June 14, 2026Post Company is a small Brooklyn-based design firm with surprising geographic reach. One of its first jobs, 14 years ago, was designing the Dogfish Inn, in Lewes, Delaware. That led to a hotel in South Lake Tahoe, California, and others as far away as Barcelona, Spain, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Meanwhile, the firm’s three partners added their own geographic diversity. Though their office stayed in Brooklyn, Jou-Yie Chou moved to Litchfield County, Connecticut, Leigh Salem decamped to Los Gatos, California, and Ruben Caldwell settled in Jackson, Wyoming. “I did a hotel and restaurant project here in 2016, and I decided to stay,” says Caldwell, who was born and raised in New York State.
For Caldwell, one recent project was a homecoming of sorts. His clients had bought a large house in a remote part of the Adirondacks, about 15 miles from the nearest town. Built in the 1890s for a Manhattan lawyer, it had been renovated many times since, sometimes carelessly. The new owners chose Post Company after seeing several of its hotels, including two in Upstate New York: the Brentwood, in Saratoga Springs. and Scribner’s Catskill Lodge, in Hunter.
“More and more of our clients want their houses to be like small hotels or bed-and-breakfasts, places where friends and family can gather,” Caldwell says. In this case, the clients wanted to be able to accommodate 10 couples in the 6,000-square-foot main house and nearby carriage house.
That meant reconfiguring the larger building to include five bedroom-bathroom suites and two bunkrooms, a commercial-grade kitchen and a back stairway, so guests could come and go without encountering the rest of the crowd, if they weren’t feeling social.
Designing the stairway, “we looked to the vernacular architecture of the area for inspiration without directly replicating it,” says Laura Cerpa, the Post Company project manager, noting, “The newel posts feature subtle chamfered edges, providing just the right amount of detail without drawing too much attention to themselves.”
The architect for the renovation was Phinney Design Group, of Saratoga Springs. Interiors were the job of Post Company. Caldwell was in charge of the project; Salem and Chou weighed in on major decisions. One of their goals was to avoid associating the house with any one style. “Some folks might’ve been tempted to make this a real Adirondack great camp,” says Caldwell, citing the work of William West Durant for Gilded Age robber barons.
Caldwell, and his clients, preferred subtlety, nodding to the location and its history without resorting to clichés or kitsch. The test was whether, from the inside, you could guess anything about the outside, which is characterized, in classic Adirondacks rustic style, by multiple gables, dark wood shingles, a standing-seam metal roof and rubble-stone chimneys. Caldwell is pretty sure you can’t.
He distinguished interior from exterior with neutral surfaces: floors of rustic white oak and walls covered in limewash paint (mainly Farrow & Ball’s warm Schoolhouse White, with the slightly darker Drop Cloth on the millwork). “We thought how the light interacted with the walls was just as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than anything we could achieve with wallpaper or bright paint colors,” Caldwell says.
The wooden beams of the ground-floor rooms were so dark they made the coffered ceiling seem disjointed. Caldwell had them painted to blend in. The moldings and wainscoting are historically inflected but not specific to one period or location. With its clean lines and unadorned surfaces, the furniture, too, is mostly time-and-place agnostic. “We actively avoid what we think are trends,” says the designer.
The design team also avoided using non-neutral shades. But, Cerpa says, “color comes in through the vintage area rugs and accessories like the hand-painted pillows. The calm background lets the objects and accessories in each space — mugs, books, et cetera — add dynamism and depth to the interiors, all within a framework of restraint.”
Throughout the house, they used vintage items that vary by era and country of origin. The foyer, for example, is dominated by a quartet of chunky Pierre Chapo stools and a sleek Swedish modern shelving unit, for stowing muddy shoes, from eliaselias. In the stair hall, an 18th-century oak French Provincial sideboard “brings scale and a sense of history to the entry sequence,” Cerpa says. And, she adds, a rustic console table behind the sofa near the entrance to the living room “adds warmth and character while helping the space feel informal and collected over time.”
Explore More of This Expansive Adirondacks Estate
With the furniture he selected, Caldwell sought to create distinct groupings so the owners and their guests could meet in a range of configurations. In that way, “you could have twenty people spending time together but having very different experiences,” he says.
One ground-floor space, known as the Map Room, provides everything guests need to plan Adirondack adventures. The room’s heavy wooden farm table is surrounded by spindle-back chairs — 21st-century versions of 18th-century Welsh Stick chairs by woodworker Greg Mitchell’s Los Angeles studio, West of Nobel.
Some elements of the interior design are distinctly modern. In the 19th century, when windows were single-paned, providing little insulation, no one would have put a bed against the glass. But new high-performance windows meant Caldwell could embrace that option. “With your head close to the window,” he says, “you wake up feeling like you’re practically outside.”
Some of the Bathroom vanities too come right up against windows. The idea, says Caldwell, is that “when you’re brushing your teeth, you’re not looking at yourself in the mirror. You’re looking out at nature.” (There are small mirrors for self-inspection.) The bathroom floors are matte ceramic tile, laid in a black-and-white pattern you might see in an old New York apartment. Plumbing and lighting fixtures are equally unassuming, vaguely industrial but not taking that look to extremes.
Its size, its history and its location were enough to make the home impressive. So, when it came to design, the clients “didn’t want the house to make big statements,” Caldwell says. “They approached this project with a degree of humility.” In fact, he sees the rooms as backdrops. They aren’t complete, he says, “until they’re filled with people having a wonderful time.”
