When Cassandra Grey moved into her 240-year-old house in Hudson, New York, she found a letter waiting for her. It was a handwritten note from an earlier owner, informing Grey that she would be sharing the residence with a ghost. Hudson Bush Farm, as the 29-acre estate is known, was originally built in 1785 by Hendrick I. Van Rensselaer, a Revolutionary War veteran who belonged to one of early America’s wealthiest families. In addition to entertaining and hosting Federalist bigwigs (Alexander Hamilton was a guest), Van Rensselaer was known for pouring himself three glasses of wine before retiring and toasting to God, country, and George Washington. According to the letter, his spirit would cause a commotion unless three glasses of tipple were left out for him. “We have the exact kind of Madeira that he liked,” Grey says.
On the Friday in October when I visit the house, no spectral presence is making itself felt. The home is instead humming with life: There’s an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. Sheet music belonging to Grey’s 10-year-old son, Jules (from her marriage to the late Brad Grey, former chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures), is propped up on the baby grand. Later on, friends will arrive for an overnight stay, and the dining table is already half set for the Bolognese pasta dinner that Grey plans to cook. Her laptop sits open on the living room sofa, where she’s spent the morning workshopping an installment of her newly launched Substack—a post on astrology, sobriety, and The Jeffersons theme song. Outside, a gaggle of chickens is clucking merrily.
This domestic tableau might seem a little incongruous if you’re familiar with the Cassandra Grey who vaulted herself from a modest upbringing in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina to It-girl status, living in a small West Village apartment and working at the now shuttered members-only Norwood Club in New York City, which had a reputation in the aughts for serving the city’s artistic community. In 2011, she married Brad Grey, set up a Hollywood home, and subsequently founded the highly curated online beauty retailer Violet Grey in 2012. The company was sold to Farfetch in 2022, bought back in 2024 by Grey, and has recently increased its retail presence, with the opening of a Violet Grey store in Manhattan and the purchase of clean beauty purveyor The Detox Market.
Today, Grey’s focus is working as the chairman and artistic director of Violet Lab, the brand’s in-house incubator, producing the limited edition perfume Madame Grey, for example. Yes, the Hudson Valley has been steadily building a reputation as an enclave of chic creatives, but there’s still something surprising about the fact that Grey, now 48, has installed herself in a community where the bulk of socializing occurs before midday, at the farmers market or the transfer station.
“I’d only been upstate, like, twice, before I bought this place,” she tells me in her childlike register. “But when I heard about this house, I knew I had to have it.” Grey is dressed in a faded Yankees T-shirt, vintage 501s, and black slides from The Row, wearing a slick of lip gloss and tortoiseshell Miu Miu glasses. She became familiar with the region a few years ago, when she and her then partner, the DJ Samantha Ronson, visited Samantha’s brother, Mark Ronson, and his wife, Grace Gummer, upstate. “Samantha was partly raised in England,” Grey recalls, “and I guess her affection for English-style country houses rubbed off on me.”
The Georgian four-bedroom has a grandeur and cozy charm that rarely go hand in hand, especially in an area where historic homes tend to feel a little dark and cramped. Here, the soaring ceilings and sweeping windows lend a sense of elegance and lightness to the moldings, fireplaces, and wood floors. Grey also liked that Miranda Brooks, with whom she had worked on the Los Angeles home she shared with her late husband, had begun designing the surrounding landscape with the previous owner: apple trees by the pool, a fruit and vegetable garden where jumbo squash and baby watermelons thrive, and the handful of flowerbeds scattered across the property. “The garden is the complete opposite of the one I designed in California,” says Brooks. “For one thing, there are actual seasons in New York.”
Grey has not hired anybody to renovate or decorate, which has given her the berth to make the property her own. The previous owners had done much of the infrastructural groundwork, installing radiant heat beneath the chestnut floorboards, painting and papering the walls, and replacing windowpanes with historic glass. With all of that out of the way, Grey was free to take her furniture out of storage and spend days arranging it. “It was emotional,” she recalls. “So much of my stuff is from my life with Brad.”
Now it appears as if her personal artifacts have been there forever. There’s the oversized portrait of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis, antique vitrines in the guest rooms, a Chesterfield sofa in the kitchen that was formerly used in a Violet Grey store in Los Angeles. A museum-quality Philippe Anthonioz chandelier now illuminates homemade suppers. Yard sale prints and little kitchen paintings from Lee Radziwill’s country house hang alongside works by Ellsworth Kelly, Al Hirschfeld, and John Alexander. Another work, by artist (and partner of Tilda Swinton) Sandro Kopp, depicts one of Grey’s best friends, White Lotus creator Mike White, wearing a T-shirt with the words “I’m So Satisfied” on the chest. “At the time I sat for Sandro, I’d just seduced this waiter who I’d been trying to get in bed forever, and I told him I was feeling so satisfied,” White recalls when I reach him in the South of France, preparing for the next season of his show. “When Cassandra and I met I wasn’t really a ‘somebody’ and there were far more famous people in her orbit,” White tells me, “but she goes by her instincts. I could see why Brad was enamored with her. I was too.”
“It’s so warm and welcoming here,” Grey says, touring me through the upstairs bedrooms. “It’s the house for the childhood I never had.” Grey’s parents split up when she was young, and her father remained in Northern California while her mother, a Montessori teacher, raised her and her brother partially on a Native American reservation in Oregon. “Is the country house my usual style?” she wonders out loud when we’re back downstairs, folding her legs under her taut frame as she sits. “If it’s iconic, then it is.”
Grey brings me outside, where we wend our way around a dilapidated barn and stop for sun-sweetened baby tomatoes in the vegetable garden. All the while, she rattles off projects she would like to get going. She has more work in mind for Brooks: a flower-lined path to the guest house, to start. Grey also dreams of a tennis court, an elegant new driveway, and a tree house that Jules will help design.
Single for the first time since she can remember, she, Jules, and their white longhaired cat, Cindy Lou Chanukah, are the primary residents spending weekends and holidays at the estate. But there’s nothing remotely lonely about being here. The home has already seen Thanksgiving dinners and New Year’s parties, marathon viewings of the Harry Potter movies, and countless sleepovers with friends. Grey spends her time with gardeners and a “very serious” beekeeper, and the home’s former residents—still in the area—have brought Grey into their circle of filmmakers, chefs, actors, and writers. Jules has befriended the previous owners’ children, and the kids regularly run over to hang out. “There’s a lot of cool people in my life up here,” she says as we arrive at the vast lawn facing the house’s front entrance. “It’s so stunning, right?” Grey says, taking in the home’s exterior. “It actually might be haunted, but the energy feels happy.”
In this story: hair, Mideyah Parker; makeup, David Broggi.
Produced by Modem Creative Projects. Prop Stylist: Tessa Watson.