Transcript of Inside Walton Goggins’s Enchanting 1920s New York Lodge | Open Door | Architectural Digest

- Hello, AD, what are you doing here? Just kidding. Welcome to our home. [mellow music] This is the gun room. I should contextualize this experience for you. The house was built in 1924. The gentleman who owned it had 3,000 acres around here. We have 125. It was built in the design of a Scottish hunting lodge. I personally have never been to a Scottish hunting lodge, so I'm gonna have to take his word for it. This was the gun room and where they would store all of their guns and go on a hunt. They had a pheasant farm here and a number of other things. So let me show you this right over here so you can see exactly what I'm talking about. There are these little gun butt kind of indentations right here. We put these shelves in on both sides, but the guns were lined up on both sides of this door. [upbeat music] Check this out. You know what this is? This is a prohibition bar. Now, we have the original blueprints of the house, right? So we know that this room was called a linen closet, but it ain't a linen closet. This is where I get to do my thing. This is where they kept all of their liquor for all of their friends that kind of came over. They entertained kind of the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Babe Ruth, Walt Disney, Joan Crawford, even the House of Windsor. What's so special about this and the history of this place is that all of the people that drank here actually signed the wall. This is the signatures of some of the people that signed the wall. This is Edna St. Vincent Millay here at the top, and Hal Erskine and a number of other people. Joan Crawford's name was right over there in the corner, but they covered it up with stain when we were redoing this room. Joan, I'm so sorry. And keeping with tradition with what they did in this bar, I have asked a number of my friends to begin signing this wall, because socializing and having friends over and talking is very, very important to me and my family. [delicate music] Rosebud. Just kidding. So we are in the Hudson Valley, and as you can imagine, it's cold, and it certainly would've been much colder than it was today in the 1920s, so all of the fireplaces in this house are practical. The one thing in this room I did wanna show you is this. This is a bronze casting of my hand from "The Hateful Eight." This Roman artisan made a sculpture out of it and presented it to Quentin at the premiere of "The Hateful Eight" in Rome. [playful music] Oh, Architectural Digest, you're still here? Just kidding. Okay, come this way. I wanna show you something. This is a gift from Sam Jackson. It's a gun that he gave us on "The Hateful Eight." He gave seven of us the gun. He gave Jennifer Jason Leigh a Prada purse, and she said, "You can keep the Prada purse, I want the gun." [upbeat music] This is the living room. It literally is my favorite room in the house. We spend a lot of time in this room as a family. There are, what, 20 windows in this room, and so you can kind of look out and see the seasons as they change. The sun comes up right over there, and we wake up early in the morning and have a cappuccino and sit in here, watch the sun come up. It's very romantic. [upbeat jazz music] When we were designing this house, we wanted it to feel like it felt in 1923, like it's a living salon. We contacted a dear friend of ours who became our interior architect, Shawn Henderson, who is an unbelievable designer. In this home, he just helped us reframe this experience and begin to think how we could live in it as a family. I like things that are old, that feel lived in and worn, and a lot of the little bitty things that you see on all of these shelves as we walk through the house, or even lamps or even chairs, they're just things that I've just kind of picked up along the way in my travels. Now, I'm a firm believer in not having to walk more than three or four feet without having a place to sit, or with a drink and a friend and having a conversation. I think that that's what life is really all about. Can we just look at this fireplace? This is 120 years old. I sit here in front of this fire with my wife or with a friend and have a glass of wine, and I just think about all the conversations that were had around this fire over 100 years, and it just fills me with so much joy. [gentle music] It's very important for me to say this. There are a lot of artisans and artists that went into the making of our home in this community that we now call home. And some of those people are James Romanchuk and his son Dave, Jake Saka, who did all of the plumbing, again, Shawn Henderson, our architectural designer, and Dean Warner who did the electricity. Chris Gregory, who matched all of the walls around here. And again, I just think it's so important to say that like making a movie, an actor doesn't make a movie. A director doesn't make a movie. A team of people show up every day and pour their hearts into it. [upbeat music] This is a painting by a friend of mine, Danny Fox, and you'll see Danny and Wes Lang in a lot of places. They're my best friends and I'm very fortunate to have a few of their pieces, and they're bangers, if you know what I mean. Come with me. So then that leads into this hallway. Check this thing out. This is what's so cool about this. This was the main entrance to the house. We decided to close this entrance off to the house and kind of redid all the stone outside so that this is kind of like our personal wing, but this was the main entrance to the house, and it's just one of my favorite rooms in the whole house. It's just a hallway, but