Two Lifelong Friends Teamed Up to Build This Glassy Catskills Cabin

In the late 1980s, Michael Cooper and Tom Gluck were roommates at Yale University—and they became lifelong friends. Gluck went on to become an architect and principal at GLUCK+ and Michael became a lawyer. When Michael and his wife, project director Ailsa Wong, began searching for their forever home in the mid 2010s, there was no question in their minds as to who would design it.

"Mike described this as a thirty-year interview process," jokes Gluck. "I didn’t realize freshman year in college that I was interviewing for a profession that I didn’t even know I was going to have."

For years, the New York City–based couple spent weekends trekking upstate to unwind in the forests of the Catskills, and to visit Gluck’s family compound in the area, called the Tower House. They looked high and low for a fixer-upper, although they later shifted their search toward vacant land that would afford more creative control.

"We saw what Tom and GLUCK+ had done with their property and others up there, and there was nothing remotely comparable, in terms of existing stock," Michael explains. "So we decided to just do the whole thing from scratch, with Tom’s guidance." After viewing dozens of different parcels, they stumbled upon one that they fell in love with. Set on a heavily wooded, stone-walled slope in the Catskills foothills, the 10-acre property had been held by the same family since the 1800s.