great rooms

This Used to Be the ‘Ugliest House on Mt. Merino’

Jeff Hayenga and Michael Belanger’s long-simmering upstate project.

The Reading Nook: The loft was a wasted space before the renovation, so a ladder was added for access. “The ceiling is tongue-and-groove pine, and the walls are birch plywood,” Michael Belanger says, as he was adamant that there be no painted surfaces to maintain inside or out. Photo: Annie Schlechter/B) Annie Schlechter 2020
The Reading Nook: The loft was a wasted space before the renovation, so a ladder was added for access. “The ceiling is tongue-and-groove pine, and the walls are birch plywood,” Michael Belanger says, as he was adamant that there be no painted surfaces to maintain inside or out. Photo: Annie Schlechter/B) Annie Schlechter 2020

Michael Belanger remembers driving by this 1959 ranch-style house on Mt. Merino just south of Hudson “literally as the Realtor was hammering the FOR SALE sign into the lawn. I screeched on the brakes, and that was that.” At the time, his find was the “ugliest house on Mt. Merino,” he says, laughing. That was almost 20 years ago. It took a while for Belanger and his husband, Jeff Hayenga, to get around to fixing it up, much less moving into it.

The House Before: The ranch house as they found it. Inside was a warren of small rooms with low ceilings. Photo: Courtesy of Micahel Belanger

Belanger, an artist-designer and former modern and antiques dealer, and Hayenga, an actor, have been together for 24 years; they are serial renovators. There was the barn in Livingston, the water-tank house in Germantown, as well as another mid-century house in Los Angeles, where they moved for five years shortly after buying this Mt. Merino place; there, Belanger opened a shop in Silver Lake.

But they kept thinking about coming back to this one to live. It was only on a half-acre lot, but the views across the Hudson River to the Catskills were magnificent. And more and more it fit with the life they wanted to have. “I have had quite a number of houses,” he notes. “Each house has gotten successively smaller.”

Back at last from the West Coast, “we basically built a new house here,” he says, while keeping a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. “There was no real plan,” Belanger says of the décor. “I had a shop in Hudson and one in L.A., so these are all pieces I have squirreled away on our buying trips; it’s a real mix.”

To keep the costs down, they did most of the finishes themselves. The one thing they vowed was that everything be low maintenance; so much so that there would be no painted surfaces inside or out. “I just thought, I want something that is really going to age well, and we’ll never have to do anything to it.

Take the cedar shingles they put on the outside: “They’re just left to age,” he says. “They’re turning gray at roughly the same rate we are, so it’s all working out.”

Exterior: The house was reclad in cedar shingles, which have been left untreated.

The Dining Area: “The floor was laid with a fiberglass-cement product that comes in four-by-eight sheets and is usually used for exterior cladding for malls and banks,” Belanger says. “But we decided to use it for flooring. It was a little tricky to install.”

The Kitchen: “We used a lot of Ikea components, and we sort of tweaked them a bit and then combined them with custom built-ins,” Belanger says.

The Great Room: The kitchen-and-dining area opens into the living room, centered on a mid-century wood-burning stove.


The Back Porch: There are two screened porches in the house; this one, in the back, was added for shade.

The Back Porch: A detail of the shade porch the couple added onto the rear of the house with vintage Eames fiberglass-shell chairs and a ’60s abstract painting found at a flea market.

The Side Porch: The couple do most of their entertaining here in the summer months. The American-walnut dining table extends to ten feet.

Photography by Annie Schlechter

Exterior: The house was reclad in cedar shingles, which have been left untreated.

The Dining Area: “The floor was laid with a fiberglass-cement product that comes in four-by-eight sheets and is usually used for exterior cladding for malls and banks,” Belanger says. “But we decided to use it for flooring. It was a little tricky to install.”

The Kitchen: “We used a lot of Ikea components, and we sort of tweaked them a bit and then combined them with custom built-ins,” Belanger says.

The Great Room: The kitchen-and-dining area opens into the living room, centered on a mid-century wood-burning stove.


The Back Porch: There are two screened porches in the house; this one, in the back, was added for shade.

The Back Porch: A detail of the shade porch the couple added onto the rear of the house with vintage Eames fiberglass-shell chairs and a ’60s abstract painting found at a flea market.

The Side Porch: The couple do most of their entertaining here in the summer months. The American-walnut dining table extends to ten feet.

Photography by Annie Schlechter

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This Used to Be the “Ugliest House on Mt. Merino”