Plans for the new home of Upstate New York’s Shaker Museum have been unveiled this week, offering the public a glimpse at the multimillion-dollar makeover that has given new life to a restored former Hudson Valley hotel. 

Selldorf Architects is responsible for the effort which will add some much-needed shelf space allowing the museum’s 18,000 objects and artifact collection to be properly displayed. The collection had not been on view in over a decade and will now be hosted by a new modern building and remade Victorian-era hotel on Austerlitz Street in the artistically significant village of Chatham.

The plan was announced in August and will now join the firm’s list of recent high-profile museum restorations that has included projects for the Frick and LUMA Arles collections. The museum’s offices and permanent collection will be relocated from nearby Old Chatham and will showcase great American design. The museum also owns the historic site at Mount Lebanon, the spiritual home of the movement.

The move will allow the museum to operate as an important font of knowledge and information regarding the utopian movement for an anticipated 30,000 visitors annually.

The new facility will cost approximately $18 million and will give the museum space for an improved community area and more rotation exhibitions in addition to on-site storage and a climate-controlled conservation center funded in part by a $550,000 grant from the NEH.

Landscape firm Nelson Byrd Woltz will be charged with turning the surrounding Columbia County countryside into a Shaker-inspired vista.

The expansion is set for completion in 2023 and can be previewed alongside Selldorf’s rendering in a pop-up exhibition titled “The Future is a Gift” on view until August 23rd.