Today, AD is welcomed by actor Walton Goggins to tour his home in Hudson Valley, New York. When ‘The White Lotus’ star and his wife Nadia Conners decided to move east for a new chapter, it was an enchanting 1920s property that caught their eye. Built in the style of a Scottish hunting lodge, this prohibition-era property had not been touched in 100 years. With the help of AD100 designer Shawn Henderson, the couple worked to bring the house into the 21st century while preserving the property’s rich history. Despite the years of work, the renovation allowed Goggins to immerse himself in two of his great love languages, art, and design, as the couple brought their new vision to life. “I’m a poor kid from Georgia. How great is it to have our child grow up around art and music and great furniture and all these things that are so life-affirming and expansive?” the actor says, concluding, “This house has stimulated me in ways I’ve never been stimulated before.”
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hello, AD. What are you doing here? Just kidding. Welcome to our home.
00:18This is the gun room. I should contextualize this experience for you. The house was built
00:23in 1924. The gentleman who owned it had 3,000 acres around here. We have 125. It was built in
00:31the design of a Scottish hunting lodge. I personally have never been to a Scottish hunting lodge, so
00:37I'm going to have to take a word for it. This was the gun room and where they would store all
00:41their guns and go on a hunt. They had a pheasant farm here and a number of other things. So,
00:46let me show you this right over here so you can see exactly what I'm talking about.
00:50There are these little gun butt kind of indentations right here. We put these
00:56shelves in on both sides, but guns were lined up on both sides of this door.
01:05Check this out. You know what this is? This is a prohibition bar. Now, we have the original
01:12blueprints of the house, right? So, we know that this room was called a linen closet,
01:17but it ain't a linen closet. This is where I get to do my thing. This is where they kept all of
01:22their liquor for all of their friends that kind of came over. They entertained kind of the likes
01:27of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Babe Ruth, Walt Disney, Joan Crawford, even the House of Windsor. What's
01:33so special about this and the history of this place is that all of the people that drank here
01:38actually signed the wall. This is the signatures of some of the people that signed the wall.
01:45This is Edna St. Vincent Millay here at the top and Hal Erskine and a number of other people.
01:50Joan Crawford's name was right over there in the corner, but they covered it up with
01:55stain when we were redoing this room. Joan, I'm so sorry. In keeping with tradition with what
02:01they did in this bar, I have asked a number of my friends to begin signing this wall,
02:07because socializing and having friends over and talking is very, very important to me and my
02:13family. Rosebud. Just kidding. So we're in the Hudson Valley and as you can imagine, it's cold
02:23and it certainly would have been much colder than it was today in the 1920s. So all of the
02:28fireplaces in this house are practical. The one thing in this room I did want to show you is this.
02:33This is a bronze casting of my hand from the Haifa Lake. This Roman artisan made a sculpture
02:40out of it and presented it to Quentin at the premiere of the Haifa Lake in Rome.
02:47Oh, Architectural Digest, you're still here? Just kidding. Okay, come this way. I want to show you
02:52something. This is a gift from Sam Jackson. It's a gun that he gave us on the Haifa Lake. He gave
02:59seven of us the gun. He gave Jennifer Jason Lee a Prada purse and she said, you can keep the Prada
03:04purse. I want the gun. This is the living room. It literally is my favorite room in the house. We
03:19spend a lot of time in this room as a family. There are, what, 20 windows in this room and so
03:25you can kind of look out and see the seasons as they change. The sun comes up right over there
03:31and we wake up early in the morning and have a cappuccino and sit in here and watch the sun come
03:37up. It's very romantic. When we were designing this house, we wanted it to feel like it felt in
03:481923, like it's a living salon. We contacted a dear friend of ours who became our interior
03:54architect, Sean Henderson, who is an unbelievable designer. In this home, he just helped us reframe
04:00this experience and begin to think how we could live in it as a family. I like things that are old
04:06that feel lived in and worn and a lot of the little bitty things that you see on all of these shelves
04:11as we walk through the house or even lamps or even chairs. They're just things that I've just
04:15kind of picked up along the way in my travels. I'm a firm believer in not having to walk more
04:21than three or four feet without having a place to sit or with a drink and a friend and having
04:28a conversation. I think that that's what life is really all about. Can we just look at this
04:33fireplace? This is 120 years old. I sit here in front of this fire with my wife or with a friend
04:40and have a glass of wine and I just think about all the conversations that were had around this
04:45fire over 100 years and it just fills me with so much joy. It's very important for me to say this.
04:53There are a lot of artisans and artists that went into the making of our home in this community
05:01that we now call home and some of those people are James Romanchuk and his son Dave, Jake Saka
05:07who did all of the plumbing, again Sean Henderson our architectural designer and Dean Warner who did
05:13the electricity, Chris Gregory who masked all of the walls around here and again I just think it's
05:20so important to say that like making a movie, an actor doesn't make a movie, a director doesn't
05:25make a movie. A team of people show up every day and pour their hearts into it.
05:32This is a painting by a friend of mine Danny Fox and you'll see Danny and Wes Lang in a lot of
05:39places. They're my best friends and I'm very fortunate to have a few of their pieces and
05:44they're bangers if you know what I mean. Come with me. So then that leads into this hallway.
