This week’s dream: a hip hang-out in upstate New York

Two hours by train from Manhattan’s Penn Station, the little town of Hudson is like a pocket of Brooklyn transported to the hills and forests of upstate New York, says Steve King in Condé Nast Traveller – an escape from the city that is both exquisitely hip and perfectly picturesque. Excellent farm-to-table restaurants rub shoulders with “chicly creaky” boutique hotels on its main drag, Warren Street, where the faded facades are a glorious compendium of 19th century architectural styles (“Greek Revival, Gothic Revival… Italianate, Second Empire… – you name it, they’re all here”). And despite a strong vein of “perky metropolitan smugness”, the “careworn, small-town humility” of the place endures.

The town was settled in the 1780s by Quakers from Nantucket who needed an inland port for their whaling ships. After a brief flush of prosperity, however, it fell on hard times, becoming a byword for drinking, gambling and “whoring” in the 1920s. Then, in 1982, its “renaissance” began, when Alain Pioton, a Frenchman living in New York, opened an antiques shop on Warren Street. More antiques dealers followed – today, about 60 have shops in a town with a population of less than 7,000. The foodies followed in the 1990s, and it became the gourmet capital of the Hudson River Valley, with inventive “locavore” restaurants such as Fish & Game, “where the bordello-red wallpaper is as luscious as the tasting menu”. Outside the town there is lots to see, including “stately piles” such as Olana, a Persian-inspired folly built by the 19th century landscape painter Frederic Church, and Clermont, ancestral home of the Livingston family, whose descendants include the actor Montgomery Clift and the presidents Bush. Hotels in Hudson include Wm. Farmer & Sons (www.wmfarmerandsons.com), The Hudson Milliner (www.thehudsonmilliner.com) and Rivertown Lodge (www.rivertownlodge.com).