Taste and Placemaking in the Hudson Valley
Through their shop Available Items—and now, their exhibition “Sense of Place”—Chad Phillips and Kristin Coleman cultivate a design scene beyond the city.
Issue 08: “Out to Pasture” is presented by East Fork.
By Alex T. Williams
When I was first coming up around the New York design world in the early 2000s, the energy centered on limited-edition objects, conceptual provocation, and a downtown scene where design bled into art, fashion, and performance. It was the era of Tobias Wong hacking early iPhones into sly cultural commentary, and Murray Moss’s SoHo store functioning as a kind of secular shrine for design obsessives. I met Chad Phillips in the midst of all that, when he was working across Moss, the Cooper Hewitt, and other museum design stores, helping shape the ecosystem through which certain objects, and certain ideas about taste, entered the conversation.
When Chad came back into my orbit two years ago with Kristin Coleman, they were opening Available Items, their small but deeply considered shop in Tivoli, New York. It felt, immediately, like an oasis: a place where objects still mattered and where selection itself was the point.
We sat down on the deck of architect Amin Tadj’s Ohayo Mountain House, just as guests began arriving for the opening of “Sense of Place,” an exhibition Chad and Kristin had organized there. Caterers moved up and down the stairs, speakers cut in and out, and Kristin kept one eye on our conversation and the other on the logistics of the evening. We were seated in folded aluminum chairs of Amin’s own design, surrounded by the low chaos of something not quite finished but very much coming to life.
The setting felt right. “Sense of Place” gathers Hudson Valley–linked designers inside a house that itself reflects one version of the region’s evolving architectural language. For Chad and Kristin, whose work has long involved framing objects and the worlds around them, the show suggests a larger question: what happens when the cultural energies once concentrated in New York begin to disperse, settle, and recombine in places like this? At Ohayo, the question wasn’t just what was on view, but what kind of design culture is taking shape here now.
Milkweed Sun Touch Dimmer by Jake Coan and Stump Side Table (Bollard) by Kieran Kinsella. // Photo: Kristin Coleman
You’ve both operated at the center of design culture in New York. What changed about that world; if not something breaking, then something becoming insufficient?
Chad: A few things. The pandemic obviously accelerated everything, but even before that, design was moving more and more high-end. There was less room for smaller designers, especially those working at scale. They just couldn’t afford to be in the city anymore.
Kristin: Yeah, people were getting pushed out. Studios, workshops—those things became harder and harder to sustain.
Chad: So people were already moving upstate; the pandemic just sped that up. And for us, personally, we were at a point where we weren’t really taking advantage of the city anymore. We’d gotten comfortable. Moving up here fit the next chapter better.
Kristin: And we actually see more people now—more designers—than we did in the city.
Were you seeking that kind of community when you moved?
Chad: Not consciously. We bought our place in Germantown as a weekend house without really knowing what was here. But I’d always wanted to open a store, and New York felt too expensive to do it the way I wanted.
Kristin: We didn’t move up with a plan. We were both working remotely, throwing around different business ideas—some pretty random.
Chad: Snack subscriptions. Curated beer.
Kristin: Things that felt missing from the area.
Chad: But we ended up coming back to what we knew: design.
Available Items doesn’t feel like a store, exactly. It feels more like an edit. What are you actually curating?
Chad: Everything. It’s just things we love, loosely under the umbrella of “for the home.” My background has always been in design smalls, so that world is important to me.
What’s interesting now is that there are fewer places for that kind of work. Future Perfect doesn’t really do it anymore, Matter doesn’t, and MoMA operates at a different level. So in a strange way, we’ve become part of a small circuit—there are only so many places a young designer can even show that kind of work anymore.
And it’s really just about fit. A lot of things come our way, but if it doesn’t feel right, we don’t include it.
What does “good taste” mean in a rural context versus the city?
Chad: We’re very aware of local vernacular. I could easily make a store that feels like outer-space design retail, but it wouldn’t make sense here.
I grew up in the country, so I’ve always liked primitives. We have this stool my grandfather made—tractor seat, iron legs, a plow disc base—and it reads almost like a modern object. That overlap—where something is deeply rural but formally contemporary—is really interesting to us.
So the mix becomes important: vintage and contemporary, local and international, emerging and established. It’s all in conversation.
There’s a romantic idea of retreating to the countryside. What’s actually true about that and what’s not?
Chad: The bugs. But also, there’s definitely a kind of costume people put on when they come up from the city; flannels, boots, the whole thing. And then there are people who just come up and actually settle into the place. What’s real is that there’s a lot going on. The level of culture, the food, the people—it’s incredibly high. And life is just… simpler logistically. You go somewhere, you come back. That alone gives people more bandwidth.
Does being here sharpen creative work, or dilute it?
Chad: I think it sharpens it. In New York, you’re constantly aware of what everyone else is doing. You start editing yourself before you even begin. Here, people can retract a bit. They’re still inspired, but they’re less distracted. There’s more space to focus on what they actually want to do.
Is there a Hudson Valley “scene,” or is that something we project onto it?
Chad: Not in terms of style, there’s too much variation for that. But there is a community. People know each other. There are overlapping groups. You see it at openings, gatherings; there’s a shared orbit, even if the work itself is very different.
What feels missing?
Chad: A real meeting point. Historically, there were these meccas: Moss, early Future Perfect, Matter—places where you could go and understand what was happening. Now, it’s more fragmented. There are a lot of voices, but not a single, consistent platform.
What kinds of gatherings or structures would help?
Chad: More low-lift ways for people to come together. What you’re doing [StüdiGroup] is great, things like that. Talks, small gatherings, recurring events. The challenge is distance. Everything’s spread out. But if you can keep it simple: lunches, rotating locations, that’s the right direction. There just needs to be more of it.
To bring it back to “Sense of Place,” how did you think about the show as a whole, as something shaped by this house and by the Hudson Valley more broadly?
Kristin: The Hudson Valley was always the starting point. We knew from the beginning it would be a showcase of designers and makers connected to the region, and then it became about how to define that connection, whether that meant being physically based here or tied to it in a broader way.
The title came out of that. It’s about what emerges from being in this house and on this site, but also the larger history and perception of the Hudson Valley—its artistic legacy—but very much rooted in the present.
The show brings together architecture, floral design, furniture, and smaller objects in one environment; what interested you about that kind of interdisciplinary mix?
Kristin: We wanted it to sit somewhere between an exhibition and a lived-in space. To give the work room to breathe, but also to suggest how you might actually live with these pieces.
And personally, we’re interested in all of those media. There’s something exciting about letting those disciplines exist in conversation with one another.
If you were to leave readers with one final thought, what do you feel this show is really trying to hold or express?
Kristin: That well-crafted objects can elevate everyday life; that they can shape how a space feels and how you move through it. And that supporting a local creative ecosystem is essential if you want it to continue to grow. ⌂