In 2014, Corinne Gervai was living and teaching yoga in the heart of Woodstock when a tip from a student lead her to an abandoned farmhouse across from Cooper Lake. After founding Euphoria Yoga in 2008, Gervai had become an integral thread in the Village fabric where she taught a wide spectrum of students and shared a cottage with her son. When she heard about the 1.5-acre property that never had anyone coming or going, she was intrigued. She trekked up to Lake Hill, finding the farm and carriage house on a slope facing Mount Tobais. “I immediately had a strong feeling,” she remembers. “It would be incredible if I could somehow restore this.”
Gervai admits she has a weakness for old houses. “I’ve always been very attracted to abandoned buildings,” she explains. “I always think somebody should save this, save the structure, save its soul.” She takes the same approach with her yoga students. “I try to see them in their highest power, abilities, and joy,” she says. “Even if they’re not quite at their best, they might seem a little bit like a house that needs resurrection, so to speak, but I try my best to facilitate the potential I see. With the right investment and love any house can be a castle.”
Gervai was in luck. After a little detective work she found the home belonged to Kenny Peterson who also ran the Lasher Funeral Home—right across the street from her cottage. “Kenny had generously let my son and his friends skateboard in the funeral home parking lot so I decided to go over and thank him,” she says. Gervai found Peterson in the middle of work, preparing for a memorial. When she inquired about the farmhouse, Peterson explained he’d inherited it with an uncle and the two intended to keep the property forever. “He said they would never let it out of the family—over his dead body,” she remembers. “It was a bit surreal because, as he said it, I looked over and there was a lovely lady in the open casket—may she fly in peace. I thanked him and took it as a sign that the cottage wasn’t meant to be.”
We Do It for the Eggs
At 18, Gervai was living in Tel Aviv and attending art school when she came across another beautiful, but abandoned, building. She knocked on doors until she found the owner. “He told me he couldn’t let me rent the building because it was where he kept his wood,” she recalls. Upon her father’s suggestion, she offered to buy the wood before renting the emptied space and the owner agreed. However, she soon realized she had another problem. “It had been an egg factory,” she explains. “There was a layer of caked eggs on the floor, and dried eggs from years before dripping down the walls.” But Gervai saw past the mess to the bones of the building, cleaning it of avian remains, and then scouring flea markets for new windows, fixtures and furniture.
Gervai took the same resourceful approach when she became a yogi. In 1999, she’d heard about Jivamukti Yoga from a friend and decided to check out their East Village classes. “I fell in love with the whole vibe of the studio, and the way the teachers Sharon Gannon and David Life integrated the spiritual teachings and the asana,” she says. “I knew I wanted to teach it.” She enrolled in the year-long teacher training intensive and, even before completing the program, knew she wanted to open her own studio. She’d been visiting Woodstock since the 1990s and thought it would be the ideal home for her new venture.
Her first attempt to open Euphoria Yoga was thwarted when the town denied her application for a barn space in Bearsville. In 2008, she was thwarted again when negotiations to buy an existing studio fell through. However, shortly after, Gervai walked past a building on Tinker Street and noticed a “For Rent” sign. “I walked in and thought, this is perfect,” she remembers of the open first floor. She opened her Jivamukti-inspired studio later that year.
Leap of Faith
After Peterson’s unequivocal “no,” Gervai set her sights elsewhere, eventually buying a cottage on Ohayo Mountain. When the 2020 pandemic hit and her studio was forced to close for the lockdown, she found herself in a precarious position. “I was a sitting duck,” she says. She decided to refocus on real estate, becoming an agent and then trusting her instincts to roll the property dice. “My gut told me real estate prices were about to skyrocket,” she explains. “I loved my house but thought I should trust myself and put it on the market.”
Despite having no backup plan, Gervai decided to sell. “I was worried I’d be priced out of the market, and there were no rentals. But I knew I just had to trust.” Then, Gervai drove by the Cooper Lake property again and saw another sign, this one saying “For Sale.” Peterson and his uncle had both passed away and the home was ready for resurrection.
She knew she had to act fast—bidding on the house even though it wasn’t habitable or mortgagable. That’s when the community she’d built stepped in. “Amazing people came forward,” she explains. “I had between five and eleven people that said, you can come and stay with us while you renovate.” Another friend offered to loan her money. “The property came back to me,” she says. “This time it felt like it was meant to be.”
Farmhouse Meditation
The 1925 farmhouse was in such poor condition that Gervai’s first priority was making the carriage house livable. She added a one-bedroom apartment over the garage with an open concept kitchen, full bathroom, and airy lofted ceilings. Then she turned her attention to the main structure.
Gervai approached the restoration of the 1,800-square-foot farmhouse as a meditation on resourcefulness and sustainability. “It was completely abandoned for at least 15 to 25 years,” she says. She began by stripping the home’s first floor down to the studs, removing drywall and flooring. This uncovered treasure: The home’s original wood paneling and floorboards had been hidden behind decades of renovations. “I thought, I have to save this wood,” she says. “I told my contractor, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t sand it, don’t stain it, don’t polish it, don’t do anything.” To preserve the walls, she insulated the home from outside, then restored the original Dutch front door.
When her architect suggested bumping out the cramped kitchen to create something more expansive, she declined. “I liked the house’s size,” she explains. “It’s not small, it’s not big. It felt right.” But his suggestion planted a seed. “I realized I was going to have a tiny kitchen.” She decided to expand in the other direction—removing a wall and capturing space from the former dining room and then relocating the stove along the chimney. She added an island to the newly expanded space, then repurposed antique dressers from Facebook Marketplace as cabinets and topped them with copper countertops.
Time to Raise the Roof
Upstairs, the bathroom floor was completely rotted out, the roof leaked, and one room had actually caved in. When the building inspector told her she’d have to replace the roof, she saw an opportunity. “The roof line was really low with tiny dormer windows, and there were three very small-farm style bedrooms. It was claustrophobic,” she says. “If I had to take the whole roof off anyway, why not raise it?” After adding five feet of height, she lofted the ceilings and added exposed beams salvaged onsite. Two smaller rooms became one soaring primary suite overlooking the water.
Four years after purchase, Gervai has transformed the property into a place that honors the past and serves the present. The project entailed more than Gervai anticipated, but the community that had embraced Euphoria Yoga 16 years earlier continued to rally around her latest quest. Students asked how the house was progressing and offered encouragement when the scope seemed overwhelming. “It took some miracles, trust, and faith,” she says. “But, as with yoga, you have to take things one step at a time. Trust the next stone will appear when you’re ready.”
The derelict farmhouse now welcomes guests, shelters family, and provides a sanctuary for Gervai. “It takes a village,” she says, looking toward the mist rising from Cooper Lake. “And I love this village.”
This article appears in October 2025.
The bluish kitchen cabinets are amazing, Congrats ! The raw wooden wall covering seems out of place in the living room. I appreciate this kind of restoration.