The Times featured the house I decorated with Ben Dixon and our break-up too.
Link here.
Slideshow here.
July 23, 2009
Living Together
After the Breakup, What About the Lake House?
By JULIE SCELFO
STANFORDVILLE, N.Y.
IT was a perfect party — vodka lemonade on a dock overlooking a lake, dozens of close friends, a cool misty night in the country a couple of hours north of New York.
Inside, the house spoke of a passionate interest in style, and of a committed relationship. Silhouettes of the couple who owned the house hung on a wall in the master bedroom; the couple’s nickname — Benford — was spelled out in large letters leaning against a wall in the kitchen.
But the couple, Benjamin Dixon, 31, and Bradford Shellhammer, 33, who had planned the evening as a commitment ceremony, had broken up three months earlier. Still, with airplane tickets purchased by some of the guests, a catering deposit paid and a house they haven’t been able to sell, they figured it made sense to go ahead and have a party anyway.
Their tale of lost love has a familiar arc — love sparks, then blooms; lives intertwine; moments are lost and misunderstandings creep in; eventually the two begin to live as strangers — and an epilogue that has become increasingly familiar as well, as unwanted houses become prisons rather than cocoons.
Rather than being a glossy testament to their taste and their partnership, their house in Stanfordville, in Dutchess County, is now a dead weight that entangles them and makes it impossible to move on. Having bought it and an apartment in Manhattan at the height of the real estate boom (and having made an agreement with a third partner in their lake house property not to sell it until December 2009), they are left with joint custody of two large mortgages. They are also left with two carefully decorated homes filled with one-of-a-kind accessories found on eBay and quirky furnishings by high-end designers like the Dutch collective Droog that are reminders of what came before and, Mr. Dixon said, “big reminders of what was supposed to be.”
Their story began in 2004 in San Francisco, where Mr. Shellhammer, who is now the manager of the Blu Dot store in SoHo and an interior designer, worked as an admissions counselor at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and wrote a blog about his adventures in the gay fashion and nightlife scenes.
Mr. Dixon, who is now an executive at the Australian investment bank Macquarie Group, then led a quieter existence: at 26, he was already the controller at Design Within Reach, working toward an M.B.A. at University of California, Berkeley.
They met online, then had a casual Sunday night dinner at Mr. Dixon’s apartment in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Mr. Shellhammer returned a week later for a second date and essentially never left. “We spent every night together from that moment on,” he said.
In May 2005, after Mr. Dixon’s graduation, they loaded a U-Haul with furniture and clothing — lots and lots of clothing — and set out for New York.
Like countless couples before them, they rented an apartment — a two-bedroom, two-bath near Wall Street — and began building a life together, Mr. Shellhammer undertaking a degree in fashion design at Parsons and Mr. Dixon finding work at a private equity firm.
At dinner with friends of Mr. Dixon’s from Design Within Reach, Mr. Shellhammer met Sandra Hansel, then DWR’s director of sales for New York, who offered him a job. Ms. Hansel said she found him “extremely charismatic, almost Pied Piper-like,” with a “vast amount of knowledge about design and pop culture and arts and fashion.”
“I found myself wondering why he didn’t work for us,” she said.
Mr. Shellhammer accepted a part-time position and soon became so passionate about interior design that he reduced the hours he spent studying fashion. “I fell in love with furniture,” he said.
A year after arriving in New York, they bought a place in the old Manhattan General Hospital building on Stuyvesant Square for $930,000, and set to work making it their own, choosing furniture and installing vast His and His closets. A few months later, they found themselves looking at weekend homes with a friend who is a real estate agent. (He asked not to be named in this article because he doesn’t want to get further involved in their breakup.)
They fell in love with a five-acre lot with two homes on a small lake in Stanfordville. “We got to this place, and it was raining and it was miserable and it was hideously decorated,” Mr. Shellhammer recalled. “But we all three kind of felt something.” The property cost $390,000. The three bought it together, with Messrs. Shellhammer and Dixon taking the larger house, and the friend the small one.
