The Octagon House

Plain English Introduction

The octagon house at 33 Hook Road in Rhinebeck, New York was built in 1977 on five acres of a 32-acre parcel negotiated with his brother — former Astor land. Its builder was Geoffrey B. Carter, twenty-something, trained at Goddard College under architect David Sellers and already running a multi-site contracting business. The design came from Orson Fowler's A Home for All — an 1848 pattern book arguing that the octagon was the ideal form for domestic architecture. The house arrived a century late, as its builder put it, but with no less conviction.

The foundation — slip-form fieldstone, learned from Scott and Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life — took the whole first year. That first winter the basement was home: a tarp over the deck, a wood stove with the pipe out the window, a toilet four feet off the floor. A brother's 1977 Dodge pickup with a plow was the only way in and out. Baby Watson cheesecake for lunch. CJ's cheese pizza for dinner. Every Sunday, Deisings Bakery, a cheese Danish. That was the pleasure.

The siding was milled by Robert Coffin on Sisters Hill Road in Stanfordville. The stone was gathered from the ground. Thirty-two casement windows were hand-built on a Delta shaper in a rented one-room shop in Red Hook — cypress frames from a silo pulled down with a cable, glass cut by hand from a dilapidated violet house near St. Christopher's in Red Hook. The tiger maple spiral staircase has a 20-foot octagonal center core splined together, with treads mortised in. The cupola floor rotates on garage door hardware.

While the house was being built, a contracting business was running out of its basement — custom millwork, Gothic Revival windows, cabinet making, furniture making, elaborate gate building, municipal contracts, and rabbit hutches. The house was given away in 1986. It was never maintained. Bought back in 2012 — retirement accounts liquidated, built it twice and paid for it twice — in hideous condition: frozen pipes, leaks everywhere, no electrical service, floors caving, roof caving, vultures living in it. A Dodge Caravan left in the basement was still there with 506 miles on the odometer. Worth it. The roof was replaced in 2017. It is still standing.

In Retrospect

Looking back, the octagon house was a starter home. First house, first marriage, the beginning of what takes decades to develop — if it develops at all. Built in the middle of the woods, in the middle of a swamp, at near-poverty levels, with a tight-knit group of friends and a brother doing a parallel thing on the adjacent land. Architectural infancy.

The attraction to Fowler was mainly practical — a way to save money on a non-rectangular floor plan that used less wall for the same space. Will Rieley was studying Thomas Jefferson at the time, working on his projects, wearing a cloth nail belt. That current ran through the work. George Clark, who had played bass for the Allman Brothers before they got famous, was down the road with his girlfriend Marcia, building a house full of bald cypress shipped up from Georgia because he was such a Southern boy. A Rhinebeck crew.

The house had originally been planned for a different site — a 5-acre piece on River Road just north of the old schoolhouse, which Bronson Chandler was going to subdivide for the purpose. That fell through. The Hook Road property was the second choice. In retrospect, the better one.

There was a burst of energy for about two years getting the house into good shape. And in retrospect, the Home for All concept actually works. It was inexpensive to build. Once it was built, it was empty — so furniture was brought in to fill it, primarily abstract laminated work produced post-Goddard College. The second floor has two north skylights and a separate sink: a studio, built into the plan from the beginning. A fantastical house built on a $20,000 loan from the Poughkeepsie Savings Bank.

When the funds ran dry, the house morphed into a business. Shovels came out. The crew crawled under the basement of Norman Greig's farm on Pitcher Lane, dug a foundation underneath the active house by hand, carried all the dirt out in spackle buckets, and built it into a room with a sauna. Clawing into the next decade.

The house also carried things forward from a previous life — out of the Kingwood Park 1950s postwar house came certain signature things: a multi-colored slate floor fashionable in the 60s, a circular cast iron furnace grate from the coal furnace age forming a central round air duct in the entry hall, and the concept of an in-house planter in the foyer — vegetation flourishing there to meet the visitor. All of it transplanted to Hook Road.

A friend named Peter went out on Old Post Road where some dead cherry stood in the woods. It was brought up and milled by Robert Coffin on Sisters Hill Road, air-dried on the Foley Bell saw planer and shaped. No dust masks were worn. The smell of the cherry was like an old tobacco pipe — mesmerizing, the kind of smell that stays with you.

