She’s Got the Look - Home and set design star Cathy Hobbs drops her eco-friendly anchor in Ulster County

by Zac Shaw for Ulster Strong

Cathy Hobbs is design royalty: a TV personality, five-time Emmy winner, an HGTV Design Star finalist, and a nationally syndicated design columnist. And now she’s headquartered in Highland.

Highland Passive House is an impressive new warehouse, showroom, and design center built to the lofty passive house “plus” standard. Certified at the end of May, the facility features on-site solar and EV infrastructure, designed to operate net-zero and carbon-neutral. The four-acre site serves as Hobbs’ upstate headquarters, anchoring a massive operation to outfit luxury homes and rentals (as well as TV and movie sets) with jaw-dropping furnishings and decor.

Cathy Hobbs

Highland Passive House is a home-staging and design hub representing over 200 lines. The building contains the Hudson Valley’s largest furniture rental inventory, enough to stage roughly 85 homes from NYC to the Hudson Valley, backed by receiving, inspection, storage, delivery, and installation services. 

Hobbs’ path to Highland started long before the Passive House. “I’ve owned an interior design firm that specializes in real estate staging and styling since 2004. I opened my business during a 20-year career as a television news reporter—mostly in New York at WPIX. I always wanted a plan B and had an interest in design, so I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology in the morning and covered the news at night. I gravitated toward home staging rather than traditional design.” 

Her Hudson Valley story is personal as well as professional. “In 2009 we purchased a little cottage in Saugerties. It was 800 square feet—they didn’t even lock it—and we’d come up on weekends. We had our daughter in 2010, and two years later we decided to raise her in the Hudson Valley. I’ve been a full-time resident since 2012, which is 13 years.”

The site that would become Highland Passive House came next. “I had always wanted a headquarters for my business, and about seven years ago I decided to move my business to the Hudson Valley. We were in a temporary location, and I’d put an offer on a building that didn’t work out. Almost immediately I found a beautiful parcel of land in Highland.”

The sustainability mission crystallized quickly. “I had the land for about seven or eight months with no plans—no architectural drawings, nothing—just a piece of land where I could build a warehouse and office. Then I heard about passive house construction and it caught my interest. I’d read about a warehouse in Idaho in an architectural magazine and reached out to an architect I knew who specialized in passive, and he put me in touch with a company called Ecocor in Maine that makes prefabricated passive panels. He called the owner, Chris Corson, who said he had already built all the panels for a passive warehouse; they were sitting in a hangar in Maine, but he’d decided to go in a different direction. I said, ‘That’s my building—tell him I’m flying to Maine.’ I learned there was one flight out of Stewart Airport to Maine, got on it, and he agreed to sell me the panels.”

Execution required a specialized bench. “At that point we had the pieces of the puzzle—almost like Lego—to erect the building, because we had the walls. We started bidding it out and needed to assemble an all-star team, because passive construction is very complicated. We interviewed a number of companies and settled on R.L. Baxter. We spent about a year getting the plans together, and then COVID hit. We were ready to go, and everything came to a halt.”

Local support helped restart momentum. “We at least had the land, the building, and our contractor lined up. When the dust settled, we went to work. We had a lot of community support. Lisa Berger—now the head of tourism, and formerly head of economic development for the county—was the first person to take a meeting with me and she opened so many doors. We ended up getting an Ulster County PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes). We employ locally. Our warehouse and logistics staff are local: one lives in Highland, another in Poughkeepsie. They work out of the Highland Passive House and handle city and local installations. We also employ local designers.”

What end-users will notice is comfort and infrastructure. “There are things you see and things you don’t. From the outside, you see our EV stations. Inside, you experience a constant-temperature, fresh-air environment. What you don’t see is that half of the entire roof is covered in solar panels. We’re as energy-efficient as we can get. As a business, Highland Passive House is a home-staging and design center—I didn’t want to just open an office.”

Hobbs frames the venture as a response to shifting local demand. “I wanted to fill what I think is a big void in Ulster County. When I moved here in 2012, the Hudson Valley Mall was a hub. Macy’s, JCPenney, Sears. Outside the mall along the avenue you had Pier 1, Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond. All of those are gone.” She adds: “What has changed is increased migration from the city. People are looking for home décor and design services. Many stayed after COVID. We feel we’re offering a service with strong appeal to the area.”

“We want to be the center of design in the Hudson Valley. We plan to host lectures and events for the design community along with workshops and boot camps. We’re just getting started; our official opening was May 31st, and we’re looking forward to great things.”

Hobbs’ brand equity is national, which she argues matters for local real estate. “We’ve been in business for 21 years—since 2004—so none of this happened overnight. We’re among the top five staging companies in Manhattan, one of the leading in the state, and one of the top 10 staging companies in the country. I’m regarded as a national expert and speak at national conferences. The leading trade organization is the Real Estate Staging Association (RESA), where I’m a regular speaker. This year we won the top honor for Best Short-Term Rental Design in the United States, and I’m consistently ranked among the Top 100 Most Influential People in Staging. I’ve also been nominated for 19 Emmy Awards.” 

For Hobbs, all the signs point to Ulster County being the perfect place to be located. “When Sotheby’s, Serhant, and Compass open in an area, they’ve done real research on the demographics. They didn’t come here overnight. We’re here just as the Hudson Valley is being discovered by Manhattan and national brokerages.”

Her operating stance is growth-minded but pragmatic. “How do I balance it? Three to four hours of sleep. There’s a joke when people start working for me that someone pulls them aside and says, ‘She doesn’t sleep.’ I don’t sleep much, but I have a great team, and we’re always looking for talent, ideally right here in the Hudson Valley.” 

Headwinds exist, largely outside local control. “Our challenges aren’t Hudson Valley-based; they’re what any business faces. Given the political landscape, we’re subject to tariffs that impact us because most wholesale furniture in this country is sourced from China and Vietnam. We’re trying to maintain pricing without passing costs on to the consumer.” To keep evolving, Hobbs points to recent executive education. “I’m always reinventing and staying current—a lifelong learner. I’m proud to say I graduated yesterday from Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program. They choose about a hundred businesses a year in Manhattan; we were selected for a four-month program. It’s a big feather in our cap with resources and mentorship.”