OUR KITCHEN IN HUNGARY

A slow drip, sixteen-year remodel. We need your input.

Hello,

Today, I’m doing something I rarely do and giving you a peak inside the one thing I never talk about here that occupies tons of my time—remodeling. Somehow, after growing up in a controlled suburban home/life, I became a person who easily falls in love with old, crumbly things that need to be rescued.

My husband and I differ on many things: music, movies, and clothing—and our idea of time or money well spent (no surprise: we grew up on opposite sides of the world from each other, him in Soviet-occupied Hungary, and me in suburban Illinois). Still, we live by a shared motto: leave things better than you found them. We both love the challenge, the craft, and the vision required to take something lost or forgotten and make it something new—and ours.

We’ve spent the last 14 years remodeling our house and yard in the Hudson Valley, room by room and inch by inch, but one project predates all that. It started at the beginning of our love story—many years before. We call it Kis Madar Haz (little birdhouse in Magyar).

I've told small snippets of how our house in Hungary came to be ours—but besides a few peaks on our Instagram or our article in Food + Wine last summer, we rarely share behind the scenes. Until now….