At the heart of Brian Messana and Toby O’Rorke’s cottage in Livingston is a simple dining room table with an exceptionally long view into history. “Our first Thanksgiving in the house, we didn’t have a table,” explains Brian Messana of the 2005 holiday. In 2001, the Manhattan-based architects had gone in together on a 1734 Dutch Colonial farmhouse and eight surrounding acres—which included six trailers, a cinder block motel-style building, and an ancient, overgrown apple orchard. “We really wanted to buy property to build on or renovate,” explains Messana. “It was also an opportunity to become general contractors so we could understand both sides of the process.”

Take the left staircase at Drew Lang's Germantown Victorian and you're back in 1863. Take the right and you're standing on a deck floating above a sea of native grass, the Kaaterskill high peak sharp against the sky. “The decoration,” says Lang, “is what you see through the glass. ”

Long before there were houses, long before the trees that made the houses, long before the roads and highways, long before a country called America, there was this river. Our river.