This Side of Paradise

As a model, Gigi Hadid is capable of creating fantasias and dreamscapes-like this fashionable ode to the Jazz Age. As a young mother, she's blissfully earthbound. Chloe Schama considers a double life.

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You can drive 90 minutes from New York City and feel as though you've never left. Same restaurants, same people, same conversations, same outfits. And then you can drive 90 minutes from Manhattan and feel like you're in a different country: dense woods, streams running alongside unpaved roads, warnings tacked to telephone poles cautioning deer hunters against trespassing. There might be a few gourmet markets and inns with minimalist, sans serif signs, but on the January day I visit Gigi Hadid in rural Pennsylvania, the only notable landmark I see anywhere near her home is a humble gas station.

"Welcome!" Hadid shouts from the doorstop of a long, low house nestled into the surrounding hills. It's a modern structure, but made with reclaimed materials and wide windows that frame the landscape. The spaces inside are clean but scattered with the clutter of parenting and life in general: unopened cardboard boxes, mugs on the kitchen counter, photos of a trip to Disney World. Hadid-tall, slender, and makeup-free-is dressed in black Nike sweatpants and a pullover from her cashmere knitwear line, Guest in Residence, her hair pulled up halfway.

A blanket of snow covers the ground and icicles hang from the eaves, but inside the fire is blazing and it seems like every room has a candle lit. She has been in the area for about eight years, she tells me, ever since she bought a converted lavender farm with her mother, Yolanda, and sister, Bella, in 2017. I ask her why she moved out here in the first place-entry-grade small talk, but Hadid answers candidly: "It just kind of got to a point in my career where there started to be cameras outside every day in New York. And there was a darkness to that for me."