A couple of weekends ago, Matt and I spent a wonderful afternoon discovering treasures in an absolutely lovely Hudson Valley town, Cold Spring, NY.
“Wait,” says a person with GoogleMaps, “Isn’t Cold Spring literally the next town over from Beacon, where you live and have lived for the last three years.”
Why yes, as it happens, that’s true. Let’s just gloss over that fact for the moment, shall we?
There are several antique shops, a couple of which were so cavernous that we could have spent the entire afternoon wandering in just one. We found some lovely old glass bottles at Cold Spring Antiques Center, but each place we stopped in had at least one thing we coveted (and could not afford, alas).
Matt, of course, had to stop in at the Country Goose and cluck tongues with the owner, a fellow Brit, about how difficult it is to find PG Tips in the U.S. and bemoan the fact that Americans don’t understand the complex delights of Marmite*.
*Note: Marmite is foul and should clearly be banned before someone gets seriously hurt. You have been warned.
Matt and I both loved Cold Spring General Store which, though small, is painstakingly curated with so many lovely things, I had a difficult time choosing just a couple. Besides the cooking and gardening books, they had a wonderful section of barware and cocktail goods.
The other store we went bananas for was Cold Spring Apothecary. The products are certainly covetable, but it’s the store itself that is spectacular. The space is large and uncluttered, with a section devoted to soaps, creams and lotions, and another to teas and tinctures.
It’s crisp and white but still somehow manages to be cozy in the way I dream my future farmhouse will be.
My farmhouse where everything stays magically clean and I never get splinters, no matter how rough the wood is.
My farmhouse where I have so much space I can leave most of a room bare, except for one incredibly lovely piece of driftwood, bleached almost white by sun and saltwater.
Sigh. One day.
