True story: Writer Dave King and Artist Frank Tartaglione found an abandoned warehouse outside Claverack and completely transformed it. How they did it, however, is a matter of perspective. Chock full of history, both real and imagined, their 5,000-square-foot home and studio complex is a light-filled warren of illustrated walls, whimsically deceptive flourishes, creative reuse of space, and a few tricks. Stories line the walls. Some of them come from King’s extensive library, but others are straight from the mind and through the brush of Tartaglione, an accomplished tromp l’oeil painter and artist, all tied together with one, very imaginative, thread.
Originally part of the area’s extensive sheep and wool industry, the couple have taken the warehouse’s originally intended use and spun it into something completely different. “Our home is unlike anyone else’s,” admits King. “It’s expressive, welcoming, and totally idiosyncratic.”
City Nights
The couple met in 1975, when King moved to New York City from Ohio, and came across Tartaglione, an art student, in a bar. “I’d come to New York to be around artists,” explains King. “As soon as I heard he was an artist, I was smitten.” To support their creative careers, they began driving taxis and picking up odd jobs—anything that would allow them to paint. When their friend Robert Jackson, a muralist and master of trompe l’oeil style painting, suggested they help with his decorative painting business, they jumped at the opportunity. “He was the doyen of decorative painters in the US at the time,” says Tartaglione, a Buffalo native. “Ever since I was a small child my heart and mind have been in the decorative arts.”
Both learned the specialized style of painting, which means “to deceive the eye” and developed the skills to create convincing three-dimensional illusions on two dimensional surfaces. Tartaglione’s growing skills landed him many prominent projects, including at the Metropolitan Museum and in Washington, DC at the White House, Blair House, and the State Department. “Just the scale of those projects made things interesting and fun,” he says. “I was hired to paint entrance halls, fireplaces, and marble trim. It was a vote of confidence and a feather in my cap.”
Country Roads, Take Them Home
By the early eighties the two were feeling the constraints of painting and living in a Brooklyn apartment. After King inherited $10,000, they decided to buy a separate studio. “But even then there was nothing for that price,” says King. Instead, they headed north to the Hudson Valley where they’d been visiting friends for almost a decade. “We went looking for a bare architectural space that could accommodate both our studios,” says King.
They zeroed in on Columbia County, a region that offered ample peace and affordability. “Frank bought a county map and drove every road looking for possible candidates,” remembers King. “It was only by chance that he saw this building out of the corner of his eye.” Outside of the hamlet of Mellenville, right off County Route 9, Tartaglione spotted a dilapidated cinderblock warehouse overgrown with weeds and vines. After investigating and then nixing a former gas station, Tartaglione suggested looking at the warehouse, even though he was skeptical of the size. They brought a friend and went to check it out.
Imagined Futures
Built in 1949 by the grandfather of Oliver North, former member of President Reagan’s security staff and central to the Iran-Contra scandal, the original 80-by-40-foot concrete warehouse was used to comb and bale sheep’s wool. “There was a tiny railroad that ran along the North Creek,” says King. “Farmers would send their wool down here to be combed.” The original warehouse had a small office, a loading dock and two restrooms. Otherwise, “it was really just a concrete block rectangle, no interior partitions, no windows, no anything,” says King. The building had been expanded in 1951 with the addition of a storage room, reinforcing steel beams, and an agricultural shed enclosed with sheet metal. After that it was rented to various businesses, then left abandoned when a previous owner’s apparel business went bust.
Sitting on three acres, “shaped like Oklahoma with a panhandle going down behind the house to the tiny stream” says King, the property had sat empty for at least a decade when they stumbled on it. Still there was something about the raw, blank nature of the place that appealed. “Our friend climbed up the side of the building on one of the vines,” remembers King. “He walked around on the roof a bit, came back down and said, ‘Buy it.'” That was 1986. It was the beginning of a multi-decade project that would transform the forgotten warehouse into a canvas for creative reinvention.
Pulling Wool Over Eyes
The two immediately got to work on the space. The lack of facilities didn’t deter them: They set up air mattresses on the concrete floor and cooked on a hotplate, then spent weekends improving the building, while working out of the city during the week. “Because there was no furnace those first three years we’d go to the movies to get warm, then to Kozel’s for burgers,” says King, mentioning the iconic local restaurant that recently closed after operating for nearly a century. “It was extremely romantic.”
After cleaning the cinder blocks and attempting to get the original furnace running, then replacing it entirely, the couple began working with architect Merrick Wochek and Tartaglione’s father Joseph to divide the interior into livable spaces. “Originally we wanted a modernist interior to contrast with the industrial look of the exterior,” explains Tartaglione. “However that was beyond our means at the time. “Instead, the couple decided to play up the industrial aesthetic and get creative.
By adding interior walls at the rectangle’s center, the couple carved out a large kitchen, bedroom, and living room. After finding second-hand industrial-sized windows and three hipped skylights in the Bronx, they “strapped all of them to the top of a mini-van and then drove them upstate,” says King. They punched holes in the cinderblock walls for the windows and installed the skylights over the enclosed kitchen, a hallway and an interior bedroom, filling the building with light.
While planning the kitchen’s design, Tartaglione was struck by an ironic inspiration. “The design started out as kind of a joke,” he explains. “I’d been painting faux marble baseboards, inlaid ceilings, and limestone walls. No one ever wanted faux linoleum.” He decided to recreate the Catholic school basement lunchroom of his childhood. “I painted the floors to look like over-waxed linoleum,” he says. “Then added and painted a staircase to suggest the room was in a basement.” Faux bead board wainscoting and real milk glass light fixtures complete the lunchroom tableau.
Re-Imagined History
They continued to draw on Tartaglione’s decor skills and both of their rich imaginations to create the remaining interior rooms. “We added lots of faux everything, including faux wide pines, faux wood grain, and painted patterns throughout,” says Tartaglione. They added an art-filled parlor with a fireplace in one corner of the building, carved out two more bedrooms, and revamped the old women’s restroom into an elegant white-tiled space. After tearing off the sheet metal, they transformed the agricultural shed into a large, screened-in porch.
To add symmetry to the building’s exterior, Tartaglione designed a faux clock tower with a real office and a third-floor porch. “We really wanted to keep the lost quality of the place,” says Tartaglione. To suggest the passage of time, he painted faux brick trim along the walls and a large brick circle to suggest a removed clock face. “It was all an attempt to give our plain Jane pile of concrete blocks some interest,” he says. They also converted the former loading dock into a studio space for Tartaglione and added a library office for King.
Meanwhile, King had found himself at a crossroads. “I’d moved to New York to be an artist, but I’d gotten far off track. I felt I’d lost my way.” One day, while waiting for a burrito on Avenue A, he wrote a story on a placemat. “I was shocked how hard it was,” King says. “But I was immediately hooked.” He began taking writing classes at The Writer’s Voice and decided, after a teacher implored him to stop wasting his life and write a book, to enroll in graduate school at age 40. “And that was it,” explains King.
In 2005 King’s first novel The Ha-Ha was published to wide acclaim, winning him the Rome Prize in literature and was included on many best-of-the-year booklists. King continues to write, as well as teach at NYU—that is when he’s not helping Tartaglione with their home’s next iteration. “I give all the credit to Frank, who’s really the mad genius of the property,” says King. “I’m just the guy who sat around and asked ‘Who moved my damn books?'”
This article appears in December 2024.
