Million Dollar
Homes

Bradford Shellhammer went stir-crazy at the start of 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns. Shellhammer was confined in his Manhattan apartment after traveling the world as eBay Inc.'s vice president of buyer experience. “I was, like, we need to buy another house,” he told his investment banker husband Georgi Balinov. They wanted a Hudson Valley rural house, he said.

Shellhammer went north after convincing his husband. “I basically planned a weekend where two of my best friends came,” he explains. “We saw 22 homes. Made a list. I conducted research.”

He noticed his last house on his first day of canvassing in Stuyvesant, north of Hudson, three hours from New York City. It “didn’t check a lot of boxes for me, I’ll be honest,” he admits. The clapboard house and barns on 13 acres were too typical for him. “I’m a tried-and-true modernist,” Shellhammer adds, “a hybrid of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the Eames House.”

Shellhammer, currently chief product officer at Reverb.com LLC, wanted to build a house from scratch. He has bought 60 Hudson Valley acres and hopes to build “more of a cabin than a farm.”