SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

In May of 2019, Bethany Parks needed a change of pace. She was divorced and living in a home in Greenwich that she had renovated herself. “I was like, ‘Alright, I just can’t be in Greenwich anymore,’” the Ulster County native says. “’It’s too small of a town.” So she set her sights on bustling Saratoga Springs, researching brand-new apartments equipped with all the bells and whistles. The rental property she fell in love with, though, was a small, cozy home on Franklin Street that was built in 1832, making it the third-oldest house in the city. The rent was a little more than she was planning to spend, but she was smitten. “I was just like, ‘This is it—I’m going to pay extra and give myself a vacation for a year,’” Parks says. “Almost like going to Paris…but not.”

While she loved the home she was about to move into, it was definitely dated. “I said to the landlord, ‘What are you doing with blue carpet?’” she says. (Surprisingly, he took out the carpet and put in wood floors before she moved in.) “And then I came into the kitchen—the dark, tight kitchen—and I said, ‘Can I paint the cabinets white?’ I’m sure he was like ‘Who does she think she is? This is a rental—it’s not her house.’ And I’m like, ‘This is my vacation home in Paris—I want to make it really pretty.’” Ultimately, the landlord said no to Parks’ art project, but she moved in anyway. She lived with the dark, tight kitchen for the better part of a year, imagining what it could be but still enjoying the home’s convenient location and its front porch, which she calls her window to the world. 

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Years prior, in another part of New York, architectural photographer Mark Samu and his wife, decorative painter Lucianna, were living on Long Island, their professional paths crossing occasionally as they both worked for clients with luxury homes in the Hamptons. Come 2001, the couple had had enough of Long Island life and closed on a home in Saratoga Springs the day the Twin Towers fell. A few years after moving upstate, they bought a 3,000-square-foot home that was built in the 1780s and located on five acres on the Hudson River in Gansevoort, and completely gutted and renovated it. “Lu was the designer and I was the tweaker,” Samu says. “Because that’s what I did—I knew how to tweak something to make it look better.”

After that reno project, the former Long Islanders kept at it, purchasing and renovating old homes around the Saratoga area. When Lu passed away in June 2019, the couple had renovated a total of 11 homes together, two of them complete flips.

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In March of 2020, Parks met Samu—who by that point had moved from Gansevoort into a tiny 300-square-foot home on Lincoln Avenue—for the first time at Uncommon Grounds. Shortly after sitting down, a barista told them the shop would be closing soon, even though it wasn’t close to closing time. They picked up and went to Max London’s, which was also closed. They ended up grabbing burgers at BurgerFi, which was still open, but by that night they already suspected the world was about to change.

“When COVID hit, I was grounded from my work travel and pondering if I would renew my lease,” Parks says. (She’s the director of sales for Source International, a Boston-based company that makes chairs for homes and offices.) “I was going to need a creative project to work on, something to fill my time. On a whim, I asked my landlord if he would be interested in selling the Franklin Street property and—voila—he said yes. I didn’t close until September 2020, but a week after that I was tearing out walls with my Sawzall and reinventing my kitchen.” 

While Parks is certainly a hands-on sort of house-flipper—“I like tearing stuff apart,” she says—as her relationship with Samu grew closer, she did utilize his contractor for some of the little house’s larger projects, like creating a closet off the kitchen for the washer and dryer, and removing the wall between the kitchen and dining room to create an open-concept entertaining space. Samu, with his eye for design, helped out as well; it was his idea to put a large framed window above the sink. “The paint color for the black frame is called Dragon’s Breath,” Parks says. “And then we painted the shed in the back [which you can see through the window] with Dragon’s Breath, too.”

Meanwhile, Samu was working on a few reno projects of his own, including one on Cossayuna Lake in Washington County. And this time, it was Parks who would help him out. “When I sold my Hudson River home, I said to my real estate agent, ‘I’ve got to find something else on the water,’” Samu says. “So she texts me that there’s something on Cossayuna Lake. I didn’t even know where that was.” He and Parks rode out to the property (it’s about 30 minutes from Saratoga), and when they got there, a devastated Samu didn’t even want to go inside. “It was a dump,” Parks says. Samu was about to call his agent to cancel, but there was no cell service. “We walked inside,” Samu says, “and Miss Optimistic Positive [Bethany] is like, ‘Oh my god, this is great!’ Then she walks into the kitchen and says ‘I think this was a trailer.’”

“And then it was game on,” Parks says.

Indeed, the tiny property on Cossayuna Lake, which Parks and Samu now refer to as “The Fancy Camp,” is a 1950s camper with a house literally built onto it. Upon tearing out an interior wall, the pair, by now all in on helping each other with various home projects, discovered it was actually an exterior wall of the RV, and what used to be an exterior window had been converted into a “takeout window” between the kitchen and living room. Now that the renovation is complete, the tiny 548-square-foot Fancy Camp is going for $300-$350 per night on Airbnb, thanks in large part to Samu’s photography expertise. “Honestly,” he says, “the photography sells this stuff.”