what a magnificent hallway it is. [gentle jazz music] You'll see a lot of art in this home. That's what I do, that's what I'm passionate about. It's about collecting things and finding things that are meaningful to me. I spend a lot of time in antique shops and flea markets and things of that nature, but I've been collecting art for about 28 years and I started when, you know, tips from valet parking, just a little bitty thing. And now 28 years later, you know, we've accumulated a lot of art and having our son exposed to art is one of the most important gifts I think, that we've been able to give him. [cheerful music] This is my ass, and it's my son's ass. And we are walking in a river up here in the Hudson Valley. He's probably three there, so it would've been about 11 years ago. What I also really love about this room is the view. We live in the Hudson Valley, so it's constantly filled with deer or wild turkey or black bears or me walking naked, talking to myself, studying lines. You could see all of those things outside this window. [gentle music] And now I'm gonna take you into the kitchen. This is where the cooking happens. And guess what? I do none of it! Zero! My wife, she does all of it. She's an incredible cook. I'm very lucky to have a partner who enjoys cooking as much as my wife does, although I do cook a mean sourdough and I cook some unbelievable focaccia. Maybe you've heard of it. These are just like, old plates that we kind of found. And this little piece of art right up here was the first piece of art that I bought from a friend of mine, that one and this one almost 28 years ago. But these are just things that we've kind of collected. These are ants. There's some ants right here. Again, they're just fans of my focaccia. [gentle music] This is the table that we had at our house in Los Angeles and it was too long for here, so we just cut it down. We live in the woods, so it's not like you can kind of run down the store and get everything that you need. And there was a lot of thought and a lot of effort that kind of went into all of this. The other thing that I'm really passionate about is lighting. I just have been collecting light fixtures for a really long time. This is one of them that we got from a friend of ours. Not a lot of variety in the lamps that I like. Most of them are brass or copper. The thing that my family can't stand is how low I usually keep the lights and they're constantly like, you see everything is on a dimmer? See that? Everything's on a dimmer. I'm gonna do an impersonation of my family whenever they walk into a room. And, the lights go up. And as soon as they leave, the lights go down. [upbeat music] Oh, I'm so sorry, Architectural Digest. I was just having a moment to myself. This is the TV room. Movies are a really big part of my and my son and my wife's life, so we spend a lot of time in this room watching movies, especially when it gets dark early and there's snow outside. [gentle music] This is my office and it's kind of a big wide open space. This is a desk that I've had for about 10 years. It's just really personal to me with, again, a bunch of things that I've collected over the years. I have stuff everywhere. This is a board where I keep all kind of my inspiration and things that, you know, I've done kind of over the years and things that really matter to me. There's a lot of pictures of my son. Hey, that's Tim Olyphant and that's me, that's Raylan and Boyd right there. Pretty cool. This is my personal space. And this room is, it's me. When we bought the house, this was actually three bedrooms and a bathroom up here. And the rooms were really small. And then this was the caretaker's bedroom, but we turned this into a bathroom. You know, the thing about this house, when we bought it, it hadn't been touched in 100 years. Every system in the house was on the precipice of failing. And over the course of that year, we learned so much about this house, the history of this place, but we learned so much about ourselves and what it takes to bring a house back to life. And we're better for it because it's literally the the place that we want to be for the rest of our lives. [gentle music] So this is our bedroom. The guy who built the house, this was his bedroom. I mean, the way that he designed this house is extraordinary in the sense that the living room faces south. And so it gets sun all day long. whereas this room in particular faces east so you wake up in the morning and then you see the sunrise. The first time that we saw it, we didn't expect it. And we woke up with the sun kind of hitting our eyes and we couldn't believe what we were looking at. That this man had the foresight to position this in such a way with the architects that they used to build it that allowed you to wake up to nature kind of in that way. It blew our minds, but it really opened up our hearts, and I can't believe that we get to live here. You've seen my bed, but there's one bed that you haven't seen. We have a black lav and she's the kind of the nucleus, the heart of our family. Well, she would sleep on our sofas and they're made out of velvet and when we moved here to the Hudson Valley, we were taking apart an old couch that we had, and I said, "Whoa, don't throw that away. Let's make the dog's bed out of our old sofa and then maybe she'll have her own divan bed and she won't sleep on our sofa. But it didn't work. She still sleeps on our sofa. [upbeat music] AD, thank you so much for letting us share our home with you. We really appreciate you coming out. It's a place that's very special to us and we hope you enjoyed your time. Be careful driving home. [upbeat music fading out]