Lovely Farmhouse 4b/3.5ba w/ Chef's Kitchen/Big Porch, close to Great Barrington

In 2010, Mickey and I were living in Park Slope, Brooklyn in a 3rd floor walk-up apartment with our 4 kids. We loved city life, but we were longing for a rural retreat. For over a year, we visited little towns outside of NYC whenever we could. No place we visited felt right, until late 2011, when we rented a house in Sheffield for the weekend and instantly fell in love with the Berkshires. It had the right mix of farms and coffee shops, locals and tourists, history and modernity that we were looking for.

We ended up moving up full-time in the fall of 2012, and Mickey went down to the city three days a week for work. In 2014, we bought a fixer-upper built in 1838 in Egremont and turned the 2-acre property into a little homestead with chickens, ducks, and sheep.

In 2020, we had another baby (and then again in 2022!). In 2021, we bought a property in Stockbridge (also a fixer-upper!). The main house was built in 1780 and was a stagecoach stop between Hartford, Connecticut and Albany, New York (before Interstate-90 cut Hill Road in half in the mid-1950s and created South Hill Road).

We now have 6 kids and have just built a new house in Stockbridge (if you’d like to see how 3 college kids, plus our 19-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, built that house over the summer of 2024, check out my blog at modernshaker.com!).