The Catskills Are Calling

Over the past few years, space-seeking New Yorkers have fueled a boom in rustic upstate resorts. Jeffries Blackerby checks out the latest to join the fray.

- Jeffries Blackerby

BEFORE MY VISIT to Wildflower Farms, a new resort in the Catskill Mountains, I had only ever seen one American kestrel. It was two years ago, while driving past an open field in upstate New York, and I had screeched to a halt to get a closer look-only for the bird to fly from its fence post in an instant. But on my first morning at Wildflower Farms, I spotted North America's smallest raptor perched on a pole a mere 30 feet from the main building. It held still long enough for me to get a good look through my binoculars, as if it had been placed there by guest services. Later that day I would glimpse a bald eagle and one of its young swooping out of their nest high in a tree, somewhere near cabin No. 32.

Phenomenal birdlife is just one of many everyday majesties at this Auberge Resorts Collection property, which opened in Gardiner last fall. Its 65 cabins and cottages are arranged around a grand main building that's home to Clay, the restaurant; the poolside Dew Bar; and an open-air venue named the Great Porch, as well as a shop, a spa, and an event space. Everything faces an open plain that rolls out like a carpet toward the stark granite ridge of the "Gunks," as the Shawangunk Mountains are known. A stream creates a gentle soundtrack as it flows along the property's eastern edge. (At first, I wondered if I could hear the sound of...traffic? No, it was just the wind and the water.)

"As people spend more time with screens, it's valuable for us to be in nature," said resort owner Phillip Rapoport, who lives in Gardiner with his wife, Kristin, and their young son, and regularly hikes and climbs in the nearby Mohonk Preserve. The couple spent seven years developing the property, working with the California architects Electric Bowery and New York designers Ward & Gray to create the right mix of minimalism and well-upholstered coziness. "We wanted to give the interiors the same feeling as our own home," Kristin explained.