Second Floor Study

On the door to the study, Ashbery attached the iron parrot doorknocker that was originally on the door of his grandfather’s study in Rochester.  At the age of thirteen in the spring of 1941, just as his grandparents were about to sell their Rochester home, Ashbery took the parrot as a souvenir, attaching it to his bedroom at his grandparents’ summer house in Pultneyville and eventually moving it to Hudson in the 1980s. 

For the first decade or so that Ashbery lived in the house, this room was used for guests.  Two twin beds from David Kermani’s childhood home provided a place for friends to sleep.  (Those beds were later moved to the attic guestroom.)  Ashbery installed three walls of built-in bookshelves to hold part of his collection of about three-thousand books and brought a long wooden table from New York to use as a computer desk.  A dictionary stand, CD player, Ashbery’s unusual collection of classical music and two large armchairs make this an especially good room in which to read or listen to music.