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While Samu and Parks, who refer to themselves as “activity partners,” own each of their properties separately, they do make a good team when it comes to the renovations. He loves the negotiation to get the property, and then putting the finishing touches on a home; she loves everything in between. “Mark’s got this house that we’re working on now, and as soon as I walked in, I hammered this big hole in the ceiling,” Parks says. “I can’t wait to tear things down.” Samu adds: “And I already know where artwork is going when the house is finished, even if the stairs are just being torn out.”

As for the duo’s interior design preferences? “They’re pretty similar,” Samu says. “A little rustic—almost like side-of-the-road, garage sale stuff. The thing I learned from Lu was that no matter what you do, you need at least one good thing in a room, whether it’s a good paint color, a good fixture or a good piece of furniture. The rest of it can kind of be junk.” But when a high-end furniture salesperson and photographer with a keen eye for design work together on a project, even the “junk” looks pretty darn good.

“I just want to make sure you are aware that I am not a real interior designer,” was the first thing Andrea Zappone told me when I reached out about featuring her in Saratoga Living’s Design Issue. “I didn’t go to design school, and I am still changing my kid’s diapers during the day.” Diapers or no diapers, upon taking one step into the high-ceilinged foyer of the custom home she designed on the outskirts of Saratoga Springs, I knew one thing to be absolutely true: Andrea Zappone is an interior designer.

What Zappone meant, of course, is that she’s not a trained interior designer, and isn’t currently running a full-time interior design business. Instead, she constantly designs and redesigns rooms in her own gorgeous white colonial, sharing hilariously candid and slightly self-deprecating posts to her Instagram—@andreazappone—along the way. “Sorry my unmanicured bare feet were on the table a couple hours before dinner time,” reads the caption of a photo of her standing on her immaculately manicured dining room table. “Spot the baby grabbing soil out of the fig tree and rubbing it into the white shag carpet,” reads one of her all-white living room. “Behold! I moved the entryway table into the hallway thereby making it a hallway table,” reads another piece of interior design Insta gold. The mother-of-three explains: “When I was in college I always had the purple Nikon camera tied around my wrist, and I would come home and upload 150 photos to Facebook. That’s just always been my personality—to share pictures and be who I am. It hasn’t evolved, it hasn’t changed. I’m still the same crazy person that will upload a million pictures after doing one thing.”

What has evolved, on the other hand, is her design aesthetic. The oldest of three children herself, Zappone’s parents allowed her to design and move into their Utica basement when she was 11. “God bless my parents—they let me do whatever the heck I wanted,” she says of the space. “I decided that I wanted antiques to be my motif, so I had old quilts and vintage mirrors that I found at garage sales. Instead of hanging pictures of my friends, I asked my dad if he could find old portraits of my great-great-grandparents and distant relatives. And I actually had framed pictures of all these dead people. I can’t even describe it—my bedroom was absolutely insane.” But while the thought of her childhood room may make her cringe today, she fondly remembers closing her door, putting on a CD and designing a space that was all her own—something that, in adulthood, she’s been able to do on a much grander scale.

Since marrying her husband, Mike, Zappone has renovated or completely designed from scratch four homes—two in Queensbury, one in Wilton (for which she won the Best Interior Design award in the 2015 Saratoga Showcase of Homes) and the one in which the family currently lives (it has been featured on housebeautiful.com and in House & Home magazine). “When we built a house in Wilton, I didn’t know how to design a home for a family,” she says. “But I learned a lot, because we had our first two kids there. I really built this house”—the Saratoga one, which was built by Belmonte Builders in 2019—“with an understanding that this banquette is going to get trashed. So we put vinyl on it.” In fact, even beyond the breakfast nook banquette, the entire house is fairly kid-proof, as Zappone utilized performance fabrics wherever possible. She also has a room upstairs that I wasn’t allowed to go in, on account of it not looking like it belonged in a magazine. “An important thing when you’re designing a house with young kids is you have to have a room that you literally just don’t care about,” she says. “I’m not putting time or money into it—that’s where they eat pizza.”

Another reason Zappone doesn’t want to touch that second-floor space is that as her kids get older (and therefore may be allowed to eat pizza in rooms she does care about), she wants to transform it into a home office to launch—yes—an interior design business. Currently she works with a few clients, selectively choosing small design projects she’s excited about, but has a big project starting in March that she’s thinking may kickstart a career. (“This is like my coming out!” she says of this very story, not to get too meta.) When she starts to second-guess her untrained design aesthetic, she turns to Instagram, where other self-taught designers are reshaping the world of interior design. “It makes me feel good about launching a business and not being ashamed of the fact that there’s stuff I don’t know,” she says of seeing such Instagram accounts. “But some people appreciate that I don’t follow many rules. I’m a little bit reckless and just go off the cuff.” So while everyone and their mother would consider Zappone an interior designer now, maybe someday soon, she will too.