In a hill above a gushing Catskill stream, tucked into the reds, yellows, and oranges of autumn's first leaves, a grand Victorian house presides over the dozing village of Fleischmanns, the Jewish resort town of yesteryear.  The house is an impressive 10-bedroom, 5,232-square-foot mansion, and it is painted entirely black - a single matte tone from its shingles to its shutters.  Silhouettes of peacocks adorn the sloping front lawn, and in the back yard is a faux graveyard where the owners bury in effigy things that they want to "put to rest" - like the New York Times art critic who gave their show a bad review this summer.  A sweet little pumpkin patch serves as the sole vegetable garden.  The property's dramatic presence is a fully realized vision, a chic, sly, whimsical, and above all artful haunted house.

Rob Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz, two Manhattan artists, are the masterminds behind this domestic piece de resistance, which they have christened Peacock Hill.  Pruitt - a painter and the creator of the exhibition "101 Art Ideas That You Can Do Yourself," a manual for people who want to dabble in the daunting world of conceptual art (www.e-flux.com/projects/Pruitt) - needed more space for his work.  And when the rent on his city studio escalated, he and Horowitz began to look for a place in the country.  Their search eventually led them, in 2001, to this late-Victorian, shingle-style gem.

A third-floor bedroom

Originally built in 1885 by the Jenkins family and called The Jenkins Cottage, the house has been owned by about five different families, including members of the Steinway piano clan.  At one time during its colorful history, the place operated as a boarding house - every bedroom door bears a small brass number.  Despite a lack of up-keep and maintenance, the house had remained miraculously well preserved.  Underneath some cosmetic deterioration, peeling paint, and one hell of a mess, the two men could see that the house was extraordinary.  Little was altered over the decades.  (When buying an old house, Pruitt asserts, it's always better to buy from people who don't have money to make renovations and additions.) Every molding and detail was intact, with oak interiors on the first floor, chestnut on the second, and pine on the third.  There is a kind of flight of fancy evident in the home's original Victorian architecture.  There is a bathroom in every bedroom, and above the building's dormer windows are eccentric, circular-shaped eyelids.  Otherwise, the architecture of the house is pared down compared to others in its era, and has more open, high-ceilinged space in its interior.

Pruitt's painting studio.

Inspired, the two artists went to work on the house.  The first step was to strip the 1950s composite siding (which had protected the pine clapboard beneath) and to hire a carpenter to restore the exterior molding and original cedar shingles.  Then they replaced the plumbing and electrical inside, returned all the bathroom fixtures to authentic period pieces, changed the interior lighting, and re-plastered the walls.  This glorious restoration was done on a lean budget and took less than a year and a half, bringing the house back to its former beauty with little pomp and circumstance.