At the Six Bells Inn, Audrey Gelman Made the Dollhouse of Her Millennial Dreams

If you build it they will come.

When they come they will shop. 

When they shop they will buy.

And someday they will die,

Or so they say. 

The Six Bells Countryside Inn is in Rosendale, New York, a little over two hours from the city when the traffic is good.

The owner of The Six Bells Countryside Inn, as you already know, or should know, is Audrey Gelman. Ex-girlfriend of Terry Richardson, alleged inspiration for Marnie on Girls, former press aide to Hillary Clinton and, most famously, the founder of The Wing, the failed women’s social club and co-working space. A legendary run. Did she invent being a girlboss? Probably not, but she perfected it and for a time she was the girlboss. But in 2020, she was knocked off her throne. Her femmes-only coworking space was not intersectional enough (there were allegations of abuse toward BIPOC employees) and Covid all but killed the burgeoning coworking industry. In June of 2020, she resigned as CEO of The Wing. She left the city. She disappeared into the woods (somewhere in Hudson Valley). She was 33 years old. She didn’t look back.

I’d like to imagine that after turning her back on society, much like Henry David Thoreau (or the Unabomber), Gelman sat down in her cabin in the woods and she began to type. Her manifesto is the story of Barrows Green, a fictional “civil parish with 640 residents, depending on who is dying and how many babies are being born.” It imagines an Anglo-influenced town, set sometime in the past (I think) and worships a time before technology (not unlike Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future), before Covid and coworking spaces and cancel culture. In Barrows Green, “you will find a manor house, a high street with shops, a meadow where sheep graze, beehive cottages with thatched roofs, a village green which hosts cricket and yearly fetes.” The town has a synagogue and at least one Black woman named Sylvia Dudley Ward, who is a reporter for the local paper, The Green Evening Chronicle. An old rich white man named Lord Henry Ashborne (the Duke of something or other), will not stop harassing her even though he is old and married. Harassment is canon.

The story begets a store, and a return to the city, for Gelman. In 2022 she opened The Six Bells, a “country store” inspired by the story of Barrows Green in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. At The Six Bells you can buy quilts, nightgowns, beeswax candles, rattan tables, spongeware bowls, and the dream (or the facade) of a different life. A simpler life, one where children run barefoot, they’ve never heard of screen time, your work for the day is to trim the rosebush and maybe to lactoferment some heirloom peppers. You and your husband are the New-American Gothic, you in your Salterhouse organic cotton dress, him in his Arc’teryx puffer vest. You bought the antique pitchfork at Six Bells. Why escape the hustle and bustle of New York City by going upstate when you can just go to Brooklyn and buy a doily? Or better yet, buy it online. They don’t do free shipping, no matter how much you spend. 

The store begets a bigger dream, or maybe the dream was there all along. Maybe cottagecore could be more than a cottage industry. Maybe it could be a real business. Maybe it could be a movement, a moment, even an empire. Maybe we can reject and overthrow the modern techno-industrial system through a terror campaign of meticulously built mailbombs. Probably not that last one, but the rest… MAYBE! First you must build it. You must create the change you want to see in the world. Or you can buy an old Inn in a little town not so far from the city and start from there. And that’s what she did. 

The Six Bells Countryside Inn opened its doors to guests on June 16th, 2025. It’s striking, it’s ambitious, it’s a lot. A lot of work (and money) has gone into creating this life-size dollhouse. Gelman quite literally used a dollhouse to lay out and design the interiors of the inn (you can see it on display in the hotel), and it has that feel. The scale is small (it’s an inn, after all) and everything is absurdly cute. You get the sense that all of the furnishings were once tiny and that they used some kind of machine or magic to make them big. Everything looks exactly how it should, or how you’d expect, or how someone would expect an urban millennial upstate country inn to look. You walk in and you’re in the store. You’re in the gift shop before you’ve even seen the exhibit. You see the hand painted hats and tote bags, the famous pig-shaped cutting boards, so many candles and candlesticks and spongeware and pitchers and baskets. Everything is for sale, even the mattress in your suite. You have to watch the sausage be made, and then you have to eat it. This isn’t an inn, it’s a santal-scented showroom, and it stinks.

It’s rare to get to spend the night in someone else’s personality disorder, but it’s not as scary as it sounds. It’s mostly boring. There’s nothing to do in the hotel, no pool, no spa, no massage, the rooms don’t even have televisions (they’d ruin the aesthetic), and the restaurant stays closed till five. There’s a children’s playroom with the most beautiful mural, and no games in sight. You’re supposed to sit there with your thoughts, or read their in-house newspaper, also called The Green Evening Chronicle. It has ads for local businesses: a cheese shop called The Dairy Dell, which sells “our finest cornish yarg made with nettles and cows milk,” whatever that means. A psychoanalyst named Thomas K. Beresin. An ice cream shop named Wentry’s whose specialty is sticky toffee pudding. And a butcher shop called The Fat of The Land, which I was excited to check out before I looked up the address and found that it doesn’t actually exist. None of it does. The real town of Rosendale is a bit of a disappointment after seeing all of the fake ads for fake artisanal foods and fake local businesses in the fake newspaper. There’s not much to do. There’s a Stewart’s gas station, a few decent hiking trails, a movie theater, three vintage stores selling children’s peasant tops, and a cheese/coffee shop where you can buy a sweater that reads, “SPREAD HUMMUS, NOT HATE.”  

