Old money, liberal values (well, arty ones) – that’s the Hudson Valley. Sarah Barrell heads upriver to hang with the A-list
The Hamptons, darling, they’re so last summer. Those in the know don’t close their beach houses, because they don’t have beach houses. Nothing so St Tropez tacky graces the property portfolio of New York’s second-home savants. The place to be, particularly during fall, with its oh-so-idyllic landscape of pumpkins and autumn leaves, is the Hudson Valley.
The buzz in New York about rural boltholes centres on the Hudson Valley and neighbouring Catskill Mountains. Writers from food and travel magazines are making pilgrimages upstate and the property pages are asking of towns in the valley’s Dutchess County “is this the next Hamptons?” It’s not. It’s more like Gloucestershire: understated, rural with old-money credentials that stretch back centuries. And unlike the Hamptons, visitors don’t need well-connected friends to get a bed. Six hotels opened in Dutchess County last year and there’s no lack of venerable old inns. Rhinebeck, a pretty market town in central Dutchess, is home to The Beekman Arms, the “oldest inn in America”.
Sarah Barrell 