But at the time it seemed rather boring. The bigger purpose hadn't found itself yet. It was survival in the woods — working two jobs, hoping the body kept up. The most pleasure during that phase was watching Doctor Who once a week on a television set with an expandable aluminum antenna hung in the attic and a twisted flat wire coming down through the wall. Once a week, a dollar for the Sunday New York Times, reading about Ronald Reagan and worrying. Life was passing — that was known. But like everyone that age with an affliction, you think you're never going to die. Or it's so remote that wasted time was time to waste, with no regrets. The regrets would come later.

Rhinebeck was a sleepy place then — the fringes of the Dutchess County Fair, the Dairy Bar where a father used to take his son. It has since become something else entirely.

The House in Its Landscape

Hook Road runs through a particular stretch of Dutchess County that was, in the 1970s, still largely what it had been for generations — dirt roads, swamp, mature maple forest, the remains of farms that had been working land since the eighteenth century. The property at number 33 had been part of Vincent Astor's holdings. Directly across the road was the Orelots — an estate where iron ore had been mined, the ore pit now lost and grown over, a hand-dug well still marking the road that led to it. Carter was close to the Chanler family who owned the Orelots. Across the street was one of the oldest homesteads in the area, its foundation surviving, artifacts from a late 1700s house still in the ground. A deserted farmhouse sat in the woods with 1930s cars rotting among the trees. There were stone piles on the land — the kind left when fields are cleared of rock. The old-timers called it a potato field: everywhere you dug, you hit a rock shaped like a potato. A few miles south, off Bull's Head Road near Lake Quarry Road, old slate quarries had been swallowed by the woods — big pits in the ground that nobody could find anymore. Will Rieley knew where they were and would walk out to them. The land wasn't pastoral. It was industrial, worked hard, and then abandoned and grown over. The octagon house was built in the ruins of a previous economy.

Old Post Road, not far away, was still a dirt road, dusty in summer, lined with raspberries and blackberries before the industrial buildings went in. A CJ5 Jeep with broken engine mounts crossed an open field to reach the Grand Union without taking any road at all. Nick Forster — not yet the founder of Hot Rize or eTown, still working a gig at the Roseland Dude Ranch near Stanfordville — was part of this world. George Trow, a New Yorker staff writer, had his house in Germantown a few miles up the road. George Clark, a bass player who had started out with the Allman Brothers before they got famous, lived at the corner of Lemon Lane and Hook Road in an ancient house with his girlfriend Marcia. Before the octagon house was built, George would drive past the piece of land in his lime green Dodge van and say "there's Geoff's house" — then keep going for an all-night catfishing run at Miller's Pond by the Schuyler House.

The survey of the land — 32.785 acres, three-lot minor subdivision, prepared by Thomas M. Mannix, L.S. & P.E., of Rhinebeck, dated June 1977 and revised February 1978 — is the founding document.

The Design Origin: Fowler, Rieley, and the Octagon Tradition

The source document was Orson Squire Fowler's A Home for All, or the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building, first published in 1848, expanded in 1853, and reprinted in 1973 — the edition on the bookshelf alongside the Whole Earth Catalog and the Nearing book. Fowler's argument was practical and democratic: the octagon admitted more light and air than the rectangle, used less wall for the same floor area, eliminated dark corners where, as Fowler put it, witches lurked and filth collected, and could be built cheaply by any man for his family. No dark rooms, no wasted space, no right angles trapping bad air. Well lit, well ventilated, low cost — a house for the common man.

Fowler practiced what he preached. Between 1848 and 1853 he built his own octagon house in Fishkill, New York — four stories, sixty rooms, a spiral staircase rising seventy feet to a glass-enclosed octagonal cupola, central heating, running water, indoor flush toilets, a roof cistern, natural gas lighting, speaking tubes between rooms, dumbwaiters from the kitchen basement to the dining room. Each floor was encircled by a porch that went all the way around. They called it Fowler's Folly. He didn't live in it long. Battered by the financial panic of 1857, he rented it to a New Yorker who turned it into a boarding house. Years later many of the tenants suffered typhoid, probably caused by cesspool seepage through the gravel walls. Fowler sold the house in 1859. In 1897 it was condemned as a public health hazard and dynamited. Nothing remains. A search for the foundation in Fishkill turned up nothing.

The octagon house at 33 Hook Road was described by its builder as "my personal participation in the 1850s octagon craze, arriving a century late but with no less conviction" — and also as "my A.J. Davis, A.J. Downing look-alike thing, built without really even understanding who they were." The back-to-the-land movement and the nineteenth-century pattern book tradition arrived at the same moment and were built from simultaneously.

