When Kiri Sulke began dating her now husband, Phillip, in New York in 2014, she was immediately drawn to the real estate developer and artist. “I trusted him straight away,” recalls the Australian-born lawyer turned writer and yoga instructor. “He is incredibly honest and unafraid to show his emotions and be vulnerable.” She also quickly sensed that Phillip does nothing halfheartedly—a scrupulousness he confirmed not long after, when he mentioned searching for a weekend escape from his Tribeca apartment. Within a few months, Phillip had canvassed 60 potential properties, from rural Pennsylvania to Massachusetts.
By 2015, Phillip and Kiri were squarely committed to a long-term relationship, when he learned that the Germantown, New York, farm belonging to AD100 hall of fame honoree Sheila Bridges was up for sale. Simply arriving at the circa-1890 home confirmed that the quest was over. “I started crying the first time I went down the driveway,” Kiri recalls of the pastoral 14 acres overlooking the Hudson River. “It was more beautiful and special than I ever could have imagined.”
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
The site would become even more meaningful after changing hands. Phillip, whose art practice includes drone photography of cargo ships, credits some of his best work to living along the Hudson. And in 2017 he proposed to Kiri under “the magic tree”—a mature oak that Kiri likens to an energy vortex.
In their first years in Germantown, the Sulkes improved their property’s landscape and satellite structures while keeping the clapboard farmhouse largely as Bridges left it. Enthralling as the building was, time revealed its need for more substantial stewardship. “A few harsh winters showed us that the infrastructure was strained and, in terms of family planning, we knew we needed a bit more space,” Phillip explains. With the same tirelessness that he conducted his initial property hunt, the couple sought a design team to renovate and expand the farmhouse in 2020. The extensive process concluded with the selection of AD PRO Directory firm Workstead. Today, the Sulkes summer at the property with their two children, and operate it as a rental, dubbed the Four Corners Estate, during the remainder of the year.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
The couple was drawn to Workstead, Phillip says, after an early realization that “the exterior of this project was as important as the interior”—a belief shared by the firm. “The farmhouse had a sweetness to it, but it didn’t necessarily feel like it had been built for that place,” explains Workstead cofounder Robert Highsmith, who, with his partners Stefanie Brechbuehler and Ryan Mahoney, spent several months devising a two-story south-facing wing that would “create something foundational for the whole property.”
.jpeg)
Inspired by a stone outcropping that frames the river view from the back porch, the designers decided their addition would be made of a handlaid blend of Connecticut granite and New York fieldstone, punctuated by mahogany windows framing dramatic views. “The outcropping felt so central to the soul of the land and that Hudson River School–like view, that we really wanted to celebrate the material context and its contrast to the clapboard,” Highsmith says. He also points out that the volume is neither a sentimental reproduction of the Hudson Valley’s hand-stacked buildings nor, as monumental and precisely made as it might seem, a feat of contemporary architecture dressed in stone. Rather, he likens it to a “modern ruin—something that is new but which feels deeply planted in the earth.”
That sensitivity guided the process. “We built three mockups to make sure the stone wouldn’t look fake in some way,” Phillip recalls, noting that the new wing “respects the proportions of the farmhouse, since our biggest fear was to build a McMansion or one of these older Frankenstein buildings you find on the East Coast.” Workstead also mounted trellises to the addition, so that vegetation would someday make the stone exterior appear even more integrated into the landscape.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
Conceived as a natural extension of the original farmhouse, the south wing accommodates a 21st-century-scale kitchen and adjoining room, along with a primary suite upstairs. In turn, the historic structure underwent only minor refinements to its center-hall layout, linking it to the addition while improving circulation through the older rooms. “Preservation was important,” Phillip says of taking functionality pressures off the farmhouse. “The older I get, the more I realize that patina is something you can only achieve with time. Kiri and I also had a fear that, if you get something wrong, it’s forever.”
Highsmith couldn’t agree more. “There was a discrete desire to create the exact correct thing here, not the grandest thing,” he notes. And on this romantically windswept site on the Hudson, correct means a rediscovery of the essentials. “We talk a lot about refuge in our residential projects—a belief that environment impacts your way of being, and that a home’s purpose is to be the well from which you draw a sense of belonging, of place,” Highsmith reflects on the expanded farmhouse. “In terms of Phillip and Kiri’s ambition to live with finely crafted things, in a way that respects nature and art and materials, this project follows that thread. It digs its heels into the literal ground.”
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
