When two Upper East Side residents bought a 8,000-square-foot home in Bedford Hills, New York, in 2017, they planned to use the space as a weekend retreat. The nearly 200-year-old property was “severely neglected” and in dire need of major renovations, says Amanda Offit, who owns the house with her husband. In fact, they weren’t able to comfortably stay there until December 2019. Then, when the pandemic hit, the couple and their three school-age children, as well as Offit’s mother and brother, decided to move to the green idyll for good.
Offit, who had not yet tackled the home’s interior design, says designing the space was her “labor of love during lockdown.” Her husband, she adds, was hesitant to hire professional help, leaving Offit in charge of all the decorating work himself. “I sat with a computer on my lap and looked at pictures and pulled out files of things I’d collected over the years – that I’d ripped out of magazines and looked at on Instagram,” Offit says. “I discovered all these talented people making things.”
She then called a former colleague, Kristen Bedell—who had since earned an interior design license as founder of decorating company Jamgotchian—to help order industry-specific fabrics and furniture. “I would say 98% of the second and third floors of the house I did myself,” Offit says. When pandemic restrictions eased, she returned to NYC to pick up special family heirlooms she’d inherited from her grandparents—“things that were in storage that I loved very much but didn’t have room in my modern apartment in the city,” she explains. Offit found great joy in “adding things and seeing the spaces evolve throughout her house.” But as she began tackling the main floors, normal life started over again, bringing with it other priorities. “I just ran out of steam,” Offit says.
