Hensonville is too small to be considered a town. One of eight Catskills hamlets to the larger town of Windham, the population is sub-500, and there are no stoplights. The main drag has a brewpub, an inn, a thrift store, and — as of the last two years — a pair of businesses from the duo behind popular downtown restaurants Contra and Wildair. By the end of May, that number will have doubled to four. On a single street: a gourmet grocery, a luncheonette, a fine-dining restaurant, and a boutique hotel.
Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske Valtierra have been slowly building out Hensonville in their image for the past two years. In 2022, they opened Paracasa, right next to the town’s main bus stop, which sells bone-in rib eyes from a local farm ($35/pound), beef-blood sprinkles for your dog ($14), and Gueyu Mar tinned sardines ($21). A year later, they opened a luncheonette next door called Day June. This summer, they’ll open a hotel called the Henson; downstairs will be Matilda, a fine-dining restaurant. All four businesses are within a two-minute walk of one another in Hensonville’s main intersection. “One of the things that we’re trying to do is create an ecosystem,” says von Hauske Valtierra.
Stone and von Hauske Valtierra found out about Hensonville in the first place through friends they met at Contra, Ely and Danielle Franko. The Frankos had been developing in the area for years — between 2016 and 2022, they converted three cottages into carefully curated Airbnbs nicknamed the Hunter Houses, designed with exposed wooden beams, mid-century malm fireplaces, and macramé hammocks. In 2021, they stumbled upon what was then called Hammo’s, a run-down hotel in the middle of Hensonville, and stayed there while working on their third Airbnb, called the Cabin. “The guy was running it like a hostel and Airbnbing out rooms for about $50 a night. The building was in complete disrepair,” said Ely Franko. “We started looking for hotel properties and this wasn’t even on our radar. But then it started to make sense. We know this area so well.”
The couple bought the 12,000-square-foot building and property for $975,000 in 2021 with Stone and von Hauske Valtierra in a four-way equal partnership. Flipping homes into Airbnbs gave them experience in basic home renovations, and the couple lived there with their two young children while hand-painting each room and restoring the original wooden floors. “We became obsessed with limewash,” said Danielle Franko. Along the way, people would drop in to tell them about the town’s history. “We’ve heard from locals that at one point it was pretty busy, like there was a huge grocery store, a barbershop, and a sporting-goods store. Then it withered away.” (Though not entirely: Other than Paracasa and Day June, Hammo’s sits between a bar called Zack’s Place and an Italian restaurant called Vesuvio.)
Now, there is a lot here — meant for a specific kind of person with a specific kind of income, who is looking for a specific kind of meal that ends with a specific kind of sweet-herb sabayon to top off their ice-cream sundae. They’re not the only ones feeding into this new ecosystem. Last summer, the popular-among-locals Windham Mountain ski resort was bought by Beall Investment Partners (the firm behind restaurant conglomerate Ruby Tuesday) and Kemmons Wilson Hospitality Partners (who founded the Holiday Inn). It was quickly rebranded as an “Italian Alps–style concept” with $200,000 memberships to mixed reception from locals, concerned — per one Change.org petition — that it would quickly become “an enclave for just a few wealthy downstate families.” (It didn’t help that the social-media campaign tied to the rebrand bore the slogan “Say Goodbye to Windham.”)
The Henson will open this weekend with an herb garden, a creek guests can swim in during the summer, and two sprawling lawns landscaped with weddings and events in mind. It also has a private dining room, a roof-deck that overlooks Windham Mountain and Black Dome Valley, and 16 unique rooms of varying sizes, all of which have Casper mattresses, a Marshall speaker, and Grown Alchemist products. And, of course, Matilda, the restaurant by von Hauske Valtierra and Stone, which will serve wood-grilled oysters with bone marrow, pumpkinseed oil, and purple sorrel, served with a side of thick, Peter Luger–style cuts of bacon.
Von Hauske Valtierra and Stone insist that they are committed, with their expansion in the town, to being accessible to locals as well as people who are up from the city for the weekend. “An electrician who has lived up there should be able to go into the diner and not think we’re trying to reinvent the wheel,” said Stone. “Then,” he says, “someone from the city should walk into Matilda and have an experience that is different from what they get downstate.” (This has become a familiar tactic for restaurateurs opening in small, upstate hamlets. When Clare de Boer took the reins as chef at Pine Plains’ Stissing House in 2022, its general manager stated, “We are committed to becoming a fixture in the Hudson Valley and want the restaurant to appeal to all types of people, whether to be a special occasion restaurant or a place they come to all the time.” Still, its fish pie is $48, in a town where the median household income is $69,321.)
It is certainly a model that has worked. Twenty-five minutes east, Camptown opened in Leeds last winter in what was formerly Carl’s Rip Van Winkle Motor Lodge, complete with its own fine-dining restaurant, Casa Susanna, which made Esquire’s “Best New Restaurants” list last year. In 2022, Hotel Lilien opened in a historic Victorian mansion in Tannersville — restaurateur Natalie Freihon opened her restaurant Nat’s Mountain House next door the following year. The Henson’s recommendation page suggests that while guests are in the area, they visit Paracasa and Day June. And on the home page, they sum up their mission: “There is something so special about this part of the world. It is completely unassuming and unimaginably beautiful. Over the last few centuries explorers have come, and settlers. They all found unique challenges — the landscape being too hilly to settle, the ground too rocky to farm, the people too smart and stubborn to sell snake oil to, the mountains too arduous to conquer. But there are travelers who came from afar and saw home. There are real salt-of-the-earth people that dreamed up what this place could be and built a wonderful life. We proudly count ourselves among them.”
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