The architect was William D. Rieley — known then as Will Riley, running White Corner Builders out of Rhinebeck with Ralph Gabriner as his partner. The house was designed in collaboration between Rieley and Carter. By the time construction was underway Rieley had already moved on to Charlotte, NC. The drawings were his parting gift after a four-year friendship — and Carter maintained a lifelong friendship with him. Rieley drew two sheets: a floor plan labeled Carter Residence, Hook Road, Rhinebeck, New York, Preliminary Scheme, 1978, and a full building section in blue ink, carefully lettered and fully dimensioned, from the stone foundation to the wind vane indicator at the top of the cupola. The note he sent with the drawings captures the relationship exactly — one craftsman guiding another, across distance, in capital letters: "DON'T WORRY — YOU'LL BOTH BE AMAZED AT #1 — HOW EASY IT WILL BE TO BUILD #2 — HOW EASY IT WILL BE TO NEGOTIATE #3 — HOW TERRIFIC IT WILL LOOK. LET ME KNOW IF YOU GET INTO ANY KIND OF JAM OR NEED MORE INFORMATION." Signed: Will.

Rieley went on to become one of the leading authorities on Jefferson's landscape. His firm, Rieley & Associates in Charlottesville, Virginia, has worked for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest, the National Park Service, and the University of Virginia, where he taught for twenty years. Jefferson returned to the octagonal form repeatedly: Poplar Forest is octagonal, the Monticello bedroom alcove is octagonal. The convergence runs through Rieley directly.

Formation: Who Built It and Why

The builder grew up in Spackenkill, Poughkeepsie, where George Carrothers was a childhood friend from age five.

The path to building ran through Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, where in 1970 architects John Mallery and David Sellers — graduates of the Yale School of Architecture and founders of the Design-Build movement — established an architecture program based on learning by doing. The mentorship was one-on-one with David Sellers. The Goddard Design Building was constructed by students from shiplap siding and recycled windows at a cost of $40,000. That method carried through everything that followed.

Goddard ran on a trimester system: for one third of the year, students had to go do something related to their discipline. One trimester was spent building a plexiglass house on the Saugerties Highway outside Woodstock, NY, under the discipline of Donnie Miles, working for Michael Zimmer. Another trimester was spent on Long Island working for Pospisil all day and living in a tent pitched inside a water retention sump surrounded by chain link fence with barbed wire on top. The only way in was to climb a tree and drop over the wire. Nobody was allowed inside water retention devices. Nobody would look. One night it rained, the sleeping bag soaked through, and there was a lake rising around the tent. Another trimester: a drive-away Cadillac belonging to some rich man, stopping at college campuses along the way and pitching tents on the outskirts, ending up in Sarasota, Florida — where Tom Thumb used to live — checked into the Mayfair Hotel, found a crew from Georgia building a bank, and self-promoted into a position slightly larger than the truth warranted. About five days in, a tobacco-chewing boss stopped work, lined up fourteen men, walked up and down like a drill sergeant spitting tobacco, and said: "I know it was one of yous. The tool shed's been getting robbed at night." He reached into his pocket and pushed the button on a switchblade kept down by his thigh. "And if I catch which one of yous has been doing it, I'm gonna spill your guts on the ground here." That night: quit, didn't collect the paycheck, went back to the rooming house, packed, and moved on. Farewell to Sarasota.

What Donnie Miles wrote in his evaluation of December 13, 1972, after the plexiglass house trimester, sets the formation in context. Carter had written: "The second realm is that of poetry which I took under Louise Gluck. I found the most gratification and pleasure in reading and writing. My only reservation in devoting my full attention is the fact that those who do usually do not earn their bread in such a manner. I am torn between the conflict of spending allotted 'college time' working on the poetry which I love or to struggle in a field remote to my wishes. I have structured my life and course in light of these opposing drives. I also acted informally by reading two novels of Lawrence Durrell's and six of Hermann Hesse's besides spending a massive amount of time obtaining food through hunting with both bow and double barrel. An education in a more basic sense." Miles responded: "Last week someone noted that Geoff Carter is a cowboy; the statement came home to me because it is the embodiment of all the romanticism we learned to attribute to true men. Actually, I probably don't have enough information about Geoff to evaluate his character — only that his proposed trip around the world in the next 4 months seems to be in keeping at least with my image of him. He appears studious and articulate in his endeavors and oddly enough, I feel he has the capability and temperament — when directed — to do serious & lasting scholarly work. I would like to see him pursue his education in a less thoroughly existential direction rather than perhaps foregoing graduate school." He didn't go to graduate school. He built the octagon house instead.