05:52Check this thing out. This is what's so cool about this. This was the main entrance to the house.
05:59We decided to close this entrance off to the house and kind of redid all the stone outside so that
06:04this is kind of like our personal wing but this was the the main entrance to the house and it's
06:09just one of my favorite rooms in the whole house. It's just a hallway but what a magnificent hallway
06:16it is. You'll see a lot of art in this home. That's what I do. That's what I'm passionate
06:25about. It's about collecting things and finding things that are meaningful to me. I spend a lot
06:29of time in antique shops and flea markets and things of that nature but I've been collecting
06:34art for about 28 years and I started when you know tips from Ballet Park and just a little
06:39bitty thing and now 28 years later you know we've accumulated a lot of art and having our son exposed
06:46to art is one of the most important gifts I think that we've been able to give him.
06:53This is my ass and it's my son's ass and we are walking in a river up here in the Hudson Valley.
07:02He's probably three there so it would have been about 11 years ago. What I also really love about
07:07this room is the view. We live in the Hudson Valley so it's constantly filled with deer or wild turkey
07:13or black bears or me walking naked talking to myself studying lines. You can see all of those
07:21things outside this window. And now I'm going to take you to the kitchen. This is where the cooking
07:36happens and guess what? I do none of it. Zero. My wife she does all of it. She's an incredible cook.
07:44I'm very lucky to have a partner who enjoys cooking as much as my wife does. Although I do
07:48cook a mean sourdough and I cook some unbelievable focaccia. Maybe you've heard of it. These are just
07:55like old plates that we kind of found and this little piece of art right up here was the first
07:59piece of art that I bought from a friend of mine. That one and this one almost 28 years ago but
08:05these are just things that we've kind of collected. These are ants. There's some ants right here.
08:11Again they're just fans of my focaccia. This is a table that we had at our house in Los Angeles and
08:17it was too long for here so we just cut it down. We live in the woods so it's not like you can kind
08:24of run down to the store and get everything that you need. There was a lot of thought and a lot of
08:28effort that kind of went into all of this. The other thing that I'm really passionate about is
08:32lighting. I just have been collecting light fixtures for a really long time. This is one of
08:36them we got from a friend of ours. Not a lot of variety in the lamps that I like. Most of them are
08:42brass or copper. The thing that my family can't stand is how low I usually keep the lights and
08:49they're constantly like you see everything is on a dimmer. See that? Everything's on a dimmer.
08:54I'm going to do an impersonation of my family whenever they walk into a room and
08:58the lights go up and as soon as they leave
09:05the lights go down.
09:13Oh I'm so sorry Architectural Digest. I was just having a moment to myself.
09:17This is the TV room. Movies are a really big part of my and my son and my wife's life so we spend a
09:24lot of time in this room watching movies especially when it gets dark early and there's snow outside.
09:38This is my office and it's kind of a big wide open space. This is a desk that I've had for about 10
09:45years. It's just really personal to me with again a bunch of things that I've collected over the
09:51years. I have stuff everywhere. This is a board where I keep all kind of my inspiration and
09:57and things that you know I've done kind of over the years and things that really matter to me.
10:02A lot of pictures of my son. Hey that's Tim Oliphant and that's me. That's Raylan and Boyd right there.
10:12Pretty cool. This is my personal space and this this room is it's me. When we bought the house
10:20this is actually three bedrooms and a bathroom up here and the rooms were really small and then
10:25this was the caretaker's bedroom but we turned this into a bathroom. You know the thing about
10:31this house when we bought it it hadn't been touched in a hundred years. Every system in the house was
10:37on the precipice of failing. I mean over the course of that year we learned so much about
10:43this house the history of this place but we learned so much about ourselves and what it
10:48takes to bring a house back to life and we're better for it because it's literally
10:56the place that we want to be for the rest of our lives.
11:07So this is our bedroom. The guy who built the house this was his bedroom and the way that he
11:12designed this house is extraordinary in the sense that the living room faces south and so it gets
11:19sun all day long whereas this room in particular faces east so you wake up in the morning and then
11:26you see the the sunrise. The first time that we saw it we didn't expect it and we woke up
11:32with the sun kind of hitting our eyes and we couldn't believe what we were looking at that
11:37this man had the foresight to position this in such a way with the architects that they used to
11:42build it that allowed you to wake up to nature kind of in that way. It blew our minds but it
11:49really opened up our hearts and I can't believe that we get to live here. You've seen my bed but
11:56there's one bed that you haven't seen. We have a black lav and she's the kind of the nucleus the
12:02heart of of our family. Well she would sleep on our sofas and they're made out of velvet and when
12:09we moved here to the Hudson Valley we were taking apart an old couch that we had and I said oh don't
12:14throw that away let's make the dog's bed out of our old sofa and then maybe she'll have her own
12:23velvet bed and she won't sleep on our sofa but it didn't work. She still sleeps on our sofa.
12:44A.D. thank you so much for letting us share our home with you. We really appreciate you coming
12:49out. It's a place that's very special to us and we hope you enjoy your time. Be careful driving home.