Taking It Slow

CREATIVE COUPLE MARIE-LOUISE AND MARC HOM THOUGHTFULLY UPDATE A HISTORIC RETREAT IN COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK

- DAVID FOXLEY

It was close to 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday when Marie-Louise Hom knew that uprooting her family from Brooklyn Heights to Cooperstown, New York, some four hours north of the city, had been the correct decision. She and her husband, celebrated fashion and portrait photographer Marc Hom, were sleeping when their son Winston, then eight, insisted on waking them to admire the sublime upstate sunrise. "Of course you worry whether you're doing the right thing or not, with how you raise your kids," Marie-Louise, an interior designer, confides. "But in moments like that, you realize that there is something about living in such beauty."

To those who recognize the hamlet as little more than the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown may seem like an unusual place for a pair of cosmopolitan Danes to settle. But when they first visited friends there 19 years ago-in the dead of winter and a month after beginning to date-a spell was cast. The couple subsequently rented a few weeks each year, then for longer periods, until they made the decision to relocate full-time and enroll their sons in a local school while keeping their brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and a summer cabin in Denmark. (Marc's older son, Adrian, is also a frequent visitor.) It took our Scandinavian relatives a while to understand what we were doing on a hilltop in Cooperstown," Marie-Louise says. Now people come here and they're like, 'Okay, we get it.""