All it took was a little imagination. And a welding torch.
Two years ago, Park Slope couple Bronson and Courtney Bigelow, a litigator and public relations professional, respectively, were brainstorming on how they could spend more time up in Sullivan County, where they had recently built a weekend home.
“We asked around at dinner parties for ideas, and lots of friends complained that there wasn’t a place for them to host friends or family in the Catskills,” says Courtney. “I think that was the first spark.”
When they visited their home upstate, they’d drive by an abandoned, 120-year-old, one-room schoolhouse-turned-gospel church — and imagined how they could save the decaying beauty. “We’d peek in the windows and walk around the overgrown grounds,” Courtney recalls. “We had to have it; we just weren’t sure what we were going to do with it.”
With only campgrounds and roadside motels in the area, a design-forward hotel would be just the thing, the couple decided. “I got this idea that it would be a sort of ‘shoppable hotel,’ ” says Bronson. “A showroom that you could live in for a night.”
He had some woodworking experience picked up from his dad, but was hardly a professional. Still, he was passionate, and certain the concept would work. The state of New York was harder to convince.
After buying the property, the couple, both 35, spent a year persuading the Attorney General to drop the building’s religious designation, and another seven months renovating the space. “We had redone a loft in Tribeca together and loved the process, but we weren’t experts,” Courtney says. So Bronson decided to become one.
He improved his woodworking skills, taught himself welding and began collecting antiques from flea markets — all the while salvaging what he could from the schoolhouse itself. The goal was to keep the integrity of the building intact while opening it up to become a light-filled space where urban visitors could retreat for a weekend.
“When we pushed up into the attic, we found an extra 16 feet,” Bronson recalls. “So we put two guest rooms upstairs, and kept the downstairs open.”
The belltower is now paned with glass, giving guests in the Belfry Suite unobstructed views of the vintage bronze bell and filling the room with light. Upstairs bathrooms are papered in one-of-a-kind wallcoverings found on SpoonFlower.com. And the sprawling living room is cozy with a pair of long linen pin-cushion sofas from Horchow and two leather ones from Empiric Studio in Los Angeles.
The 1,400-square-foot main floor also has a full kitchen — ideal for cooking up grand dinners presented at the big, communal dining table.
“The emphasis in the name is on ‘house,’ because it feels more like a home than a hotel,” says Bronson.
Bookings have been so strong that Bronson quit as a lawyer a few months after the inn opened in the summer of 2012. In addition to acting as the innkeeper, he’s also the resident designer — having repurposed and refined nearly every piece of furniture on display in the clapboard space.
“I generally mention that everything is for sale during the tour, but I try not to push it,” he says. “If guests are interested, they can grab a booklet of tearsheets set out on the coffee table.”
Visitors and fans can also buy his upcycled bar carts and repurposed iceboxes on the hotel’s Web site. So far, the Bigelows have sold about a dozen pieces.
The couple love their new venture, but prefer to be discrete hoteliers. “Bronson and I haven’t always loved B&Bs,” explains Courtney. “So we are available, but we’re not hovering.” Bronson generally shows guests their rooms, helps with dinner reservations, scrawls a map and his cell number on the chalkboard, then walks back to his own home around the corner.
Since opening, the hotel has hosted mostly creative types — many hunting for homes in the area. “It’s a great way to make-believe what it would be like,” says Courtney of a Hillside stay. “Maybe someday we’ll have other properties to help introduce people to the Catskills. An old firehouse or a summer camp would be a dream.”
Meanwhile, on a spring Saturday afternoon, Bronson is out back welding a monkey wrench table of his own design, and Courtney is prepping the guest rooms. “For now, we’re busy enough,” she says.
The Hillside Schoolhouse is located at 259 Van Tuyl Road, Barryville, NY; phone: (845) 557-8565.