A House on the Hudson With a Japanese Soul

GERMANTOWN, N.Y.

Barbara and Kenneth Cooke.

THE Japanese-style house on the Hudson seems as much air as wood. The front wall of the living room is glass, the back wall of the living room is glass, and the furnishings are so few that standing at the entrance, you can look straight through the house to the river. On a fine spring day, when both those glass walls are opened, to a pebbled courtyard on one side and a cantilevered ipe wood deck on the other, and a clutch of white lilac in the living room is scenting the air, the separation between indoors and outdoors seems barely there.

The bedroom of the house, which has been home for two years to Barbara and Kenneth Cooke, an artistic couple who were urban pioneers in SoHo in the early 1970s, is the only room that does not have a river view, but that does not mean it is without its own pleasures. Like the rest of the house it is sparely furnished, with Japanese, modern and primitive influences: There's a platform bed; lamps by the industrial designer V. Lorenzo Porcelli, a friend of the Cookes; wooden Japanese lunch boxes stacked in an artful pyramid in the corner. The surprise here: two small mail-slot shaped windows on either side of the bedroom wall, about a foot from the floor.

"Snow viewing windows," Ms. Cooke explains.

"That's very Japanese," Mr. Cooke says. "They design windows for a sitting position on the floor and standing positions. We don't sit on the floor, but we do use them to watch the snow fall."

"Occasionally we're sitting here and a little trail of turkeys come around," Ms. Cooke says. "Somebody called them Columbia County peacocks."

They are a smart looking couple, both shoeless, for this house is a shoe-free zone. Both 60, they have been together 40 years, except for that emotionally fraught glitch in the mid '80s involving a Frenchman.

Mr. Cooke, the former creative director at the Siegel & Gale branding agency, works now as a freelance design consultant and photographer. Ms. Cooke is the owner of Joovay, a lingerie shop that was a SoHo fixture for 20 years until 2004, and has since reopened in nearby Rhinebeck.

Such is the aesthetic perfection of their home that even the red-eyed tree frogs in their glass box have a copper hued piece of Japanese pottery in which to hydrate on waking up for the night (they're nocturnal). There are old Japanese textiles in mint condition, particularly woven or quilted coats of firemen and farmers, hung about the house as art, along with squares of Japanese fabric. This makes a visit to the bathroom anxiety-provoking, for both reporter and hostess: Was that nubby piece of cloth on which one wiped one's hands a towel, one hopes?

A look of panic flashes across Ms. Cooke's eyes, but only for a moment, until it is established that item in question was merely hand-woven cloth from Transylvania.

Ms. Cooke grew up in Portsmouth, N.H., her husband in Newport News, Va. They met at Virginia Commonwealth University, eloped when she was 19 and he was 20, and moved to New York as soon as they possibly could, "soul mates from tertiary markets," as she put it. They found jobs in two of the most inventive fields of 1970s, Ms. Cooke as a product manager at Columbia Records, dealing with Bob Dylan and Miles Davis, Mr. Cooke as a graphic designer. In 1973, they bought a loft on Greene Street and furnished their home with carefully selected industrial flotsam, in the style that would come to be known as high tech. They used gym lockers for their headboard and Mack truck mirrors in the bathroom.

"Our first quilt was a moving pad we got on Canal Street, which was just a treasure trove of wonderful things," Ms. Cooke says. Ten years later came the romantic glitch: Ms. Cooke fell in love with another man, and she and Mr. Cooke divorced. Mr. Cooke was so devastated, he got himself transferred to Tokyo, where, as he tells it, his principal job was to go out drinking with the Japanese.

"The loft smelled like Barbara. I couldn't take it, I couldn't stand it," says Mr. Cooke, an intense and, one would think, deeply satisfying statement for a wife to hear 25 years after the fact. One hopes, given what happened with SoHo real estate, that the Cookes held on to the property?

"Because it was such a shock for him, I said, ‘Why don't we not do anything about the loft, then after a year, when everybody has quieted down, we can sell it,' " Ms. Cooke says. "Ken had predicted my romance wouldn't be that compelling after a year."

An earthy interjection, paraphrased here, from Mr. Cooke: In a year the guy would be a jerk, like every other guy.

"There were some cracks in the perfection," Ms. Cooke says, and Mr. Cooke "saw the opportunity to put on a full court press."