Devoted aesthete and A.THERIEN founder, Stephen Ellwood, interviews Roman Spataro and Caleb Dudley to commemorate the Dutchess Hamlet Cabin for Upstate Diary Issue 23.
Along a forgotten stone wall in Dutchess County, NY, a hidden footpath leads to a native meadow, and beyond sits a cabin in the woods, illuminated purely by sunlight and evening candles. Owners Danny Marcus & Erica Levin enlisted artists-designers-photographers Caleb Dudley & Roman Spataro to revise the interior spaces of their hand-built home, and to resurrect the cabin’s spirited connection to the natural world.
Danny & Erica started the dialogue and planning with Caleb & Roman by embracing an uncommon degree of trust — inviting them to stay in the cabin alone for extended periods — to carefully observe and meditate on the textures and proportions of the space, to track the light and sounds of the seasons, and to coax out the humming dreamworld pulse of the shelter. The designers touched the space with a careful hand, honoring its legacy by using natural materials and honest methods; and invited friends to contribute craft and building expertise along the way.
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Stephen Ellwood: How does the aesthetic language for your projects take shape — and in this case, for the cabin project?
Roman Spataro: The formulation of the language that we pursued happened over a course of multiple sessions of meditation and incubation in the space as we found it, as it was given to us. And I think that’s where any process starts for us. It often feels like chipping away at our preconceived notions and our projections to get to, from our perspective, the purest nature for that place. Caleb and I grew up in very rural places and are not unfamiliar with the kind of remoteness and the sacredness of being in a structure in the woods. There was an opportunity to flesh out a certain romance that I’ve always perceived about being in a remote structure. To give it a certain sacredness and elegance that those structures often don’t have the pleasure of taking on.
SE: What qualities of the cabin and its setting, and your initial experience of it, spoke to you and remained with you through the process?
RS: The way that you arrive at the property is extremely surreal and dreamlike. You enter onto a wooded path next to a graveyard and then suddenly you’re at a house that has no driveway, so you have to walk through a grassy plain.
Caleb Dudley: It immediately has this quality of being timeless. And there was a really special relationship formed with the owners, and I think in time we’re just only going to see how truly special that relationship was. It doesn’t seem that you often get to work with people that truly care so much about the project and about your well-being, and they so thoroughly wanted to understand our decisions and our process in a really sincere way. That was another aspect of the project — the dialogue — not just in terms of their practical needs, but the emotional reasons and why we would want to make them. All this justified the project and put wind in our sail.
SE: When it comes to approaching a project around interior spaces, I often think about questions that ask about our existence. Often this comes back to nature, and nature with little intervention and without the codes of what we call interior design. When do you feel like an interior space breaks through for you, or perhaps starts asking questions about the unknown?
CD: That question is like a mansion with infinite doors and hallways. Physical space has always been a visceral way in which I experience being human. Ever since I started working with physical material, it’s been some form of trying to create or express what makes the world around me feel more natural. Sometimes I find that in synthesizing nature and nostalgia or synthesizing places of romance — all those things factor into creating spaces that make me feel natural. I think it also has a lot to do with creating space as a form of spiritual healing or spiritual formation. How can my environment carve a lifestyle that’s going to endorse the kind of thoughts and life relationships that I want to have with myself and with the nature around me.
RS: It’s a pulse, a resonance. And it’s usually a few steps ahead of our intellect.
SE: Approaching interiors as a journey into the unknown, mapped through listening and feeling, is an incredible experience, a journey that asks questions without looking for answers. In this way, the journey is imbued with optimism, the anticipation of discovery. Do you experience this in your process?
CD: That feeling is so monumental in how I experience life. It’s so ridiculously present. I feel like in justifying a decision with space or design, it arrives naturally because it is about preserving that emotion, especially since it is often that the common world does not appreciate that and they can only look as far as to see how it affects the utility, like the practical day-to-day. The real journey happens when you try to explain to someone why going off route from utility or practicality with a design decision is worth it. It’s out of that, you find people that can appreciate it, and then there are actually so many that can. So much of this practice is a devotion to making space for that.
