![]() There’s also a barn, a chicken coop and a small cabin that, with its raw wooden beams and lofted bed, serves as a rustic guesthouse. Indeed, the grounds also hold several other smaller structures: A crimson-red schoolhouse dating to 1810 is now Martin’s music studio - he’s grateful to no longer be sharing walls with noise-averse neighbors - and a onetime sugar shack that initially inspired now-waylaid ambitions of harvesting their own maple syrup serves as the girls’ clubhouse. “We had tons of ideas and were blown away by the expanse of everything,” says Ventosa Martin. And so the couple put their Brooklyn house up for sale and made the Old Stone House the family’s full-time home. “We said, ‘Let’s not overthink it and just try this thing we’ve been fantasizing about for a while,’” says Martin, who took it as a good sign when their two city-raised kids fell into the pond on the property while chasing frogs on their first visit. The next owner of the house was a restoration carpenter who, in the late ’90s, updated the interiors with fresh wainscoting, arched entryways and built-in shelving that, when the Martins toured the home in person, they realized was perfectly sized for their ample record collection. In the 1920s, after its stint as a tavern and stagecoach shop for travelers - Saratoga Springs used to be a booming resort destination referred to as the “queen of the spas” for its naturally carbonated mineral waters - a pair of women purchased and expanded the property, tacking on an addition out of which they operated a cafe called the Singing Kettle Tearoom that, this being the Prohibition era, might have sold other beverages more covertly. By then, too, the pace of their lives was wearing on them.īuilt in 1833 from limestone quarried on the property, the Old Stone House, as it’s known among locals, has seen much life over the years. But the design process dragged on, and then the pandemic hit, which meant that the construction work never really got started. In 2018, the couple, who by this point had two young daughters in tow, purchased and embarked on a gut renovation of a detached two-story home in Windsor Terrace. Eventually, she joined Martin uptown, after which they moved first to a condo in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood, and then to a rowhouse in Crown Heights. ![]() “It was like a long-distance relationship,” jokes Ventosa Martin. When they met, in 2003, they were both living in Manhattan, but at opposite ends of it - he in Washington Heights and she in the Financial District. Ventosa Martin grew up on Staten Island and Martin, who grew up in D.C., moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side at 19. ![]() For many years, Melissa Ventosa Martin, a fashion stylist, and her husband, Walter Martin, a musician, lived in New York City and, as is common in its complex real estate market, in various parts of it.
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