The motel, reconfigured and expanded to include 48 rooms, is elegantly contextual, its road-facing side cladded in vertical slats of plain white oak that block out the modern world, while its interior side opens onto pretty views of mature floodplain forest.

In a clearing stands a "chime chapel," a huge, playable sculpture that Stirratt enticed his friends in the artists' collective New Orleans Airlift to build. A 220-foot-long suspension footbridge leads to the Hoosic's north bank, and to old Blackinton, whose red-brick mill once supplied woolen fabric for the Union Army's uniforms.

A deconsecrated church near the mill will become the home, this winter, of Loom, a fine-dining restaurant overseen by Burns, the group's ringer: a James Beard Award winner, late of San Francisco's celebrated Bar Tartine, who has gone all-in, upping stakes, moving east, and beginning the slow, laborious process of putting up an old-style New England larder of fermented and preserved goods. (It's as if Judy Rodgers, at the height of her Zuni Cafe acclaim, had forsaken the Bay Area for, say, Danbury.) For Bums, the opportunity to be a partner in and witness to this experiment in regional re-invention was too much to pass up. "I knew that if I didn't do this," she says, "I would kick myself."

As for the original roadside farmhouse, it will function as a social-gathering place for guests, with an inviting parlor room anchored by an old Sohmer & Co. upright piano: a touristy spot in the best sense.