Malin+Goetz Founders Rebuild Home for Modern Living

The drive up to Haroldhurst Farm is winding, passing a large red barn and a pair of weeping willows that frame a pond. The Greek Revival-style house sits on 187 acres in New York’s Hudson Valley. Homeowners Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz launched the modern apothecary brand Malin+Goetz in 2004, but now they settle into life as rural sophisticates. “We have working pugs,” Goetz says, referring to Piet and Harold, the place’s namesake.

The couple’s green thumbs are visible in a sprawling ornamental kitchen garden. Fennel, tomatoes, and chard make up the summer bounty. A stand of fruit trees includes apple, peach, persimmon, and quince. The peonies had a glorious two-week flash in late spring; dahlias are on deck for late summer, ready to churn out rounds of dinner-plate-size blooms. “It’ll be like, ‘Could this last forever?’ And then you get a frost,” Malin says of the flowers’ abrupt end. “Gardening is very biblical,” Goetz says. “You have famine, feast, locusts, floods, fires, and that’s nature.”

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A Catastrophic Loss

Haroldhurst has already lived through an Old Sign calamity. In late October 2022—three weeks before a scheduled move-in following a year-and-a-half-long restoration overseen by Jim Joseph of Hottenroth + Joseph Architects—a farmer friend called the homeowners, then in Manhattan, with word of a catastrophic fire. “I got a text message from Matthew that said, ‘House gone,’” recalls the designer John Hulka, who had been tasked with the interiors.

The flames leveled the house to its original stacked-stone foundation. Only stray elements were spared: the banister and newel post, which were at the millworker’s for repair; new windows, delayed on a truck. The couple, unmoored, considered pivoting to a modernist-style house or even selling the land, but the prospect of a multiyear setback was too much to bear. “It would have never entered our minds to build some pastiche home,” says Goetz. Reconstruction made sense because they already had the plans.

The choice to reconstruct a near replica rather than pivot to a contemporary structure demonstrates a specific attachment to historical continuity. When property owners face total destruction, the impulse to duplicate the lost form often outweighs the urge to modernize, effectively preserving the site’s architectural identity while bypassing the lengthy design phases associated with new builds. This path allows the project to reclaim the time lost to the disaster, treating the reconstruction as a restoration of intent rather than an opportunity for reinvention.

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Restoring the Structure

By Thanksgiving 2024, a near replica of the Greek Revival was complete, resited to a choice perch overlooking the pond. Reclaimed 19th-century pine boards, sourced in Pennsylvania by LV Wood, help to conjure the old-growth feel of the original floor. The couple found a Federal-style mantel caked in 200 years of paint; after stripping it and uncovering the detailed fretwork, they decided to leave it as is.

This time around, they opted to coat the majority of the walls in plaster tinted with Benjamin Moore’s White Dove, which gives a luminous, lived-in effect as daylight filters through the house. One exception is the Phillip Jeffries grasscloth in the ground-level library—a neutral backdrop for a blue Milo Baughman sectional and a vintage poster of a denim-clad Lone Ranger.

A Mix of High and Low

In contrast to the house’s exterior formality, with its crisp black shutters against white, Goetz and Malin’s assembled furniture and objects have a “comfortable, intellectual” quality, Hulka says. An antique Dutch chandelier hangs above a Tulip dining table by Eero Saarinen. In the living room, Arne Jacobsen’s sculptural Egg chair sits alongside a deep-green sofa by George Smith—a holdover from Hulka’s first concept for the room, and now in conversation with the willows outside.

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Local artwork includes a primary-color print by Ellsworth Kelly, who worked in nearby Spencertown, and a large-scale photograph of the Kinderhook Farm co-owner Georgia Ranney. There are also junk-store floral paintings and whimsical ceramic piggy banks. “We like tchotchkes and kitsch,” Malin says. The theme continues in Goetz’s office, where pug portraits abound, including one by the New York artist Maira Kalman.

The couple recently moved on from their namesake company, but traces of it carry forth. In the kitchen, an 18th-century French farm table is joined by a constellation-style David Weeks light fixture, similar to the one installed at Malin+Goetz’s first Los Angeles store. At the top of the stairs, the asymmetrical console by J. Wade Beam for Brueton is the same piece the homeowners chose some 15 years ago for their store in Hong Kong. Aside from the couple’s sunken garden, set within the remnants of the original stone foundation, it’s the only remaining hint of ruin in the whole house.