Amenities: Cozy sun room with hearth, overlooking peach tree. Rainbow fairy staircase realm, favorable flow from room to room, wall-gliding sunlight panels, forehead-cooling marble mantelpieces. AAA hide-and-seek rating. Squirrel antic observation corner. Breakfast with birds. Airy mansard attic fit for future majestic master bedroom or eccentric artist’s playground or use your imagination. Seat 16 for Thanksgiving. Backyard foraging for raspberries in summer.

Old friends of OTBKB are selling their beloved house on Fair Street in Uptown Kingston, where they’ve been very happy the past seven years, making energy retrofits and restoring the plaster walls and ceilings (a much-blogged project, when there was time). It’s a comfy house with a great spirit, and they’d love to place it in good hands.
Here’s the full MLS listing.

They left Park Slope to raise their kids where they could run barefoot in a big back yard, yet still walk to everything (and on the same bluestone sidewalks we have here in Brooklyn—both were sourced from quarries in Ulster County.)
There will be an open house August 2, 2009, 1 pm-3 pm, but if you’re interested, this is a great weekend to get to know Kingston (for a viewing of the house, call realtor Jennifer Lewis Bennett at 845-679-7321, X127 or email jenniferb@westwoodrealty.com).

Tomorrow evening, July 25, 4 pm-7 pm, you can mix with local digerati, many of them Brooklyn transplants, at the meet-up of the Kingston Digital Corridor at Keegan Ales, just a few blocks from the house on Fair Street. The Kingston Digital Corridor is a local effort to assist technopreneurs in relocating to Kingston and networking once they get there. No car? No problem. Uptown Kingston can be explored on foot right off the Trailways bus.

Business Week named Kingston One of the top ten Best Places for Artists in America, 2007. The New York Times recently touted Kingston’s real estate deals for weekenders: “The New Country Squires”, The New York Times, July 2,2009. Those with elementary-age children might be interested to know that the public school two blocks from this house recently adopted a Montessori approach to teaching that just got a green light for more funding and rave reviews from parents. The annual Artists’ Soapbox Derby, coming up in August, is a must. The town is going nuts with gardening and other green initiatives. And one of the best things about Kingston is the ease with which you can bop to neighboring towns (Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Bard College, Red Hook, High Falls, Stone Ridge, Rosendale, New Paltz), ski resorts, and boat-launch spots.