Hollow Sky: The Catskills Retreat Todd Built to Keep a Promise to His Uncle

‍One hundred and ten acres, three koi ponds, and a hillside home designed the way his uncle taught him to live — on purpose, and paying attention.

Todd Hali will tell you the property found him the way most important things do — sideways, and a long time before he understood what it meant.

Today, that hillside is Hollow Sky. The first thing you notice is the silence. No neighboring porch lights. No passing traffic. Just a wall of glass facing a valley that changes color almost by the hour — gold in the morning, slate by evening, white and hushed once the snow settles in. Fog lifts off the tree line most mornings before the light fully arrives, and depending on the season, you might hear nothing beyond the wind moving through an apple orchard that's been standing for over a hundred years.

Todd didn't buy this place. He inherited it, along with a set of instructions he's still working out for himself.

He was an only child. His parents worked constantly. Most weekends, it was his uncle, Ed, who showed up instead — a school guidance counselor with 110 acres in upstate New York and a habit of turning every visit into a lesson Todd wouldn't understand until decades later.

"He was that guy to many, many people," Todd says. "Just very cultured, traveled the world. I learned a lot from him."

A Life Redirected, One Walk at a Time

Todd Hali works in commercial real estate today — offices, distribution space, the kind of large-scale logistics that keeps warehouses running across New Jersey. But ask him how he got there, and the details of the job matter less than what's underneath them: Ed quietly steering the course of his life, the way he steered everything.

"Everything was kind of connected through him," Todd says.

The pattern started years earlier, on the property. Ed would invent projects for Todd to work through — hours of hands-on labor with no explanation — and then, once the work was done, take him on a walk into the woods.

"He would ask me questions like, 'What did you learn from what I just had you do?'" Todd remembers. "At the time, I was like, why are you asking me this? But now, in my adult life, I realize what he was doing. He's making me appreciate the value of hard work."

One Hundred and Ten Acres, One Decision

When Ed passed, Todd was left with a choice that wasn't really a choice at all.

"I had two choices — to let it go, or — it wasn't really a choice. I wanted to keep it," he says.

What he inherited sits on top of a ridge in the hamlet of Preston Hollow, part of the Town of Rensselaerville in Albany County — 1,800 feet up, reached by a private gravel road, with no through traffic, no neighbors in any direction. The house went up in 1982, designed by a close friend of Ed's, Toni Miello, a New York City architect known for his 1980s contemporary work, who passed away nearly thirty years ago.

It is a striking contemporary structure, characterized by its clean, geometric lines and an intentional openness that blurs the boundary between the interior and the surrounding landscape.

"He wanted to make sure aesthetically it fit into that landscape," Todd says — a design instinct he later recognized in Frank Lloyd Wright's work, reading about architecture long after the property became his. "That is exactly the route I took with this."

You can see it in the roofline before you see anything else. Instead of sitting on the hill like a box, the roof slopes down, echoing the ridge beside it. Everywhere you look, the house seems to defer to the landscape rather than compete with it.

What He Kept, What He Chose Not to Touch

By the time it came to Todd, the house needed work. His uncle, well into his eighties, had let the maintenance slide. Todd re-skinned the exterior in board and batten siding, redid the kitchen and two bathrooms — but the structure itself, the bones his uncle's friend had drawn up in 1982, he left alone.

"There was nothing there that needed to really be changed as far as the bones and the structure, and the property itself," he says. "He was always about — don't touch the land, leave the land the way it is. That's the beauty of it."

Inside, the palette borrows directly from what's outside the glass. The front of the house is nearly all window, facing a valley that shifts color with the seasons — so Todd chose pewter gray walls and a wallpaper pulled toward autumn tones, letting the interior echo whatever the hillside is doing that week. Even indoors, your attention keeps getting pulled back outside.

Dark vertical siding catches the last light at dusk, windows glowing amber against the fading sky, a single sconce lit like a second moon on the wall. Even the smallest details were built to hold the light this way — and inside, the whole layout follows the same instinct, arranged so the valley is never out of view.

The detail he's proudest of almost didn't survive.

"There's some old — I think they're over a hundred years old — apple orchards right to the right of the home," he says. "I was considering putting a deck on that side, and I did put a deck, but I was going to take out those trees. And I'm so glad — it kind of crossed my mind. I was like, no, you can't do that."

