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Living small
The small shack, one of the few extant examples of a popular 1970s design, had no heating or bathrooms, but it was theirs for $85,000.
By Julie Lasky
One weekend in 2021, Gemma Warren does what she does every weekend: sit down for coffee at her home in Tulum, Mexico, browse listings of genuine properties for cabins in New York City’s Catskill Mountains.
She and her husband, Nick Warren, who is English, had discovered the Catskills several years earlier, when they lived in Brooklyn and worked for London-based marketing and PR firms. They fell in love with the region’s aromatic forests, sunny meadows, and sunny meadows. icy streams and bears, which weren’t very threatening (unless provoked). They wanted to buy a weekend home, but couldn’t find anything that fit their budget.
Six years ago, they moved to Tulum, on the Yucatan Peninsula, because they also had a sunny, oceanic air in their nature. There they ran remotely. But the Catskills were still calling.
During that fateful online browsing query three years ago, Ms. Warren, now 37, saw an ad for a cabin in the village of Delancey in the western Catskills, New York. The starting price: $65,000. The space was 192 square feet and lacked heating and bathrooms.
“A shack,” is how Warren, 38, described it: “There’s running water. But that’s about it. “
And yet, it encompassed 6. 8 acres covered with old trees and tall grass. Next to him flowed a stream that bubbled audibly in a video. A giant window, the water and the forest.
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