How Bucks County, Pa., Became a Celebrity Hot Spot

It’s hard to pinpoint when things began to change around here but you might start with the arrival of Yolanda Hadid in 2017.

Ms. Hadid, a onetime regular on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” bought a farm just outside New Hope, Pa., to be closer to her daughters, the models Gigi and Bella Hadid, who were then living in New York City.

The 32-acre property, with its stone farmhouse, horse barn and formal garden, became a family retreat, and the Hadids’ social media feeds filled with pastoral images: Gigi in a two-piece bathing suit, posing with a bowl of newly picked vegetables beside a patch of basil; Yolanda in black boots, bluejeans and a puffer vest, showing off a heap of fresh-cut lavender.

“We ride horses, we have a vegetable garden,” Yolanda told The Toronto Star in 2018, describing her life in the countryside with her famous daughters, who between them have 140 million followers on Instagram.

The presence of the Hadids attracted other famous people to Bucks County, a woodsy area known for its rolling hills and 12 covered bridges. In 2018, Zayn Malik, the British pop singer who was in a relationship with Gigi, bought a farm there. “It is quiet,” he said in an interview with British Vogue. “There are no human beings.” People magazine shared the news that Gigi gave birth to the couple’s daughter at home in Bucks County in 2020.

Tranquil Bucks County was back in the media spotlight the next year, when TMZ and Billboard reported on an altercation involving Mr. Malik, Gigi and Yolanda that took place at one of their country homes. Facing four charges of harassment, Mr. Malik pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 360 days of probation; he and Gigi broke up after the incident.

In 2023, the actor-writer-director Bradley Cooper, widely reported to have succeeded Mr. Malik as Gigi’s love interest, paid $6.5 million for a 33-acre gentleman’s farm close to Yolanda’s property. Then came local sightings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin and Hailey Bieber. Just across the Delaware River from New Hope, in Lambertville, N.J., Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney were filming a movie.

Suddenly, New Hope and the quaint neighboring towns were becoming a celebrity enclave. While a census might reveal fewer famous people per acre than in the Hamptons, Malibu, or Aspen, the area’s glamour quotient was on the rise.

Located between Philadelphia and Manhattan, New Hope has long been a haven for wealthy part-time residents. The surrounding countryside has been compared to that of the Cotswolds in England, and the artists and artisans living in the area add a touch of bohemia to the rusticity. But in past decades the weekenders tended to be lawyers and executives from Philadelphia, not supermodels, Hollywood actors and pop stars.

Michael Arenella, a musician and the founder of the annual Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governors Island, bought a weekend house in Bucks County in 2014, when he was living in Brooklyn. He started living there full-time two years later in the belief that he had chosen a place well off the cool map.

“Beacon is like Brooklyn 2.0,” Mr. Arenella, 46, said, referring to the Hudson Valley town that has been nicknamed “Bro No,” an abbreviation of Brooklyn North, because of the many former Brooklynites residing there. “I wanted to get away from New Yorkers. Bucks County is not quite as pretentious.”

Lately, though, Mr. Arenella has been seeing plenty of New York license plates in and around New Hope. Beyond sightings of Gigi Hadid or Jakob Dylan, another famous transplant, there are other signs of change in the area.

Humble inns have been refurbished to attract a new clientele, and several luxury hotels have sprung up, including River House at Odette’s, where the average nightly rate for a Saturday in November was $560 and the private rooftop club charges members $1,250 a year.

Philadelphia magazine cited the hotel and its in-house restaurant as the most glaring example of “the new New Hope.” Opened in 2020 by a group of investors that includes Ed Breen, the executive chairman of DuPont, it was built on the former site of Chez Odette’s, a restaurant and cabaret presided over by an eccentric French actress and poet, Odette Myrtil.

