Shortly after their marriage almost six years ago, Ayan Chatterjee and David Krause bought their first home together: a two-story brick townhouse from 1920 in Ridgewood, Queens, which they fully renovated.
As time went on, the two “had the itch to get out of the city,” Mr. Chatterjee said, and began traveling to the Catskills. “At some point, when you hit your 30s, every weekend in the city isn’t so fun anymore.”
The couple, both now 35, had enjoyed renovating the Queens house, so they bought a fixer-upper farmhouse in Greene County, three hours north, for around $250,000. They added a chicken coop and a pool.
“It is a beautiful house, but it is primitive and needs a lot of work,” Mr. Chatterjee said. “The minute you open up walls, you discover problems.”
They call their contractor their “upstate dad” — he comes to the rescue when anything goes wrong.
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Back in the city during the pandemic, the couple felt trapped in their townhouse, with its small concrete patio. “That was our only breath of fresh air,” Mr. Chatterjee said.
His job as a producer at MSNBC was fully remote, and Mr. Krause, a founder of a vegan skin-care company, Alder New York, had always worked from home. So they sold the Ridgewood house and moved up to the Catskills with Levi the dog, getting a hotel room whenever they visited the city or when Mr. Chatterjee went to his office. They found it interesting to try hotels in different neighborhoods — but exhausting to live out of suitcases.
So last winter, the couple checked out the Manhattan rental market, even as they heard horror stories about soaring rents. One day, surfing online, Mr. Krause mistakenly clicked on the “for sale” listings and found some surprisingly low prices. For a small pied-à-terre, buying seemed a better deal than renting. “It didn’t need to be more than a place to sleep and shower,” he said.
The couple could afford up to $400,000 for the equivalent of a hotel room of their own. They sought a West Side location — an easy walk to Mr. Chatterjee’s office in Rockefeller Center and to Penn Station, for the train upstate.
They knew they would get no more than a studio in a co-op building. The so-called one-bedrooms in their price range were typically studios with some kind of makeshift sleeping area.
For help, they contacted a friend, Sumi Vatsa, an associate broker at Compass, who had sold their Ridgewood townhouse. “It was about making it the nicest hotel room possible,” Ms. Vatsa said.
Among their options:
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