“We change houses, not spouses,” actor/builder Corbin Bernsen likes to say. His partner, Amanda Pays, long ago shifted her focus from acting to interior design and the two have been on a decades-long extreme-remodeling tear: in 36 years of marriage, they’ve flipped 30 properties. We’ve been avidly following along since featuring their work in our first book.
The two approach their projects with care and esprit de corps, hand picking every element themselves (and searching high and low before purchasing). Corbin can be found tearing down walls when he’s not on set—his latest role is in the new Jon Hamm series Your Friends and Neighbors. And they fully unpack and live in each of their places before kissing them goodbye.
Based in Los Angeles for many years, Amanda and Corbin decamped for New York’s Hudson Valley in 2019 when the youngest of their four sons left for college on the East Coast. Their latest upstate project, a historic farm compound, is newly on the market. Join us for a tour.
Photography courtesy of Amanda Pays (@amandapays) and The Lillie K. Team at Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Reality.
Above: Located in Germantown, New York, 1910 Barnswood sits on eight acres of farmland and has a cottage and giant barn behind the main house. It was originally part of the adjacent Livingston estate, now Clermont Manor, a National Historic Landmark open as a museum and park with walking trails.
“It’s going to be an new old house,” says Amanda in season 7, episode 4 of the home improvement television series In with the Old. “Real wood, real timbers, real floors,” specified Corbin. “We are really turning a newer house into an older house.” The show is available on HBO and worth watching to see the place as it was and all that went into its dramatic transformation.
Amanda and Corbin wrote a book about their remodeling adventures called Open House: here are a dozen of their key tips plus a look at their place in the South of France.
Note the carpenter’s signature, E.B. Palmer, on one of the newly added old ceiling beams.
The property is listed at $4.6 million via The Lillie K. Team at Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Reality.
Here are more Pays-Bernsen productions:
- 11 Money-Saving Strategies from a Hollywood House Flipper
- Rehab Diary: Amanda Pays and Corbin Bernsen Air Their Dirty Laundry
- Saving (and Splurging) with Style in Upstate NY
- At Home in Upstate, New York, with Amanda Pays and Corbin Bernsen
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