When Daniela Araya was growing up outside Miami, her grandmother kept a bowl of bright plastic fruit on the family dining table. “My grandmother kept the house pristine in a way that now feels ceremonial: plastic over the staircase runners, the plastic fruit in a lacquered bowl, and a fun plastic tablecloth for every meal,” Araya remembers. “We had a peach sofa covered in plastic. I can still hear the crunch from sitting on it.”
Araya’s affinity for color—deeply saturated with memory and meaning—has followed her from Florida through her years in Manhattan’s media industry and now to her log cabin, perched at the top of a hill in Delaware County and painted the color of charred wood.
Standing outside, Araya is explaining why she painted the front door a shade of yellow unequivocally named Gleeful Joy (Valspar). “You know that feeling when you finally feel the sun on your skin after a long upstate winter?” Araya asks. “That’s yellow for me.” It’s early spring, and the trees are still bare, but the cabin is already blooming. Inside the 1,200-square-foot space, a kaleidoscope of color swirls around an ancient soot-colored woodstove. The Porsche Riviera Blue (Backdrop) staircase contrasts with the calming Ocean Air (Benjamin Moore) of the kitchen island. In the living room, soft, hay-yellow walls are punctuated by Bada Bing (Backdrop) red trim.
In the six-year process of transforming the space from a remote hunting cabin to a polychromatic hilltop refuge, Araya also transformed herself, developing an aesthetic that prioritizes slow design, full saturation, and a single guiding principle. “Creating a home isn’t about how it looks. It’s about how it holds you,” she says.
Delaware Dreaming
Araya and her husband, Austin Mitchell, discovered Delaware County separately, before they even met. Araya had moved to Manhattan in 2014 with two suitcases and dreams of big city success. It was very much The Devil Wears Prada time in my life,” she explains. “I loved design, and I was determined to make it in the magazine world. “She got an internship at Hearst Magazines, then stints at CNN and Gimlet Media. “Almost immediately, I knew I wasn’t leaving,” she says. “It was exactly the kind of creative environment I’d always dreamed of but couldn’t find in Florida. “
As she moved up the corporate ladder, she changed apartments often. “I was so focused on my crazy, high-energy jobs where everything was just work, work, work,” she says. “I definitely moved every year—sometimes multiple times— and didn’t really care as much about what I was accumulating. There wasn’t a lot of intention in my day-to-day life.”
It was during a low-stakes, weekend trip that Araya finally began pulling her attention away from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. “I found Delaware County almost by accident,” she says. “I wanted to take my car somewhere that was actual nature.” She found herself in Bloomville at the local pizzeria and inn, Table on Ten. “I drove up expecting nothing in particular and found this sweet building surrounded by rolling hills,” she says. “I was completely smitten.”
Country Kismet
It was during a work event that Araya first noticed Mitchell, a podcast editor. On one of their early dates, the two realized their mutual affinity for the western Catskills when Araya told Mitchell about her weekend sojourns. “He said, ‘That sounds exactly like how I’ve been spending my weekends,” she recalls. “He’d been coming to the region for years to hike and camp with friends. We realized loving the region was common ground.”
The pair began spending their Delaware County weekends together—renting an A-Frame in Delancey, where they hiked and stargazed. The rural life grew on her. “I loved how remote it felt,” says Araya. “It felt vast and peaceful in a way we hadn’t found anywhere else.” Araya’s attraction to the region wasn’t just a retreat; however, it was also a move towards something new. “The one thing I kept noticing was the people,” she says. “I kept meeting fascinating individuals who had packed up their lives and started something entirely on their own in the middle of nowhere. I kept thinking: I want that.”
Man Cave
When they started to look for a Catskills cabin, Araya envisioned a cute place in nearby Hobart, but Mitchell wanted land and privacy. Their hunter’s cabin on 13 private acres at the end of a mile-long, very rough driveway seemed like the perfect combination.
Built in 1986 at the apex of the hill, the two-story cabin was simple, utilitarian—and remote. “Local lore is that the cabin was built by a doctor from New Jersey as an upstate getaway,” says Araya. “Apparently, he would fly in by helicopter and land on the hilltop.” The hunting cabin had two rustic bunk rooms and one rudimentary bathroom. “It had one of those little coffin-like showers that was all plastic; it was like standing in an MRI machine,” says Araya. “When we first walked in, I thought, ‘Oh, this tracks, this is definitely an upstate cabin.’”
The cavernous open living room and kitchen were finished in brown paneling that mirrored the surrounding woods. “The owner was just using it as a place to go hunting and get drunk and pass out,” says Araya. “It was neglected, but this was the first place that hit all the things each of us admired about the region,” says Araya. “And ironically, it was very close to Table on Ten.”
Delayed Blessings
They bought the home in November of 2020 with the intention of doing all the renovation work themselves. That first winter—hit by the double whammy of the lockdown and supply chain delays—was when the reality of their purchase set in. “I have photos that are so bleak, of us on an air mattress in the kitchen on the linoleum flooring,” says Araya. “Everything was so brown, and we could hear the mice running through the walls at night. And we were like, ‘Oh my God.’”
Delivery delays, coupled with their own overwhelm at the project’s scope, created a temporary design paralysis. That design paralysis, however, turned out to be a blessing. “I had put a lot of pressure on myself to get it done perfectly—and fast,” explains Araya. The delay gave them time to actually live in the house before altering it, and to consider what they really needed from the space. “Once I stopped fighting that urge and started listening to what the house wanted, things started falling into place,” Araya says. “That evolved into this less rigid, more playful approach to creating a home.”
Domino Effect Design
They began by gutting the home’s entire first floor themselves, removing the wood paneling and the wall between the two bedrooms to create a new living area. Next, they needed to add natural light. “It was so dark in here before,” says Araya. “The interior wasn’t a reflection of what you felt when you got to the top of the driveway.” With the intention of capturing the beauty of the surrounding landscape, Mitchell expanded the kitchen and living room window openings, then reframed the walls and added insulation.
The bigger windows and expanded viewshed dictated the next design steps. In the kitchen, they ripped out the original wood cabinets and a sliver of countertop, and reimagined the space from scratch. Semi-handmade custom fronts on IKEA bases form new cabinetry and a central island, positioned as a gathering spot and finished in Ocean Air blue. “Blue felt like almost a neutral in this situation,” Araya explains. “It’s so calming and works with other colors.” She took it further, painting the ceiling the same shade, mimicking the sky.
The couple also created a patterned kitchen backsplash from irregular, handmade Fire Clay tiles. “I definitely cried,” Araya admits of laying the multicolored backsplash by hand. But it taught her something the whole project had been trying to teach her from the beginning. “Nothing’s going to be perfect,” she says. “My grandma didn’t dust the fake grapes because she thought they were stylish; she did it because she believed the care itself mattered.”
Her experience wrestling with the cabin’s redesign gave her the confidence to begin her own interior design practice, helping others create deeply saturated spaces that resonate with their own personal histories. Araya “When you stand in the kitchen, there’s the vibrant blue stairs, the bright yellow front door, and pops of red from the window trim,” says Araya. “It’s a bold primary palette, and I love how the colors shift and feel different depending on where you’re standing in the space.”
But for Araya, creating the cabin wasn’t just about color. “Maybe creating a home is less about making do and more about making meaning after all.”
This article appears in June 2026.
