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DUTCHESS COUNTY, N.Y. -- Netherlands native Frederique van der Wal swears that the fact she spends her weekends upstate in Dutchess County in a 1790 white clapboard colonial with a Dutch door is just a happy coincidence.
When the veteran model was hunting for a retreat from her Manhattan modernist loft 5 1/2 years ago, her criteria were proximity (she's only 90 miles north) and a real sense of refuge.
"New York is such an intense city, so bustling. The weekend should be an escape," she says.
That means trading in the slick trappings of her loft life: Armani gowns get ditched for jeans and tank tops; klieg-lit galas are dimmed in favor of sunbathed barbecues. Unlike the manicured Hamptons, which feel more suburban than rural and are often more about socializing than seeking sanctuary, the Hudson River Valley still boasts swaths of legitimate farmland.
Van der Wal shares 20 acres, a former Angus cattle farm, with her long-term boyfriend, screenwriter Nicholas Klein. She gardens, hikes, rides her John Deere and swims in a half-acre pond fed by one of three springs on her property. Shaped like a lopsided heart, it's stocked with bass and 2-foot koi. "If you sit still in the water, they'll nip at you to see what you are."
White sand was trucked in to create a small beach, scattered with a white dinghy, hen clam shells and plastic shovels that are the property of her daughter, 5-year-old Scyler. On the shore sits a Balinese pagoda. Van der Wal hops in and reclines on the faded red mattress. A turtle plops into the pond.
"This is great," she says, peering through amber-tinted aviators. "You're only 1 1/2 hours away, and you feel like you're in another world."
Call her spread Camp Frederique. She and Scyler ice-skate and sled in winter. Van der Wal had a tennis court built 1 1/2 years ago and plans to replace the 60- or 70-year-old chicken wire and cement pool -- now a haven for frogs -- and renovate the flaking red barn, which she envisions as an airy rec room with pool and pingpong tables.
The house, too, has a rustic, Adirondacks camp feel. Van der Wal wanted to honor its history by returning it to its roots: peeling off linoleum to expose wide-planked chestnut floors, punching through dropped ceilings and chipping away at wall stucco to reveal wooden beams. She laid a wood floor in the first-floor bathroom, where she installed a claw-foot tub that was her birthday gift to herself last year.
Outside, she ripped out foliage that was obscuring stone walls. She replaced an uninspired wood deck with a patio made of brick culled from a Manhattan town house; there is photographic evidence to prove she had a hand in laying it. Now, with moss sprouting among the seams, "it feels like it belongs."
Even with its rich history, there's nothing precious about van der Wal's home. "It still has a roughness to it," she says proudly. Everything is old and far from perfect -- consider the office's steeply sloping floors -- and, to her eye, charming. "This is a house you really live in. ... I made it so people come in and feel immediately comfortable."
It's a popular gathering spot. She hosts an annual Thanksgiving feast for 30 featuring "the weirdest walks of life: locals, city people, foreigners who don't celebrate Thanksgiving."
Still, she knows not to invite up certain urban friends. "They don't get it." (One admonished, "It's a money pit. Freddie, you're out of your mind!") Some would shudder at the prospect of sharing a bathroom (there are only two for five bedrooms). "I have new towels, but that's about it," van der Wal says. And some might quake knowing that their BlackBerrys function in only one spot: atop one of those outdoor stone walls just beyond the mudroom.
No matter -- or "Whatever," as the white sign hanging in her kitchen reads. The idea is relaxation, not ritziness. There are none of van der Wal's Vogue or Cosmopolitan covers, her Sports Illustrated swimsuit pictorials or Victoria's Secret catalog shots hanging up: "I'm not into that." For this highly photographed woman, the only visible photos here are family snapshots and one tiny, silver-framed image tucked into a kitchen shelf of a grinning, preteen van der Wal.
Though she still models after nearly two decades in the industry -- for Nicole Miller's show earlier this year, for edgy design house Imitation of Christ a couple of years ago -- van der Wal, who's in her late 30s, has other projects in the works, primarily a Travel Channel series premiering in November, The Invisible Journey with Frederique. She'll take viewers to the source of goods both expensive (diamonds) and everyday (tea).
Her first subject is the cut flower, inspired by the fact that Holland breeders recently named a new lily for her, the first in a series of blooms called Frederique's Choice. Having dabbled in the lingerie and fragrance businesses, van der Wal has a new entrepreneurial goal: a lifestyle line of pots, place mats, vases and bulbs.
White and dappled pink with a hint of perfume, a vase of her eponymous lilies sit on a patio table.
"Stunning, no?" she asks mischievously. Like their namesake -- and her homestead -- yes.
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