They Found a Rare Species in the Wild: An Original Bolt-Together House

One weekend in 2021, Gemma Warren was doing what she did every weekend: sitting over coffee in her home in Tulum, Mexico, combing through the real estate listings for cabins in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

She and her husband, Nick Warren, who are English, had discovered the Catskills several years earlier, while living in Brooklyn and working for public relations and marketing companies headquartered in London. They fell for the region’s scented forests, sunny meadows, icy streams and not terribly threatening bears (unless provoked). They wanted to buy a weekend house, but found nothing to fit their budget.

So six years ago, they picked up and moved to Tulum, on the Yucatán Peninsula, because they also had a sunny, oceanic side to their natures. There, they worked remotely. But the Catskills still beckoned.

In that fateful website-browsing session three years ago, Ms. Warren, now 37, saw a listing for a cabin in the western Catskills hamlet of Delancey, N.Y. The asking price: $65,000. The house was 192 square feet and lacked heating and a toilet.

“A shack” is how Mr. Warren, 38, described it: “There was running water. But that was pretty much it.”

And yet it sat on 6.8 acres thick with old trees and tall grasses. Flowing next to it was a creek that audibly burbled in a video. A large picture window looked out to the water and forest.