Pastime Vintage

One morning, while working to reclaim his overrun front garden, Greg Daigle found a dime. “I pulled up a plant and there it was,” he explains. After polishing it off, he realized the coin was minted in 1910—predating his vintage treasure box home by seven years. An artist and craftsman, Daigle has a knack for finding buried treasure. Whether it’s an antique icebox abandoned in a Dumpster (now refurbished and reimagined as a dish cabinet in his dining room) or a cast-off Christmas tree floating down the Hudson River (rescued from the current and transformed into a walking stick), he sees beauty in bygone things and lovingly restores what he finds into objects d’arte.

On a bright spring day, the surrounding woods and gardens are covered with a fuzz of light green and the neighboring hillsides are still clearly visible through the branches. Down a steep hillside, a stream ambles through nearby woods. Above the brick patio, carefully planned and laid out in a detailed circular pattern by Daigle, hawks swoop silently in the clear sky. At its edge, a brick-and-concrete barbecue grill is hand-engraved with a record of its completion: the date, August 11, 1945, and the note, “Japan surrenders.” “It gives me the shivers every time I look at it,” says Daigle. Encircling the brick patio, the towering oaks and the blankets of azaleas seem as if they’re on the verge of erupting into explosions of pink and green confetti. “What a time of celebration that must have been. The war was over and DeSantes was finishing the house and moving to the country full-time,” says Daigle. “This house really is an old soul.”