In my dream world, I never go to Port Authority. But I don’t live in my dream world. Instead, I live in one where I make a middle-class salary in the world’s second most expensive city, which I spend on my rent and Con Edison bills and $21 dollar salads from a start-up that’s served me frozen cucumbers not once but twice—including on the day they IPOed. Still, inexplicably, I continue to eat there. And at this point, if I get another frozen cucumber (which feels likely), it’s kind of on me, right? As is studying art history instead of economics, like my dad told me to, the latter of which could have turned me into a finance bro who invested in those $21 dollar salads.
It’s for those reasons that I find myself in midtown, sitting on a metal chair in a blighted bus terminal scheduled for demolition in 2028, waiting to board a Trailways bus to Rosendale, New York. My final destination? The dramatically more dignified The Six Bells Countryside Inn, a quaint new hospitality project by Audrey Gelman. (I guess I could have asked for a budget to rent a car, but I’m pretty sure I’m six months away from getting replaced by an AI bot, so I’m trying to be as frugal as possible.)
Maybe you saw the spread in Architectural Digest, or read the New York Times profile of Gelman herself, who previously founded the women-only workspace the Wing. But if somehow you missed those things, let me give you a brief rundown: in 2020, Gelman stepped down as CEO of the Wing. In 2021, she founded The Six Bells, a Brooklyn-based homewares store that specializes in folksy country goods—things like patchwork quilts, Grandma Moses needlepoint pillows, beeswax candles, and Heather Taylor Home gingham tablecloths. Amid the cottagecore boom of the pandemic—as well as Gelman’s general start-up savvy—the store became a thing. So much so that she struck a deal with HN Capital Partners, the group behind the Ace Hotel and London’s The Ned, to open her first hospitality project alongside Jeremy Selman, HN Capital’s principal.
She chose the Hudson Valley because it’s where she grew up going as a kid and currently owns a home; also, she tells me, the region gets 10 times the tourism of Napa but has far fewer hotels to support it. When a 19th-century Federalist inn on the banks of Rosendale’s creek came up for sale, Gelman and her team quickly snapped it up. “We were looking at properties for probably six months,” she says. “It was very Goldilocks—one was great, but it didn’t have this or it didn’t have that. Then we found this. We were like, ‘It’s small, but it could be this amazing jewel box.’”
Gelman rented a U-Haul in Queens and drove down the I-76 to the antique shops of Ohio and West Virginia, packing it to the brim with wooden furniture and oddities like a wrought iron chandelier with farm animals and a pistachio-colored chest. (This feels like a feat when you consider the fact she’s 5’1”.) Then, together with Adam Greco of the interior design firm Greco Deco, she got to work.
You’ll notice that I’m calling it a “hospitality project” rather than a hotel; that’s because The Six Bells doesn’t really fit the definition of the latter. Sure, it has 11 guest rooms. But it’s also… completely shoppable. Like, that wicker table in the front room? It’s yours. Fancy the mattress you slept on? Order it at the front desk. Inhaled the caramel popcorn in your minibar? They can give you a bag to bring home and charge it to your credit card. The lobby is a store filled with homewares, tablecloths, and nightgowns; a store filled with homewares, tablecloths, and nightgowns is the lobby.
And here s the other thing about The Six Bells: While it may literally exist in Rosendale, a town with two tattoo parlors, in Gelman’s dream world, it’s the beating heart of a village called Barrow’s Green—an imaginary village of her own creation with no tattoo parlors. A map of Barrow’s Green is painted on the ceiling when I walk into The Six Bells for the first time: There’s the town, with stores like Oswald’s Jam and Jellies, Wentry’s Tea Room (famous for its sticky toffee pudding), along with a church, a synagogue, and a courthouse where anyone can marry. Down a meandering Candy Land-like path is a place called Snowdrop’s Cottage. There is no Port Authority.
I’m led to a wonderfully frilly guest room called Mildred’s Plum, outfitted with a canopy bed done up in several different shades of purple. A Barrow’s Green booklet—laid daintily in a wicker basket along with flowers for my beside (and a how-to-purchase packet)—informs me that it’s named after local resident Mavis Green, whose “plum bounty has been the pride of the village for over two decades.” Except scandal is afoot! One of her plums poisoned Amabella Fytch, the harvest festival judge. “Had the plum inadvertently come into contact with a water hemlock, or was the judge targeted?”
I flip to a page for a room called Lamplight. This one is in hues of peacock blue and soft brick, “inspired by the story of Eustace Ashbee, former vicar of Barrow’s Green, who is said to have been madly in love with Lady Rosemary Ashborne, mistress of Cranbrook Manor.” Look closely, and you’ll see their thwarted elopement retold through Sleepy Hollow-esque illustrations on the wallpaper. I flip further. On the first floor of The Six Bells is Gable’s Hollow, a room based on the colors of Barrow’s Green in the fall, when the leaves turn and “the children make corn dollies at the local primary school.” It has cinnabar-colored, needlepointed wallpaper by Sister Parish so beautiful that I later ask Gelman if I can run my hand over it. I flip through the booklet until the end. It does not include the WiFi password. I pop down to the lobby store to ask. The innkeeper, Eric, answers me with Disney-worthy cheer.
Now, regarding the food: In Gelman’s Barrow’s Green, you do not order from an “American” or “farm-to-table” menu at a “restaurant.” You eat at a “tavern” that serves “traditional country cookery” like sour cream cornbread, warm chicken pot pies, and three-layer Dutch chocolate cakes with dollops of vanilla ice cream. A chilled cucumber soup is creamy, not frozen. “Folk culture is the thread that weaved everything together—to me that’s American folk, that’s Western European folk,” Gelman tells me as we sit drinking lattes on a vintage floral vintage couch. She goes on to reference “Martha Stewart’s ’90s kitchen” and “Stew Leonards,” with its singing cows, as other visuals on her moodboard.
She walks me through every inch of the space, pointing out all the Sister Parish wallpaper prints (Brio, Kinnicut, Waldingfield) and fabrics, the four-poster beds, the pine cladding, the hand-painted dressers, the Tyrolean chairs, the bookshelf with titles like Amish Cooking, Kitchens and Kitchenware, and Kitchen Glassware of the Depression Years. Nearly every single room has a stately writer’s desk that an AI bot can’t take away. My heart yearns.
The yearning’s the point: The Six Bells is old-fashioned and kitschy and kind of absurd, because those things build a foundation for escapism. No one wants to send a work email while tucked into a Tyrolean trundle bed like a Christmas elf. And no one wants to whip out the ultimate anachronism—a laptop—in the lobby store that looks like a Midwestern grandma’s living room melded with a Swiss grandma’s chalet. You simply want to exist in this world—this dream world—while you can. “My thesis around the brand was nostalgia,” says Gelman. “We have such an emotional pull to nostalgia, particularly right now, when everything feels really, really scary.”
At check out, I buy six beeswax candles.
