paltz. “My grandfather was a neurosurgeon in the city,” Osborne says. “He bought a farm to escape, and as kids we’d come up on weekends.” As a teenager, he discovered rock climbing and spent his time scaling and hanging from Shawangunk ledges, permanently setting his love for the landscape in stone. “I’ve always been enamored with nature,” he says. “Rock climbing made me more so. I just never went back to the city.”
Osborne studied metalsmithing and sculpture at SUNY New Paltz, where he learned to master the fundamentals and trust the process. “I had a teacher who taught me the most important thing in life, that is to look, look, look, look, look, look,” he explains. “I always feel mistakes are the greatest things that can happen in life. You’re tired, or you feel you’ve made a mistake, and then you hit on something unexpected and think, ‘Oh, that’s incredible.’”
After graduation, Osborne channeled his creative skills and materials experience into his landscape design business, Artscapes. “In the early days, I did a lot of mowing lawns and maintenance but eventually transitioned to stone work and construction,” he says. “I still made sculpture and artwork when I wasn’t working.” He got married and started a family, then built a wooden house with a Japanese-style garden in Gardiner.
Chiseling a House
By 2019, Osborne had begun a new chapter. His marriage had ended, his children were finishing college, and he’d built a solid landscape design business. He also had five empty acres and years of accumulated materials. It was finally time for him to build a place just for himself. “I’m going to build a house,” he decided. “It was the first time in my life where I could do whatever I wanted—so I just started doing things.”
to clean, two bedrooms and one bathroom.” In the living room, he mixed wood from his family’s Colonial-era Dutch farmhouse with salvaged metal, cabinetry, and, of course, art. One plank—damaged by pileated woodpeckers—caught his eye. “It was just one long board and I knew it could be something really cool,” he explains. After adding a few other similar planks, Osborne commissioned a metal frame from a local blacksmith and displayed the piece in the center of the room. Photo by Winona Barton Ballentine.
Over his 30-year career, Osborne amassed leftover fieldstone, bluestone, and quartz conglomerate, which he stored on his land. “Some people like diamonds; I like stones,” Osborne explains. “I had rows and rows of it.” Along with the rock, he’d salvaged scrap metal, barn wood, and interesting leftovers from renovation projects and the dump.
He envisioned a barn-inspired structure, with Japanese influences that would need minimal maintenance. “I wanted big overhangs and no gutters,” he says. “I wanted two stories, with a ground-floor garage and basement, and then a floor-through living space on top.”
He laid a rectangular foundation and played with the rest. “I’d go over to my piles, choose six or eight or ten stones with colors I liked and then haul them over,” he says. “Then I cut them into rectangles and cubes, tapped them, and stacked them.” If he didn’t like the outcome, he’d tear the stack down and begin again. Eventually, Osborne built the chiseled fieldstone foundation and first-floor walls, then added a bay of glass garage doors. He topped the stone walls with dark gray fiber cement panels, then added two-foot, Japanese-style overhangs.
Begin Again
With the shell completed and walls of windows in place, Osborne began to play with the interiors. “Although I’d drawn everything up, I didn’t really know what I wanted on the inside,” he says. “I wanted one open space that would be easy to clean and maintain as well as two bedrooms and one bathroom.”
He began with wood planks salvaged from his mother’s Dutch Colonial barn. “I found these old boards in her burn pile and just fell in love with them,” he says. “I always had a love of mixing old with new.” He experimented by installing the planks along a bedroom wall, then tore it out. “I did a whole wall and spent a lot of time on it,” he explains. “Then I thought it was too rough.”
Next, Osborne tried alternating the wood panels with scrap aluminum. He added salvaged ornate metal grates to create a mixed, textured wall that matched a collection of Turkish rugs his mother gifted him. He also crafted wood accents throughout the living room and bedrooms. “I didn’t want dressers to clean under or any crazy trim,” he says. “I wanted things to be easy.” He had enough leftover salvaged wood for built-in bedroom storage, a coffee table, and a built-in dining table with benches.
Spartan Designs
Osborne wanted the same reuse-renew-recycle principle to guide the open kitchen’s design, but it remained empty for years. Then one night he found a listing for an Italian Snaidero kitchen on Craigslist. “I drove down to Sparta, New Jersey, on a snowy day and thought to myself, ‘This is nuts,” he says. After driving through a development of multimillion-dollar homes, he found the seller of the brand-new kitchen. “His wife didn’t like the baby blue color,” Osborne says. “So they ripped the entire kitchen out.” Osborne bought all of it for $1,000.
After securing the kitchen to the back of his trailer and trekking it back to Gardiner in the middle of a storm, he suddenly had more cabinets than he knew what to do with. After refinishing the doors in gray and off-white (he didn’t like the color either), he used half as base cabinets in the open-concept kitchen, topped with Barra & Trumbore counters. He repurposed the remaining cabinetry as extra storage in the bedrooms and along the ceiling in the living room.
Future Summits
By early 2025, Osborne had maxed out his permit renewals. “The last time I went to renew the building permit, the office said, ‘We’re not going to renew it again, so you’ll have to start over,’” he says. Until then, the project had been leisurely. “It was a very enjoyable journey because there wasn’t the pressure,” he says. “It was all done because I wanted to do it.” The deadline pushed him to finish—at least enough to move in.
Although the Town of Gardiner Building Department is satisfied, Osborne still has a few stones to turn and projects to try. Against a culture of checklists, his simple mountain home is a testament to work done for its own sake. “It was gratifying to create,” he says. “I always loved making things. It was just like making art.”
This article appears in November 2026.
