Cassandra Grey Reinvents Herself, Again, in a Home Upstate

Today, Grey’s focus is working as the chairman and artistic director of Violet Lab, the brand’s in-house incubator, producing the limited edition perfume Madame Grey, for example. Yes, the Hudson Valley has been steadily building a reputation as an enclave of chic creatives, but there’s still something surprising about the fact that Grey, now 48, has installed herself in a community where the bulk of socializing occurs before midday, at the farmers market or the transfer station.

DOWN THE PATH
Miranda Brooks worked with Grey on her Los Angeles home, so it felt serendipitous that the Hudson house’s previous owners had worked with Brooks as well.

“I’d only been upstate, like, twice, before I bought this place,” she tells me in her childlike register. “But when I heard about this house, I knew I had to have it.” Grey is dressed in a faded Yankees T-shirt, vintage 501s, and black slides from The Row, wearing a slick of lip gloss and tortoiseshell Miu Miu glasses. She became familiar with the region a few years ago, when she and her then partner, the DJ Samantha Ronson, visited Samantha’s brother, Mark Ronson, and his wife, Grace Gummer, upstate. “Samantha was partly raised in England,” Grey recalls, “and I guess her affection for English-style country houses rubbed off on me.”