English Arts & Crafts sensibility at Rumford Hall

It was twenty years ago that a friend told Jeanne Farewell and Monty Denneau about a unique property in New York's Hudson Valley.

- TOVAH MARTIN

The house wasn't for sale; the friend simply thought that Monty and Jeanne would find a rapport with the 1879 house and its 15 acres. In 2013, as the couple were looking to expand from their petite house, that special property went on the market. The friend had been right; there was instant chemistry.

JEANNE AND MONTY have always been more at home in the past but this house had a mystique. Lovingly preserved by previous owners, with many original features intact, the house centers on a massive Great Hall, 30 feet by 40 feetjust what Jeanne, an artist, art historian, and musician, needed for her grand piano and for recitals. The engineering of the house fascinated Monty, who is an IBM Fellow and computer scientist. He was sold the moment he saw the turnbuckle on the second floor, part of a system that distributes the weight for the beams of the Great Hall. A student of the 19th-century English founder of the Arts & Crafts Movement William Morris, Jeanne saw Arts & Crafts earmarks inside and out.