Improvising with Nature

Maybe it was their love of music, maybe it was their love of the outdoors, but it’s no surprise that Annie Duflo and Sree Kant found a home in Woodstock. “Someone told us that everyone in Woodstock thinks they’re an artist,” says Kant, showing me his collection of guitars and one giant upright bass in a sunny corner of the family’s music room. In the opposite corner sits Duflo’s baby grand piano, where she regularly practices classical pieces, a serious pastime the Paris native has pursued on and off since childhood.

Fittingly, their home’s music room offers one of the best seats in the house. Surrounded on three sides by walls of windows, the space looks out over the Catskills and offers unparalleled views of the winter sunsets. It’s a great place to make music—and, especially, a great place to work out the improvisation that lies at the heart of the jazz piece they are now collaborating on. “With jazz, you actually have to learn a little bit more theory and structure,” explains Duflo. “But then, within that structure, you can improvise around points of the piece.”

Duflo and Kant have approached the reimagining of their 2,300-square-foot home with the same spirit of improvisation—learning as much as they can about the existing structure and then improvising a bit with the elements at hand, creating their own Earth-friendly improvisation, combining energy sources harnessed from deep in the Earth as well as their unobstructed access to the sun.