Drawn Around the Light: How Maggie Dallal Designed Neversink Retreat

Maggie Dallal is often up at four in the morning, working through a to-do list she puts at seven thousand items. She has taught high school and middle school science. She studied engineering and then chemistry. And for twelve years, alongside all of that, she has been designing a house and a piece of land in the Catskills, mostly by herself.

She grew up inside hospitality. Her parents ran a restaurant, the family did catering, and her grandfather owned a resort and built houses. Design, she insists, is only a hobby — but the instinct to host, to make a place where people are well looked after, runs back generations.

"I happen to like design. It's a hobby." — Maggie Dallal

The house is Neversink Retreat, on fifteen acres in Sullivan County, a few minutes from the Neversink Reservoir. This summer a guest, a chef, and her husband, who builds furniture, asked who had designed it. She had, herself.

Where it begins

The land came before the house, by several decades. Her husband is from New York, and his grandparents grew up going to the Catskills resorts. In 1950 his family bought land in the area, and for years nobody developed it. In 2010 the property was divided, and she and her husband took a fifteen-acre plot.

Neversink Retreat went up about twelve years ago, built as the family's own home. The family spent summers there, away from the city, and in the years that followed the house kept growing: the pool about eight years ago, deer fencing, landscaping, an orchard.

The decision to share Neversink Retreat came later. She couldn't bear to see a place this beautiful sit empty, with the land in its full summer green and the sunsets going unwatched. In 2024, Neversink Retreat began taking guests.

"I feel like it's such a beautiful place. It's silly to let it sit." — Maggie Dallal

The thinking behind the house

The starting point for Neversink Retreat was what it should not be. Much of what gets built in the Catskills is timber cabin. Neversink Retreat became a farmhouse — a house that belonged to the region without being one more timber cabin. The restraint was deliberate. Its palette of gray and white was chosen well before it became fashionable, letting the architecture stay quiet and the setting speak. All the thought went into how the house sits on the land.

The main decision was orientation. The property gets strong sunsets, so the whole back of Neversink Retreat is glass, with a screened porch there. She cooks a lot, and wanted to be in the kitchen at the end of the day with the sky in front of her.

"I wanted to have that view of the sunset at the end of the day and have a lot of natural light." — Maggie Dallal

The primary bedroom faces the other way. Three large windows there take in the sunrise. Between the two, a lot of the design came down to thinking about the property and about how a person experiences the beginning and the end of the day on it.

The pool came next, and here too the placement was deliberate. Rather than set behind the house, it sits to the side, with fewer windows onto it and more distance, so it became its own space. The reward is in the main view: from the back of Neversink Retreat, the eye stays on the landscape and the sunsets, uninterrupted.

The most recent work at Neversink Retreat went underground. The lower level was finished to be the one space that takes guests by surprise — a custom Murphy bed, a gym behind a glass wall, a sauna, and a bath built to feel like a spa, all in stone and natural materials. The idea was that people would come downstairs expecting a basement and find the best room in the house.

How guests are meant to live

Neversink Retreat is meant to be a place to stay put. Many guests come up from New York for a long weekend of three or four days. There are not many televisions. What there is, instead, is a lot of outdoor space: porches on the pool side of the house, where people tended to gather, and a hot tub and fire pit right off the house that get used in spring and fall.

A former science teacher who loves plants, she has shaped the grounds of Neversink Retreat as carefully as the house. The land is a mix of woods, open field and a few mowed acres. Tree species have been added slowly, almost like an arboretum, alongside a garden and an orchard she planted herself. Wild blueberries grow across the property, and rather than clear them, the family has let them spread — a neighbour now makes wine from them.

Inside, the attention turns to the things a guest touches. Maggie spent a long time on the beds, trying nine different comforters and sheets before settling on linen sheets and organic blankets. That same attention extends to every corner of Neversink Retreat. From the architecture and furnishings to the bedding, towels, and smallest everyday comforts, each detail has been personally selected to create a home that feels as beautiful as it is comfortable. The house was designed and furnished as a family home, personally curated rather than commercially outfitted. Guests ask where the couch came from, and a shop for the house's furnishings is somewhere on her list.

Neversink Retreat draws people who want to settle in and use it fully. Some come to cook — the kitchen, built for the light and the sunset view, has hosted a visiting chef who wanted a proper space to work in. Others come for the grounds and the pool, for long unhurried days outdoors, the kind of stay where the point is to slow down rather than go anywhere. Many bring their dogs, since three of the acres are fenced.

And she runs Neversink Retreat herself, closely and personally. She looks after the details, stays reachable, and treats being a good host as part of what the house offers — not a property left to a managing agent, but a place with someone behind it.

"I enhance the experience, so I'm part of the experience as well." — Maggie Dallal

Neversink Retreat is about twelve years old, though it is kept so carefully that guests take it for new. The compliment she hears most is the same one every time.

"The feedback is always the house is nicer than the photos." — Maggie Dallal

What comes next

Neversink Retreat is not finished, and she does not talk about it as if it will be. A tennis court and a basketball court are planned for the next year or two. She hopes to work with chefs so guests can have food brought to the house. Across the way, on family land with a creek and a waterfall, there is a site where she would like to build another house, if the energy and the budget allow.

She feels just as strongly about how people book. Maggie takes reservations directly, through the Neversink Retreat website, because she wants a real relationship with the people who stay — to know who's coming, to be in touch, to host them properly.

That conviction is what brought Neversink Retreat to Locèlle. Locèlle is a curated directory of design-led homes where travelers find a house through the story of the people who made it, then book directly with them, without a faceless platform in between and without added platform fees. Here, guests can learn why the back of the house is glass and why the pool sits to the side before they ever arrive. To see the rooms, the lower level and the fifteen acres for yourself, explore Neversink Retreat on Locèlle and reach Maggie directly from there.

When she talks about what makes Neversink Retreat special, she comes back to the land and the quiet of it.

"You don't experience it until you're there." — Maggie Dallal

Stay at Neversink Retreat

Neversink Retreat sleeps eight, with room for up to ten, in four bedrooms on fifteen acres near the Neversink Reservoir, about two hours from New York City. It is booked directly with Maggie Dallal. View the full Neversink Retreat gallery and plan your stay.

Photography by Clay Banks.