Actor Walton Goggins and his wife, writer-director Nadia Conners, want to make one thing very clear about their decision to quit the West Coast and plant their family flag in the Hudson Valley. “We weren’t running away from Los Angeles. We were running toward something,” insists Goggins, a standout player in the third season of HBO’s The White Lotus and an actor renowned for portraying villains and antiheroes with a certain sinister silkiness. “We loved our home in LA. It’s the city where our son, Augustus, was born and raised, the city where I became the person I always wanted to be, culturally, spiritually, not just career-wise,” the Georgia-bred talent adds. Nevertheless, the siren call of the Hudson Valley would not be denied. Goggins and Conners had visited the area for years, renting homes and flirting with real estate listings, but it was the COVID pandemic that finally propelled them eastward in 2021. “The pandemic opened windows of self-perception and possibility. It was an opportunity to do something different, not to start over from scratch but to change, to evolve,” the actor explains.
Conners seconds the notion. “We marinated on this decision for years, but the pandemic was the real reckoning. The audacity of contemplating this move suddenly seemed less far-fetched,” says the director of 2024’s The Uninvited, who was raised in LA and Egypt. Still, it wasn’t just the COVID upheaval or some abstract Washington Irving fever dream that ultimately sealed the deal. There was also a house, specifically a bewitching estate built in the style of a Scottish hunting lodge by a prominent entrepreneur and sportsman in the 1920s. “I have an affinity for that time period, and when I saw the listing, I became obsessed,” Goggins recalls. “There was something incredibly seductive about the proposition. We were buying a feeling, an idea of a new way of life for our family. We were tapping into the generative idea of a place.”
Of course, when it comes to buying old houses, there’s the inevitable moment when romance collides with reality. “When we got here, we realized that the house hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. Every system, every fixture, faucet, and fireplace was ready to fail or had already failed. But it was magic,” Goggins remembers. Undeterred (albeit slightly intimidated) by the scope of work, the couple initially thought they could renovate the property in phases over time. “That turned out to be a fantasy. Once you start tinkering with one part of the house, you understand it’s all connected. Basically, the first year we were here I took every part I was offered so we could afford to do everything that needed to be done,” the actor says.