Then Will Rieley and Ralph Gabriner at White Corner Builders in Rhinebeck — Rieley the architect, Gabriner the photographer, partners. Then John Corcoran's house in North Haverhill, Massachusetts — Corcoran a sculptor, a Goddard classmate, later the creator of the Daniel Pearl Memorial; at Goddard when they didn't feel like going to class, they hunted woodcock and grouse. By 1977, in the builder's own words, a half-decent framer.

Corcoran lived near Opus 40 in Saugerties before moving to Tivoli — Harvey Fite's monumental bluestone environment, nearly nine acres of hand-laid terraces and ramps built largely alone over 37 years. Skeet shooting together on visits. Another man building an impossible thing by hand from local stone. The Hudson Valley in those years was full of them.

In 1974 the builder was living in the gardener's cottage at Rokeby — the historic Livingston estate on the Hudson — with Pam Forster, sister of Nick Forster. Work was ongoing for Winthrop Aldrich on the main house. Winthrop's mother had first invited the builder's mother for tea — a character check — before the cottage was offered. Rob Hare, a sculptor and Goddard classmate, was renting at Rokeby at the same time. Ralph Gabriner was there. So was Jean Fleming, who does the Halloween parades. Rich Aldrich, Winthrop's brother, would later come by the octagon house almost every day during construction. George William Swift Trow came into the picture during these years — a New Yorker staff writer associated with the magazine for nearly thirty years, best known for his 1980 essay "Within the Context of No Context." Trow had a house in Germantown. The bookshelves in it, the desk the typewriter sat on, the lecture podium — all built in the octagon house basement.

The man writing "Within the Context of No Context" — arguing that America had destroyed its own authentic culture — was having his furniture built in an eight-sided house basement by a man building that house from an 1848 pattern book. Trow came to the octagon house frequently.

In the late 1980s there was a trip to New York City to help Trow buy a monitor and bring it back on the train to Germantown. Trow took the builder to the offices of The New Yorker and introduced him to William Shawn, the editor. They sat together in a room while Trow and Shawn discussed a piece of work. Trow was very deferential to him. On the same trip, standing in front of Trump Tower, Trow made a prophetic observation — contrasting its nouveau riche opulence with the classic elegance of the Waldorf Astoria a few blocks away. The man who had written that television was establishing a context of no context was naming the next chapter in real time, on the street, in front of the building. A drink at the Campobello Club, inside the Campobello Apartments tucked into Grand Central Station. Trow knew a secret way to walk along a transparent catwalk in the arched transom windows of the station.

The Trow circle extended through the Germantown and Linlithgo world. Timothy S. Mayer — Tony-nominated playwright and lyricist, director of My One and Only on Broadway, collaborator with Peter Sellars on Mother Courage, lyricist for James Taylor, co-writer with Donald Fagen of "Century's End" for the film Bright Lights, Big City — had a house on the hill above Linlithgo Landing, at the dead end. The builder worked on the house and was its de facto caretaker during the two or three years of heavy occupation of the Germantown area. Bill Murray was there. Margot Kidder. Dan Aykroyd came down from Canada — the first time anyone had seen windshield wipers on the front headlights of a Mercedes-Benz. Murray was in Hyde Park for a season, performing in a play Trow and Mayer had written together at the Hyde Park Festival Theater, since burned down, directly across from the Vanderbilt estate. One night at the Rhinecliff Hotel — heavy drinking in the courtyard next to the train tracks, Murray seeming manic, all of them at a table in the main room. The same room where, later, a concert played when the Clearwater docked at Rhinecliff. Lottery tickets were passed out. First prize was won and donated back to Clearwater. Pete Seeger acknowledged it from the microphone. Because Mayer and Fagen were collaborators, Fagen was part of this world — which is why, at lunch at Trow's house one afternoon at a table off the sleeping porch wing, Fagen was there. He didn't talk much, ate lightly, and spent the meal circling the yard with disposable cardboard cameras photographing flowers and insects. Mayer died of cancer at 43 in Linlithgo, at the house, still working on a play about Rip Van Winkle. On the front porch, near the end, he said: "Geoff, you play the hand you're dealt" — and handed Carter a prism aimed at the sun.

Around 1980, on a back road near Oneonta, two men were talking outside a church with a wooden steeple. One of them was Daniel Patrick Moynihan — Senator from New York, first term. He gave directions and smiled: "Now this is what you call serving your constituents."

