A BOUNTY OF ESTATE SALE FINDS AT BRUSHLAND EATING HOUSE
Date: December 2015
Publication: And North
It was a weekend jaunt to the bucolic hills of Bovina in 2011 that planted the seed of yearning for Sohail Zandi and Sara Elbert, a once Brooklyn-based couple who now own farm-to-table restaurant Brushland Eating House in Bovina. “So it goes with a lot of people that come to visit, you get up here and try to figure out how to stay here full time,” says Sara.
The next three years were spent inching their way north. After a brief stint in Martha’s Vineyard – Sohail making cheese in Chilmark and Sara working on a flower farm – the pair found kismet in a building for sale on Main Street in Bovina with a commercial space on the first floor and two sizeable apartments upstairs. At first, the couple rented the front apartment as an airbnb and lived in the back until May of 2015 when they bought a house just across the street, turning the rear space into a second airbnb.
Today, the two apartments – that can sleep anywhere from four to eight people – almost never go unoccupied, having gained traction via word-of-mouth recommendations and an ever growing following on Brushland Eating House’s delectable Instagram. The pair filled their many rooms with a delightful collection of estate sale treasures mixed in with personal items that hold special meaning. “We really thought about things in a way that they would be welcoming or comfortable or playful,” says Sara. “People have embraced us and we feel really lucky that we’ve built something that people believe in as well.”