After studying architecture in college and working as a designer in New York, Dana Sottile had clear ideas about what she wanted when she set out to design her own house in Garrison, N.Y.
But she also knew the process of building a home could be so frustrating and unforgiving that she didn’t want to go it alone. She wanted to collaborate with an architect who would be willing to not only brainstorm ideas and details but also handle the fundamentals of meeting building codes and coordinating construction.
“I studied architecture as a graduate student,” at the University of California at Berkeley, said Ms. Sottile, 65, an independent designer and artist. “But I didn’t become licensed because I felt that the architecture profession encompassed a lot that I wasn’t interested in doing.”
She and her husband, Kevin Reymond, 69, who works in finance, already owned a second home in Garrison as a weekend escape from their primary home in Manhattan, but they dreamed of having a house right on the Hudson River.
In 2019, they heard about a property comprising three lots on a sliver of land between the river and railway track. It was high enough for a home above the Federal Emergency Management Agency flood zone, so they pounced and negotiated a deal to buy it for about $1.2 million.