Renovating the bigger house took about $200,000 and occupied every weekend for a more than a year. “It was exciting,” Mr. Dixon said. “The house had been very dated and very dark.” When they were done, they had created a bright, open space with views of the lake from nearly every room.
With the house complete and their careers progressing — Mr. Dixon moved to Macquarie Group at the end of 2007; in 2008, Mr. Shellhammer became the sales manager for DWR’s new Tools for Living store — the couple began thinking about what came next. To Mr. Shellhammer, marriage seemed like a natural step.
While Mr. Dixon resisted, Mr. Shellhammer said: “I pushed it. I wanted pictures. I wanted the fuss. I wanted all the people we ever loved to share the love we felt on a daily basis.” Mr. Dixon gave in, and “save the date” cards were sent.
But while they had poured heart and soul into their homes, they hadn’t tended to each other with the same care. Small differences were pushing them apart.
Mr. Dixon felt increasingly alienated by his partner’s need to post the details of their lives online. “For me,” he said, a vacation or a party was “real just for the two of us. It seemed like Bradford often needed to put it online for it to be real.”
Mr. Shellhammer, who said his blog, bradfordshellhammer.com, has about 5,600 regular readers, said writing about his experiences is a central part of his life. “It’s helped me get through hard times, brought me to some amazing people, and it’s not something I’m going to abandon,” he said.
The further they got into planning the big day, the more the significance of a lifetime commitment set in, and both began to have doubts.
“We had become pretty mean to each other,” Mr. Dixon said. “We hadn’t put our finger on what was wrong — we just knew it wasn’t right.”
One night in March when Mr. Dixon was working late, Mr. Shellhammer phoned him at the office and asked him to come home. “We had a calm discussion that evening,” Mr. Dixon said, resulting in a decision to call off the ceremony and part ways.
Mr. Shellhammer, who earns less than Mr. Dixon, volunteered to move out of the condo. Mr. Dixon agreed to pay market rent, about $4,000 a month, to stay there, which they then applied toward the monthly condo cost of $5,500, and to cover two-thirds of the remaining $1,500. They also agreed to divide the remaining bills — about $2,400 a month for the lake house and $450 a month for car-related fees — using the same two-thirds, one-third formula. (“It was in proportion to our income,” Mr. Shellhammer said. “It’s always been that way.”) Each month, Mr. Shellhammer puts $1,600 into an account for joint expenses, and separately pays $1,750 rent for his new apartment, a 400-square-foot walkup in the West Village he moved into in April.
Then they had to figure out timing on the lake house. “We looked at the year ahead and chose weekends,” Mr. Dixon said.
For Mr. Shellhammer, who left DWR in January to manage the Blu Dot showroom in SoHo, there have been lots of changes — starting with his new home. “Sometimes it’s charming, but other times I’m like, ‘I want my old kitchen back! I want my old floors back!’ ” he said.
“We bought so many things — art, furniture, bags — we consumed so much,” he said. “Now that I’m in a small apartment but still responsible for mortgages on two houses, I’m having to think about how I’m spending my money.”
But living with less, he added, is “kind of empowering. I’m at a place now where I don’t really need this stuff.”
His personal growth was tested the night of their wedding-turned-birthday party for Mr. Dixon.
Just as the day was starting to cool, friends and family gathered, protected from the light rain by the thick foliage of a maple tree. To some, it felt awkward.
“I was a little surprised Bradford was here,” said Arwen Schreiber, a friend of Mr. Dixon’s who had flown in from Northern California. Knowing what was supposed to have taken place that day, she said, she felt concerned for both men.
Mr. Shellhammer insisted he had no regrets about his choices. “I’m a true romantic,” he said. “I believe in finding the love of my life and spending the rest of my life with him.”
Still, some changes are hard to accept. Although they had agreed that the house was Mr. Dixon’s for the weekend, Mr. Shellhammer assumed he would be welcome to stay overnight.
But when he asked beforehand which room he would have, “I told him they were full,” said Mr. Dixon, who had invited a date to the party.
Mr. Shellhammer returned to the city that night.
