“We change houses, not spouses,” actor/builder Corbin Bernsen likes to say. His partner, Amanda Pays, long ago shifted her focus from acting to interior design and the two have been on a decades-long extreme-remodeling tear: in 36 years of marriage, they’ve flipped 30 properties. We’ve been avidly following along since featuring their work in our first book.
The two approach their work with care, hand picking every element themselves (and searching high and low before purchasing). Corbin can be found tearing down walls when he’s not on set (his latest role is in the new Jon Hamm series Your Friends and Neighbors). And they fully unpack and live in each of their places before kissing them goodbye.
Based in Los Angeles for many years, Amanda and Corbin decamped for New York’s Hudson Valley in 2019 when the youngest of their four sons left for college on the East Coast. Their latest upstate project, a historic farm compound, is newly on the market. Join us for a tour.
Photography courtesy of Amanda Pays (@amandapays) and The Lillie K. Team at Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Reality.
Above: Located in Germantown, New York, 1910 Barnswood sits on eight acres of farmland and has a cottage and giant barn behind the main house. It was originally part of the adjacent Livingston estate, now Clermont Manor, a National Historic Landmark open as a museum and park with walking trails.
Above: The house received a lot of clunky tweaks over the years—the laundry room was right off the front door. Amanda and Corbin stripped it down and set out to re-create its “simple, classic, colonial-style” elements. “
“It’s going to be an new old house,” says Amanda in season 7, episode 4 of the TV series In with the Old. “We are really turning a newer house into an older house,” specifies Corbin. “Real wood, real timbers, real floors.” The show is available on HBO and worth watching to see the place as it was and all that went into its dramatic transformation.
Above: Enter through the back door and there’s a custom-built mudroom with a newly introduced flagstone floor and closet doors made of salvaged wood. The walls are finished with lime wash.
Amanda and Corbin wrote a book about their remodeling adventures called Open House: here are their key tips plus a look at their place in the South of France.
Above: The enlarged living room retains its original fireplace with a new mantel that Corbin created from wood in their scrap pile. They rebuilt the house introducing period materials in every room, including beams from Rousseau Reclaimed Lumber & Flooring of Portland and Windham, Maine, that Corbin hand picked individually, knowing exactly where each would go: three are structural and the rest decorative.
Above: The library/TV room. The furnishings are vintage pieces, many of which travel with the couple from project to project. The walls are a lime wash: “a mix of green with muddy gray,” says Amanda.
Above: The 16 antique doors throughout are English pine acquired from Parker Doyle of Preservation Co. in Huntsville, Alabama—who says they came out of a house in Alexandria, Egypt, built a century ago likely for a British family. “We built the frames after we purchased the doors,” explains Amanda. “I love their height; it’s unusual in such low-ceilinged spaces.”
Above: The kitchen island and terracotta cabinets were built by a local cabinetmaker Ross Brown to Amanda’s specs. She often buys appliances from American chain stores, purchasing them en masse to negotiate a discount, but here she succumbed to an Aga range.
Note the carpenter’s signature, E.B. Palmer, on one of the newly added old ceiling beams.
Above: Fittingsly, there’s a farmhouse sink.
Above: The couple opened the kitchen to the dining room and introduced a built-in bar.
Above: The house’s wide-board flooring is newly introduced—its salvaged ceiling decking that came out of a clothespin factory in Nova Scotia.
Above: A place to work.
Above: The main bedroom. The bed cover is from Les Indiennes in nearby Hudson, NY.
Above: Corbin’s dressing room, fully stocked with country attire.
Above: A bathroom for two.
Above: There are three bedrooms in the main house.
Above: There’s a back terrace overlooking an outbuilding that the couple use as a cottage. Amanda decided to paint all three structures barn red, wavered for a moment, but was glad she stuck with her choice: “it adds a very, very classic farmstead kind of feeling.”
Above: The couple gave the cottage the same exterior and interior upgrades as the main house.
Above: The perfect place for guests: the cottage has upstairs and downstairs bedrooms.
Above: An antique patchwork quilt on a log bed.
Above: The whitewashed attic has a new-old stair and floor.
Above: The barn has been converted into a gathering space that can be easily turned into living quarters.
Above: The second floor is currently used as a gym.
Above: The barn has its own custom-built kitchen.
Above: A glimpse of Corbin’s barn office showcasing his snow globe and Hawaiian shirt collections.
Above: The couple’s 1974 Ford pickup travels with them to each upstate project—yes, they’re already at work on the next house.
The property is listed at $4.6 million via The Lillie K. Team at Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Reality.
Here are more Pays-Bernsen productions:
