Helen and Brice Marden Turn a Hudson Ferry Terminal into Swan House

Elena Vasquez

What was Swan House before it became a home?

Architectural Digest’s December issue dates Swan House to 1877. The house formed part of Long Dock, a Hudson River ship terminal and moorage.

Long Dock received large vessels carrying people and goods along the Hudson. It also served as a ferry landing between Saugerties and Tivoli.

A long, narrow causeway links the building to Saugerties. From the edge of Rose Hill, the Marden family’s 19th-century Tivoli estate, the house shimmers in the landscape.

The Depression and more efficient transport ended large-ship service in the early 1930s. Ferries continued the two-minute crossing until 1938. The building then left professional service and was sold. Architectural Digest reports that it later became the Hudson’s only privately owned peninsula.

Long Dock survives as a former working terminal on the Hudson’s only privately owned peninsula.

How did art and family shape the Marden homes?

Across their more than 50-year marriage, artist Helen Marden and her late husband, painter Brice Marden, assembled an international collection of houses, gardens and studios. Architectural Digest describes the group as deeply eccentric and magical, designed around a double helix of art and family.

Art facilitated the purchase of property. In turn, the properties acted as catalysts and protective shells for the evolution of the couple’s art.

Their first purchase came in 1973: a cliffside cottage on the Greek island of Hydra.

Architectural Digest lists an Italianate villa in upstate New York; two traditional riads in Marrakech; a hotel among the ruins of a 19th-century sugar plantation in the Caribbean; a second house by the port in Hydra; a Renaissance Revival town house in Manhattan; and a stately manse on a sprawling estate in Pennsylvania.

The feature says the Mardens favored endurance, texture and soul over newly built pleasure domes. Each property’s history appears in its interior.

Their property portfolio functioned as both a place to live and a working context for their art.

How did a ferry terminal become a private residence?

The Mardens bought the property in 2011. A full decade passed before they engaged designer Daniel Sachs and architect Kevin Lindores of the AD100 firm Sachs Lindores Architecture, Interiors. The pair executed a full-scale renovation.

“Early on we demolished a few walls to open up the views, but it was pretty raw. We’d just go over and watch the boats go by,” Helen recalls. “You have a completely different relationship with the river when you’re sitting in the middle of it.”

The feature calls their collaboration unusually fertile. The design turns the derelict building into a trick box for trapping natural light reflected from the water. Reflective, lead-coated copper siding and a zinc roof wrap the exterior. Luminous plaster, tile and marble structure the interior.

“Helen never shies away from a bold gesture. At first, she told us to paint the house red, but when we presented the idea of a glistening metal-clad box with light dancing on the skin, she immediately went for it,” Sachs recalls.

“Brice and Helen were very interconnected in their aesthetic tastes and decision making,” Lindores adds. “As you might imagine, they studied every paint color and trim detail.”

The renovation retained the original architectural envelope but essentially rebuilt the house. New window configurations opened the views. Open circulation and an exposed ceiling improved ease of use.

On the upper level, a newly revealed chimney reaches its full floor-to-ceiling height. Glossy black brick tile clads its face, giving the monolithic form the scale of a high altar in a temple of light.

Custom zellige tiles imported from Fez cover the kitchen and bath walls. There, Helen Marden’s instinct for juxtaposing colors and materials becomes most visible.

The result keeps the terminal’s outer form while essentially rebuilding the house.

What fills the rooms?

Architectural Digest calls the furnishings a polyglot ensemble and a signature Marden mix. The collection includes:

• Moroccan rugs.
• Contemporary designs by Gaetano Pesce, Marcel Wanders and the Campana Brothers.
• Humble American folk pieces.
• 20th-century classics by Paavo Tynell, Adolf Loos and Pierre Jeanneret.
• A few Continental antiques.

“I just pick things that I like, things that make me happy,” Helen says. She pooh-poohs the idea of some grand decorative vision.

“She has an incredible eye,” Sachs insists. “The more crazy Helen would get, the more Brice liked it.”

The interiors therefore operate as accumulations of personal taste, not a unified decorative manifesto.

What will the new book document?

An upcoming Gagosian volume documents every home: Brice & Helen Marden: Houses, Gardens, Studios. The feature’s author edited the book, and Stephen Kent Johnson provided the photography.

The volume extends the feature’s account of the couple’s more-than-50-year practice of placing art within distinctive homes. The forthcoming book will bring the properties’ individual histories and shared Marden logic into one published survey.