The deck went up. The orchard stayed, close enough now that its branches move within earshot of the deck chairs. Just behind it: three koi ponds his uncle dug and stocked himself, water moving quietly enough that you hear the fish before you see them.

"They're kind of like dogs. They're very bright for fish," Todd says. "When I creep up to the property, up to the pond, it takes a moment, but they come over — like, 'all right, I know who you are.'"

His uncle used to separate the young koi from the adults so the bigger fish wouldn't eat them, moving them pond to pond as they grew. Todd still does it exactly that way.

Seven Fields, and What Comes Next

The 110 acres split roughly in half — fields on one side, woods on the other, the house sitting right at the tree line. From there, a half-mile trail Todd's uncle cut by hand leads down through the woods to Catskill Creek. Up the road, another entrance opens into Rensselaerville State Forest, with roughly eight miles of trail beyond that for anyone who wants more.

In winter, the fields go quiet in a way that's hard to describe until you've stood in it — snow settling over everything, sound muffled to almost nothing, a hawk visible from thirty miles out, crossing the valley in full view long before it ever reaches the house.

Wildlife has never included bears, oddly enough, despite an active set of beehives on the property. "I've been going up there for fifty years, and he's never seen a bear," Todd says. "Lots of deer, lots of fox, coyote. A little bit of everything." He does have one exception: a chocolate lab named Bear, the only one of his kind allowed on the hill.

The seven fields aren't just scenery — they're the long game. Each one is roughly ten to twelve acres, positioned so that a house built on any single field would see no other structure at all.

"If this takes off, and I'm like 40, 50, 60 percent occupied within three years, I'll probably build another one," Todd says. It's an idea that started with his uncle, who'd raised the possibility before he got sick. "He was like, yeah, we should do one. You keep this house for yourself, and then you build something else."

A Reset, Not a Party House

Ask Todd who he's building this for, and the answer is immediate: not a crowd looking for a scene. Someone looking to disappear for a weekend.

"I'm looking for people in the city that just want to get out of that city for the weekend and enjoy nature," he says. "This is not going to be a property for parties. It's a reset-type retreat."

Preston Hollow itself is 1800s-built and quiet; the nearest real amenities are the ski towns of Windham and Hunter, 14–15 miles out. What's here instead is the kind of evening where the light through the glass turns gold, then pink, then gone, and the only sound left is rain finding the roofline.

"If you want to disconnect, you can," Todd says. "If you want to reconnect, it's right there."

Mornings are the whole argument for the place. The shades lift at the push of a button, and the valley just appears. "Having a cup of coffee on the deck overlooking that is just wonderful," he says.

Owning the Story

Todd is listing the house on Airbnb for reach, but his own site is the real front door — something closer, in his words, to a relationship than a transaction.

“I want people to go to my website, even if they want to go through Airbnb — that’s fine, I’ll have the links there too,” he says. “But I want them to see the website, so they can get a feel of exactly what I’m trying to give them. It’s really important that I make people feel comfortable, and have this family-type relationship with them.”

It’s the same instinct that shaped everything else about Hollow Sky — keeping what matters close and creating an experience that feels personal from the moment you arrive. For Todd, direct booking is an extension of the hospitality built into the property itself, allowing guests to connect with the story, the land, and the person behind the home.

Stay at Hollow Sky and experience it for yourself →

Giving It Back

There's one detail Todd almost didn't mention.

Once the property is generating income, he plans to donate a share of it every year to the Hackensack Blue & Gold Scholarship Fund — founded by his uncle, Edward J. "Ed" Acciardi, to help Hackensack High School students with financial need continue their education. Todd Hali is its president today; his uncle started it.

"I don't know what percentage yet, because I don't know how well I'm going to do," he says. "It's my way of giving back to him, what he gave to me."

"He would say, 'What are you crazy? Why'd you spend all this money?'" Todd says, imagining his uncle's reaction to the finished house. But before he passed, knowing he was sick, his uncle had already started pointing Todd toward this — telling him to start the renovations, already talking about a second house on the far field.

Todd is just the one still up there, listening.

Photography by Chris and Pam Daniele, dirtandglass.net

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