How a millennial ‘It Girl' created a fantasy of old England in New York

Telegraph

29-07-2025

In the Six Bells Countryside Inn, if I squinted – and certainly after a gin cocktail – I was convinced it could almost be a pub in the Cotswolds.
It has deep red upholstered banquettes, exposed beams and a cosy wooden bar, cast in muted light from ruffled lampshades (though, alas, no beer taps).
There are Kendal Mint Cakes on offer in its 11 guest rooms, with beds bedecked in patchwork quilts from West Dorset. The whole vibe is tongue-in-cheek twee (hence very British) with florals, frills and hand-painted frescos.
What makes this perhaps surprising is that the Six Bells is a hotly anticipated new opening in the rural town of Rosendale, two hours' drive upstate from New York City. But what makes it genuinely bizarre is that it sprung from the imagination of Audrey Gelman.
If you've heard of Gelman, you probably know her as co-founder of the Wing. The chain of women's co-working spaces epitomised a particular brand of 2016-era 'girl boss' feminism with an aesthetic that defined millennials for years to come.
It was a dizzying success, once valued at $365 million with a waiting list 9,000 names long. That is, until the self-styled 'women's utopia' was accused of being less than utopic for some members of staff. Gelman resigned as CEO in 2020, apologised and withdrew to a 68-acre farmhouse in upstate New York.
But the media's fascination with Gelman started long before that, from her years as a political operator (she left college to work on Hilary Clinton's 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination) to her cameos in Girls.
The seminal TV show's creator Lena Dunham is a childhood best friend and Gelman was the rumoured real-life inspiration for the highly strung Marnie, 'only successful'.
While not a household name – unless you read the pages of New York Magazine – she seemingly has a mainline into the zeitgeist. So what's behind the pivot to country kitsch?
We met in the bar of the Six Bells, where she's spent most of the last two months in preparation for the hotel's launch. We drank a fresh lambrusco, chatting about how the sparkling red wine is in vogue again after years of exile, and I couldn't help but think it was an on-point choice for an entrepreneur herself in the midst of a low-key comeback.
I asked Gelman about her apparent Anglophilia and it turns out this 'Jewish gal from the Upper West Side' (her words) has a penchant for British murder mysteries.
Indeed, she can gamely swap notes on Agatha Christie adaptations (her favourite being Joan Hickson as Miss Marple) and, while in England, went on a location tour for Midsomer Murders, on which she visited Beckonscott Model Village and discovered her brand's namesake.
The Six Bells, a 17th-century, thatched pub in Oxfordshire, features on several of the series' episodes (Gelman can name them).
'There's a reason they call [the genre cosy crime],' she said. 'The world is overwhelming and I wanted to create that kind of escapism that felt a little bit evocative of mysteries of the past.'
While she found style inspiration in design from this side of the pond – 'obviously British maximalism and pattern and eccentricity' – the Six Bells isn't an immersive recreation of any specific time or place.
The design is a mash-up of folk arts and crafts, from American Gothic to William Morris.
And it works. In 2021, Gelman opened the Six Bells 'country store' in Brooklyn's chic Cobble Hill neighbourhood – it sells many of the homewares available in the hotel today – tapping into the pandemic-era embrace of a nostalgic maximalism, when cottagecore was trending and fashion brand Batsheva made Laura Ashley newly relevant.
Gelman prefers a term coined by a friend – 'cottage hardcore' – because rather than the 'ultra-feminine woman in a nightgown in a meadow' vibe, the hotel offers 'something a little weirder, a little spookier even.'
She and her son recently 'discovered' a ghost in the basement of the building and they're now on a research project to find who is haunting the hotel. 'A good ghost,' Gelman assured me, in earshot of her son sitting nearby.
Gelman's sense of whimsy is on full display in the fictional backstory she created for the brand. Both the shop and inn exist in the make-believe 'civil parish' of Barrow's Green, home to an entire cast of characters, such as Ursula Lumley 'the town gossip' and Amalia Blackwood 'the parlour maid.' The village map is hand-painted on the ceiling of the hotel's reception.
Each room plays a part in this lore. Gable's Hollow, where I stayed, tucked away on the third floor of the handsome 19th-century Federalist building, with its floral wallpaper and sumptuous toffee-coloured drapes, was apparently inspired by 'Barrow's Green in the autumn, when the maples turn and a debate breaks out in the village over whether the harvest festivities are slightly too occult in nature.'
I learnt this from a booklet waiting for me on the berry-print quilt of my four-poster, king-size bed, which was accompanied by a 'field guide' with instructions on how to take home what took my fancy, because, yes, almost the entire hotel is also shoppable, from the calico bed sets to the sponge-ware ceramics in which my chicken pie was served later.
The gift shop offers further opportunities for what's best described as gentle commerce, in the shape of ditsy nightgowns, beeswax candles and egg-white facial soap bars (apparently once popular in Sweden).
Gelman described the process as like Soho House but backwards; she started with goods and expanded into hospitality.
Gelman wasn't a hands-off founder, either. As well as 'all sorts of unglamorous things such as heating and plumbing', she 'got very comfortable driving a truck' as she crossed the American Midwest to scour estate sales for antique finds such as the many oil paintings that grace the walls of the hotel.
This sort of treasure hunting is in her bones, having grown up visiting her grandfather in the Hudson Valley and tagging along with him to auctions and thrift stores. She now lives in the barn he built, having fulfilled a lifelong dream to buy it back, only to find that the owners hadn't sold his many knick-knacks.
Perhaps that's why the Six Bells works. Gelman has always had a nose for the millennial mood, and in these times of digital myopia, AI and the fractured state of politics, perhaps what we want is a nostalgic and tactile fantasy-land to escape to for a few days.