RS: And what’s beautiful is that it’s a naturally occurring thing. Everybody is doing this already. It’s not something you opt into. Designing by way of feeling versus utility happens naturally. So many people reject the function of navigating a design decision that way and the absolute meteor size influence it has. I feel like Caleb and I grew up in a time in this country where there’s a ridiculous amount of the disregarding of material and sentimentality. The buildings that we’ve seen go up in our time of being alive where it’s a complete rejection of sentimentality and form, and it only prioritizes the agendas of late-stage capitalism. So, I think for our generation, at least in this particular sphere, I feel a responsibility to reinstate that quality because it is true. One’s personal space influences everything. And I feel like American culture was a bit more in touch with that at a different time in its formation, maybe not as directly, but the sentimentality in design and structure is undeniable, if you look at late 1800s, early 1900s vernacular spaces. You see the markings on the beams, of life formation.
SE: With conventional interior design approaches set aside, there are so many ways an interior space can be formed, the origin point. For me, the idea that photography and film can be a tool to create a setting is significant, that photography can be an origin for interior spaces. What are your thoughts about how photography plays into interior spaces?
RS: We didn’t grow up in environments that we were at terms with, and definitely not intrinsically inspired by on an aesthetic level or on just a soul level. And so, we discovered the power of design and aesthetics largely through images, and I think that it’s probably been more fundamental to our perspective than I can even comprehend. I think it’s the fact that the photographic image is so self-contained that it can become a vessel for exploration and expansion.
CD: I think that’s been a really subconscious level practice, and a very pivotal task that we’ve just subconsciously taken on throughout our lives.
SE: It’s kind of the ultimate device for world-building and interior world creation.
CD: With our process, when we photograph a project, we’re not trying to capture the space as an end moment. We’re trying to distill and conjure the kind of space that we envision. In a sense, the photograph of the space transcends the space itself. To create a distilled emotion that we dream of in the space, some vision of how the space can be experienced. I think it is a really interesting part of our process … beyond interesting. It’s so easy to overlook the idea of the photograph and consider it as just a byproduct of the space and needing to represent it. I think of those early photos of Schindler’s Kings Road House. The quality is not the clearest; but there’s botanicals, there’s a lived-in quality, which you don’t see in the Kings Road house today. And in a sense, those photographs create a version of a Schindler house that will likely never exist again, could never exist again.
RS: I think that folks, in this industry, photograph in a way that exposes everything, and there’s no sacredness in a process that reveals every inch in perfect clarity. It’s a disservice to the experience that one can have in that space. At its best, a photograph that we would make of a space would essentially memorialize a feeling and an aura, an atmosphere, a possibility. And I think that we’re probably going to grow into the ability to take that task on with deeper commitment. Photographing as a way to present a feeling rather than present a space, because that’s ultimately what the work is aiming towards.
SE: What conventions or practices do you feel should be embraced or investigated when building an interior environment?
CD: I think that with design and interior spaces there needs to be more of an embrace of the natural elements. the natural seasons and how they affect living in one’s home. I think there’s an essential function to experiencing the passing seasons inside your home, and the discomfort of that process and the tension with it. It seems increasingly common that the sole intention of the home is to completely reject any sort of outside influence. It is the exact same humidity, temperature, light, and quality, 24/7. And, to me, that feels extremely, deeply, unnatural and inhumane. And to condition yourself to that sort of circumstance, in the place that is most personal to you, feels like it would dehumanize you over time.
RS: There is a really functional and practical use of a home that is somewhat integrated to the natural world outside it. It drags you through the necessary emotional and spiritual processes of the calendar year. I think that’s extremely practical, and necessary, and needs to be further incorporated in the design community. Interior design as a task has become inundated with so many unnatural notions whereas it’s an incredibly simple task and we can derive everything that we need to know in order to do it well from just listening to what we want, how we want to live, what we aspire to, what we romanticize.
CD: I think the way that we approach design is not too different than the way we try to approach day-to-day experience and that does involve being present, listening to your environment. The goal is to be embodied. There are many goals, one of which is being grateful, but it’s really situational with a space, what kind of emotion is it that you’re trying to provoke? I think underlying all that is a goal to be embodied, to feel embodied, and that requires you to listen so much.
Upstate Diary Issue 23, October 2026—Written by Stephen Ellwood