If the average person were to hollow out a tree branch, turn it into a light fixture and hang it over a dining room table, it would look like the work of a Cub Scout. But in Constantin Boym’s weekend home in the Hudson Valley, the branch is perfection. Not too crusty, not too knobby, so artless as to be almost invisible.
Mr. Boym, the chair of the industrial design department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and co-principal with his wife, Laurene Leon Boym, of the design company Boym Partners, is very good at making things and has recently had lots of opportunities.
Sequestered with his family for 18 months in their 1955 cabin in Esopus, N.Y., he embarked on a long busman’s holiday. Inside, he designed a second bedroom for the couple’s 24-year-old son, Rob, and a mudroom where the refrigerator and laundry appliances could live.
Outside, he introduced to the property’s eight acres a firepit, a “village” of acquired birdhouses in various architectural styles, a tomato garden, a pavilion with a faux deer trophy that he assembled from found wood (part of a series Mr. Boym…
