Labor of Love

For design duo Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows, home is where the art is

- HANNAH MARTIN

It was Valentine's Day 1998 when Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows fell in love-with a house. The Manhattan-based couple, founders of Hostler Burrows gallery, had been looking for a place in upstate New York when, on that fateful snowy afternoon, their intrepid real estate agent led them down a dirt road. "It looked like a Swedish country home," Burrows recalls of the cabin, hand-built by its previous owners and covered at the time in red clapboard. Its vernacular instantly appealed to the couple, given their then newly opened gallery's speciality in Scandinavian antiques. "I call it our little handmade house," says Hostler, still crazy about its pine-clad living room and fireplace of hewn local stone.