Country houses in the Hudson Valley are almost always viewed between May and September. They are bought in a week when the meadow is high and the light lasts until nine. They are then owned in February, when the drive is a sheet of ice and the nearest open restaurant is forty minutes away.
I moved up in 2017, which turned out to be the qualification that mattered. Most of my clients are making the same move, and their real questions are not about the house. They are about whether the life around it holds up when the weather stops cooperating.
So the things I ask people to check are unromantic. Who ploughs the drive, and what do they charge. How far to a supermarket that is open on a Sunday in January. Whether the house has a generator, and if not what a week without power in that township actually looks like. Whether the internet is genuinely fast enough to work from — not the advertised figure, the tested one.
None of this argues against buying. It argues for buying with the winter in view. The clients who are still delighted five years on are the ones who asked these questions before they signed, not the ones who fell for the meadow.
