When the actors Rebecca Hall and Morgan Spector first started dating—after meeting in 2013 while co-starring in the Broadway play Machinal—they took a trip to Hudson, New York together and fell in love.
They were enamored with the landscape, which reminded Hall of her childhood in the English countryside. And, as creative people, they were drawn to the area’s artistic community. They bought a house near downtown Hudson, initially keeping it as a weekend home away from the city. In 2015, the couple was married in Saugerties, another Hudson Valley town, and in 2018—when their daughter, Ida, was born—they decided to live in Hudson full time. Craving wide open space, they found an 1840s farmhouse on forty acres, where they now live.
Hall and Spector are featured in the new book Hudson Folk: Creative People and Places of the Hudson Valley by Amanda Benchley and Tamara Weiss, which is published by Abrams on September 15. “This environment and its people have led to the birth of galleries, sculpture parks, and artists’ residency programs that are as prevalent in the Hudson Valley as the area’s rambling creeks and apple orchards,” the authors write in the book’s introduction. The book, which focuses on the daily lives and artistic practices of its subjects, also features Deborah Needleman, Reginald Madison, Tamar Adler, Tschabalala Self and Michael Mosby, Rick Anderson, and Ian Felice.
The photographs of Hall and Spector’s home, excerpted exclusively in Vogue, show a space full of art, including Hall’s own paintings. As Hall tells the authors, “I think we’re both into living a beautiful life.”
Photo: Elizabeth Cecil, Courtesy of Abrams