You have to wonder if her plan is to slowly buy up the town and turn Rosendale into a sort of amusement park where the worst people can come and cosplay English countryside in linen shirts, just a quick Subaru ride away from New York City. But for now, Barrows Green only exists in the confines of the Six Bells Inn, and in Audrey Gelman’s mind. 

Every room in the hotel is themed around a story straight from Gelman’s imagination. My girlfriend and I booked “The Lamplight,” a “junior Suite with a draped Box King Bed” inspired by the fictional story of Eustace Ashbee, a priest who had a torrid affair with a noblewoman, was murdered, and then proceeded to haunt the town. How romantic! But the room is quite impressive. The whole suite is hand-painted with an allegory depicting the vicar and the noblewoman. There’s German-inspired wood trim all over the place, steel wall sconces in the shape of love hearts with Edison bulbs that look like flickering candles. Colors and patterns galore—they had a great time designing this room, and you can feel it. The bed is tucked away in its own little nook. From our little nook there’s a great view of a parking lot. From our bathroom window a beautiful view of the HVAC system. The mattress is comfortable, but it’s suspiciously short, longer than it is wide. They claim it’s a king-sized bed, but after consulting the dimensions in the provided Six Bells store catalog, it appears that the king-sized bed is actually a queen turned sideways. Another fantasy. 

Maybe it’s just because everything is brand new, but it ultimately all winds up feeling soulless. When you are staying in a manufactured “countryside inn” where everything is for sale, it cheapens the idea of the artisanal or the unique, which is kind of the whole appeal of provincial/rural/village life, the fantasy they’re selling. Yes, the quilts and pillows are all hand-sewn, not by local grandmas or quaker artisans but by people in India. Many of the items at the Six Bells Countryside Inn come from India, or somewhere in Southeast Asia. Their custom pajamas and nightgowns are made of rayon. And to add insult to injury, they’re objectively ugly. Someone could surely do a whole dissertation on the outsourcing of this American pastoral dream, colonialism, and the commodification/commercialization/gentrification of rural communities. It won’t be me, but someone should.

The restaurant at The Six Bells Inn is called The Feathers Tavern. It’s open from 5:00 to 8:30 PM, Wednesday-Sunday. If you are hungry on Monday or Tuesday, or at any time outside of the three-and-a-half hour dinner service, I’m sorry, you’re out of luck. The Feathers Tavern is charming, designed by and for millennials: textiles, carved wood, murals, and wallpaper, and more patterns. There’s a beautiful patio overlooking a stream, the perfect place to enjoy a spritz on a summer evening. I can already imagine the wedding receptions that will be held here. But for as much thought and effort as they put into the color scheme and backstory of this place, the restaurant, and beverage program, feels like an afterthought. We had a fine and completely unremarkable meal. The drinks ran sweet and the food ran heavy. But I won’t be too critical. They just opened, and they’ve got some kinks to iron out. 

After our meal we took a walk outside, to help digest and process what we’d just experienced (we overheard some of the worst conversations: Park Slope vs Fort Greene, Linkedin self-help videos, “unsubscribe from the status quo”, “what is orange wine” ), but we soon remembered that there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. We went back to our room and watched the new episode of …And Just Like That on my laptop. I spent the night in my little cove on my short sideways mattress, tossing and turning, stomach in knots, sweating profusely (the air conditioning has a hard time finding its way into the nook). I woke up on the hard Victorian-inspired fainting couch, hugging a decorative pillow, only half-covered by a quilt made in India. 

Our room was $508 a night. 

To inhabit Upstate New York, we carved through mountains, we cut down forests, we created roads where there were none, we built on top of fields of wild flowers. We brought electricity, and 5G, and smashburgers, and pilates studios, and corporate retreats and, now, The Six Bells Countryside Inn. We build roads and worlds to escape the lives we lead. To find peace. To reinvent ourselves. We use VC money to colonize towns and build life-size dollhouses to actualize fantasies all our own. I left The Six Bells feeling empty. I wanted nothing. Not a Ditsy Floral Ruffled Pillow, not a Dotty Jug. No Gable Sponged Rim Dinner Plate for me. Save your Crimson Blooms Painted Candles. I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t wait to get back to the city. Maybe this is enlightenment. We drove away. I didn’t look back.