It was Valentine’s Day 1998 when Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows fell in love—with a house. The Manhattan-based couple, founders of Hostler Burrows gallery, had been looking for a place in upstate New York when, on that fateful snowy afternoon, their intrepid real estate agent led them down a dirt road. “It looked like a Swedish country home,” Burrows recalls of the cabin, hand-built by its previous owners and covered at the time in red clapboard. Its vernacular instantly appealed to the couple, given their then newly opened gallery’s speciality in Scandinavian antiques. “I call it our little handmade house,” says Hostler, still crazy about its pine-clad living room and fireplace of hewn local stone.
In the nearly three decades since they purchased the property, the couple have left their inimitable mark—replacing the roof, recladding façades in cedar shake, and adapting the old barn on the property into an office and utility area. Along the way, they have slowly filled the home with things they love, mixing contemporary art and design with vintage and antique Nordic finds to achieve a cozy extension of their gallery program. In the living room, for example, a chandelier made up of gem-like glass forms by Frida Fjellman dangles above a 1960s rug by Marianne Richter and Josef Frank’s 1934 Liljevalchs sofa, upholstered in Hawaii print, one of his iconic floral patterns. “We collect a lot of the early Svenskt Tenn pewter pieces and textiles,” says Burrows, referring to the venerable Stockholm emporium, helmed by Frank and Estrid Ericson in the mid-20th century. Hostler points to the horses on the mantel, explaining that the early 1900s carved-timber figurines (some of many around the house) belong to a folk-art tradition popularized by Swedish woodworkers on their lunch breaks. “It’s that spirit I love,” says Hostler. “These are people who are working and have families but are still driven to make things.”
That ethos remains at the heart of their gallery program, which spotlights the trace of the hand across art forms of all kinds. “Our first love was ceramics,” Burrows recalls. “That’s where we started.”Once a springboard for their business, the medium is now ever present in their home—from the tiled surface of the 1950s Bjørn Wiinbladdining table to the svelte vintage Berndt Friberg vessels in nearly every room. Three years ago, their taste for stranger, more avant-garde pieces—the porcelain sea anemone by Eva Zethraeus on their hearth, for instance—spurred them to open HB381, a second gallery with a focus on contemporary ceramics, much of it, again, from Scandinavia. Examples appear across the 35-acre upstate property, among them the Jakob Jørgensen totem outside the barn and the Jasmin Anoschkin sculpture of a hybrid creature floating on a dock in the pond.
Back inside their little handmade house, personal keepsakes abound, including 1970s leather stuffed animals, photographs by their friend Catherine Opie, and Guatemalan masks. In the kitchen stands an original Josef Frank cabinet that was once part of the designer’s personal collection. “It’s super meaningful and full of treasures,” Burrows explains of the piece, which displays plastic tokens from the Jardin des Tuileries merry-go-round (souvenirs from a trip with one of their daughters) alongside miniatures by artists on their roster. “Something about old things—especially the Swedish, Finnish, and Danish—just resonates with both of us,” says Burrows. “They feel like home.”