Montgomery Place — the only surviving neoclassical house designed by A.J. Davis, owned by Major John White Delafield — was another world running in parallel. The squash court the Delafield family had added to the estate was home during the octagon house years. The Major would drive over to Hook Road in his pink Lincoln Continental with his second wife to watch the house go up. Richard H. Jenrette — co-founder of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette — also came to watch. Lydia Redmond at Pine Hill in Tivoli — born in Rome in 1902, married three times, once to an Italian prince, once to Roland Livingston Redmond, still going at 107. Wolcott Builders — Del Wolcott's Rhinebeck firm, whose whole crew took the first day of deer season off en masse. Sylvia Straton, mistress of Bill Wasserman who owned the Delano place: a powerful woman who carried a pistol on her hip, rode a horse, and hated men. All the shutters on her brick mansion were rebuilt, working alongside a German painter in the basement next to the gigantic converted coal furnace. The caretaker — called Lurch — raped the maid and disappeared. Everything swam by. And where the next meal was coming from, really.

In 1985, the year before the house was given away, a replica of the A.J. Davis gate at Montgomery Place was built — curved — in the octagon house basement, for Dennis Delafield, the Major's son. The original had been wrecked when Duff Gummere hit it coming out of the Annandale Hotel one night. The gate was built in the same basement where the first winter had been spent, the business run, and Trow's furniture made. By 1981 C.C. & G. was doing restoration work for Jenrette — the same man who had stood on Hook Road and watched — at Edgewater in Barrytown, one of the great Greek Revival houses on the Hudson. Edgewater has an octagonal gatehouse.

Genealogy and Inheritance

The money that bought the land came from a grandmother's inheritance — $10,000, split between two brothers. Eleven acres of a 32.785-acre parcel in Rhinebeck. The brother took his portion and built his own house on adjacent land at the same time, using a chainsaw until a kickback cut his eyebrow open.

The land itself carried its own inheritance. It had been part of Vincent Astor's holdings. Across the street, the foundation of one of the oldest homesteads in the area was still in the ground, with artifacts from a late 1700s house. Ennis Kane — the old caretaker at the Delano place, who had been hunting rabbits on this land when FDR came up and the Secret Service surrounded him — could remember when there were no trees on these hills and you could see all the way to Rhinebeck. He remembered the tin roof of an old cider mill visible from the intersection of upper and lower Hook Road, which he called Bunker Hill, near Snyder's Swamp. Rich Aldrich came by almost every day during construction, telling stories of the land.

The techniques were also inherited. The slip-form fieldstone foundation came from Scott and Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life — first published 1954, reissued in the 1970s as one of the central texts of the back-to-the-land movement. The Nearings had learned it from New York architect Ernest Flagg, who developed the method in 1920. Applied first at the octagon house. Applied again a decade later at Sneaker's Gap — the same hands, the same technique, the same philosophy.

The land on Field Road nearby was sold by Bobby Bard — the same Bobby Bard whose sawmill cut the siding for the octagon house — to George Carrothers, childhood friend from Spackenkill, who began building his own house there in 1980. The same materials, the same landscape, the same circle. Bobby Bard was a soldier, Field Road. His father had been a gunsmith. His first wife was named Priscilla, whose job was to be a gynecological model for a medical school — a volunteer, perhaps. It turned Bobby off. He had a Weimaraner named Fritz. One day at Bobby's mill, Fritz found a big black snake in the stone wall — a grass snake, caught mid-drift — and shook it violently until it exploded.

Peg and Buzz Gummere — also known as Richard Gummere — lived in the southernmost octagonal gatehouse to Edgewater in Barrytown. Peg was from Duxbury, Massachusetts, where an architect/builder named Alex Wade had designed her house. Alex had a white beard, was a jolly man, and was said to have had syphilis — believed cured. He later had a bad back and became an inspector near Woodstock. Alex hired a Norwegian named Jim, whose girlfriend Nina had one kidney and a roving eye. Jim lived at Rokeby, smoked Marlboros, was spaced out, needed money, and talked about robbing the big house. That ended the association. Peg Gummere was a C.C. & G. client — drainage and pest control for her estate. Her son Duff later wrecked the A.J. Davis gate at Montgomery Place coming out of the Annandale Hotel.

On trips to New York City, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen was a frequent stop — founded in 1785. Samuel Thomson, whose work connects to the genealogy of Sneaker's Gap, was one of its members. A society of craftsmen established in the year the Constitution was being drafted, still operating.

The Documentary Record

Four primary documents survive from the construction period and after.