Born in Hong Kong, Pik-Yee Berwick moved to England when she was eight years old. After studying fashion design and working on Topshop’s design team in London, a job opportunity brought her and her family to New York 17 years ago. While searching for a weekend home in the Hudson Valley, she came across an abandoned bunker outside Hudson that was a little more than a concrete shell at the time. Over the next nine years, she and her husband transformed it into a remarkably energy-efficient home, guided by passive-house principles and their own vision.
She sourced much of the furniture secondhand, including chairs from Goodwill, lamps from Housing Works, and a Chesterfield sofa acquired through a barter with a neighbor. Her Vitsoe shelves are lined with books on art and gardening, among titles by Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf and Stephen Orr's "The Gardener's Mindset." Family photographs are displayed alongside a still image from "In the Mood for Love" that reminds her of her father and works by her daughter, including a copy of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring created for school and a whimsical ink drawing of women and serpents Berwick tore out of her sketchbook and hung on the wall. Works by Anish Kapoor and Clare Chapman await their place on the walls, and vases brim with asters, Queen Anne’s lace, and yarrow snipped from her garden.
Three years ago, after their children had left home, the couple made the life-changing decision to leave Brooklyn, giving up their full-time jobs and making Hudson their permanent home. By then, Berwick had begun turning her attention to the outdoors, where she applied a similar design sensibility to the landscape. Starting with unwanted plants from her friends and neighbors, she gradually cultivated what is now a roughly three-quarter-acre garden. It has become what she calls her sketchbook, an ever-evolving composition where smoke bush, lupins, catmint, lady's mantle, astilbes, and phlox bloom beside lupins, hydrangeas, yarrow, and self-seeded Queen Anne's lace. Every morning begins the same way: coffee in hand, she wanders outside to see what has changed overnight.
Stepping away from full-time work has also allowed Berwick to reclaim what she values most: her time. She still occasionally helps friends with styling, real estate, and gardening, but otherwise spends long mornings in the garden and afternoons with one of the books she never had time to read. "The biggest luxury is my minutes," she says.
There’s a TV program in England called Grand Designs. The presenter is incredible. He’s called Kevin McCloud, and he films couples or families taking on building projects. I often laugh because everything that goes wrong in Grand Designs happened to us when we were building the house. We ran out of money–all of that stuff. We actually took on the building project ourselves toward the end and had to finish up a lot of it ourselves.
We decided to buy it after seeing all the houses up here in Hudson; they all tend to be very traditional, 18th-century saltboxes and that sort of thing. We heard the creek and the water, and we just said, let’s do it. Let’s have this adventure where we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know what the budget’s going to be. Let's involve ourselves in building something new.
I’ve always lived in old houses, so having a house like this was brand new to me.
One of the things I love about not working full-time is actually being able to look at my books and read them. I didn’t think I really read my books properly when I was working, and I would carry these books around from house to house every time we moved. Now I literally have books open by my bed and on the coffee table. I don’t want them just to be pretty books that you carry around. They actually have knowledge in them. They have advice on how to do stuff.
I love my books, but what I prize the most are the photo albums; they go back years with the kids, and they’re not digital. If they went up in smoke, they couldn’t be replaced.
My garden is different every day, and looks completely different from five weeks ago. I have white daisies that weren’t even there four weeks ago, and now they have overtaken my garden, and I don’t know where they came from.
I love really well-designed, really well-made things that are very simple. Being practical is everything to me.