When a pair of Upper East Side residents purchased an 8,000-square-foot home in Bedford Hills, New York, in 2017, they intended to use the space as a weekend retreat. The nearly 200-year-old property had been “badly neglected” and in need of basic plumbing and electrical upgrades right away, says Amanda Offit, who owns the home with her husband. In fact, it wasn’t until December 2019 that they could comfortably stay there overnight. Then, when the pandemic hit, the couple and their three school-age children, as well as Offit’s mother and brother, chose to decamp to the leafy idyll full-time.
Offit, who hadn’t yet addressed the house’s interiors, says that designing the space was her “lockdown labor of love.” Her husband, she adds, was hesitant to hire professional help and put Offit in charge with taking all things decor-related into her own hands. “I sat with a computer on my lap and looked through images and pulled out files of things that I had saved over the years—that I had ripped out of magazines and looked at on Instagram,” Offit says. “I discovered all of these talented people who were making things.”
She then called up a former colleague, Kristen Bedell—who had since acquired an interior design license as the founder of decorating firm Jamgotchian—to help order trade-specific fabrics and furnishings. “I would say 98% of the second and the third floor of the house was done that way by myself,” Offit says. Once pandemic restrictions loosened, she returned to NYC to retrieve special family heirlooms passed down from her grandparents—“things that were sitting in storage that I loved dearly, but had no place in my modern apartment in the city,” she explains. Offit took great pleasure in “adding things and seeing how spaces were evolving” throughout her home. But as she began to tackle the main floors, normal life began to resume and brought with it other priorities. “I just kind of ran out of gas,” Offit says.