Along with Bucks County Playhouse, which opened in 1939 and drew such stars as Grace Kelly and Robert Redford, Odette’s came to symbolize New Hope’s bohemian culture. It closed in 2007, after three consecutive floods struck the town, and the stone building that housed it was painstakingly relocated to another lot, where it now sits empty.

Just up the Delaware, in Stockton, N.J., population 494, the historic Stockton Inn recently reopened after a two-year renovation. Its owners hired a James Beard Award winner to manage the property and its two restaurants. They also opened Stockton Market, a gourmet café that sells Frankies 457 olive oil and matcha tea made on site. Nearby, another high-end dining establishment, the Northridge Restaurant, opened last month after a three-year transformation of a weathered barn on the property of the Woolverton Inn.

Real estate values have soared in the area as the ultrarich supersize musty, low-ceilinged 19th-century abodes. “The old Bucks County farmhouse is now being blown out and expanded into true estates,” said Michael J. Strickland, a real estate agent with Kurfiss Sotheby’s International Realty who moved from Manhattan to Bucks County full-time in 2000.

Part of the appeal, he added, is that “property values are still accessible here, versus the Hamptons.”

‘Everyone Is From Brooklyn’

Mira Nakashima has seen the changes up close. She moved to New Hope as a child, in 1943. Her father, George Nakashima, was a woodworker and designer whose sculptural tables and chairs were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and today fetch thousands of dollars at auction.

Mira took over George Nakashima Woodworkers after his death in 1990 and still runs the complex of workshops he built on a tree-lined property above the town. Sitting at a walnut table made by her father, Mira, 82, recalled the old New Hope as low-key and artsy.

“A lot of landscape painters came because the landscape was so beautiful,” she said. “There was fishing on the river. And there were canals running both sides of the river. And it was quiet and peaceful.”

For years, Nakashima Woodworkers held an open house on Saturdays. Recently, Mira said, the grounds became so overcrowded that she now offers guided tours by appointment only.

“Everyone is from Brooklyn. I can smell Brooklyn on them when they arrive here,” added Soomi Hahn Amagasu, Mira’s daughter-in-law and the studio’s sales manager. “So many young people are coming here.”

They won’t find Williamsburg-on-the-Delaware, however. New Hope’s commercial drag still has a hippie vibe distinct from the increasingly refined retail atmosphere of that Brooklyn neighborhood, with its Hermès and Chanel stores.

Mainstays include Witch Shop Gypsy Heaven, MagiKava teahouse and Love Saves the Day, a vintage bric-a-brac emporium formerly located in New York’s East Village. Another store sells tie-dye rock T-shirts. Those places, along with the homey bars and reasonably priced restaurants, bring in the suburban teens, twentysomethings and other day-trippers who clog the streets on weekends.

The lack of luxury stores of the kind you might find in East Hampton is by design, said Larry Keller, New Hope’s mayor for the last 27 years and an antique dealer in town. The town is also not so hot on national chains: After Starbucks and Dunkin’ moved in, the council revised zoning laws to favor local businesses.

“You don’t have the square-footage,” Mr. Keller said, referring to the tiny storefronts. “Where is Ralph Lauren going to have a store and sell enough gear to make sense? These are boutiques.”

One of New Hope’s shops made the grade for Gigi Hadid: Ditto Vintage, on Brick Street. Last winter Ms. Hadid stopped in and bought a Nahui Ollin handbag, a leather jacket and a necklace.

There are some upscale shops in nearby Lambertville: Albucker Gallery sells contemporary art and an assortment of found objects; Ten Church offers vintage clothing; and Rago Arts and Auction Center sells works by Nakashima and other design goods. Lambertville is also on the foodie map: Canal House Station, which serves American fare in a converted 1870s train station, earned a Michelin star.

Back on the Pennsylvania side of the iron bridge, there are signs that New Hope is in the early stages of a makeover. The building that houses Farley’s Bookshop, which opened in 1967, was recently renovated into a bright, modern space. A few doors down, a scruffy indoor mini mall was turned into a Ferry Market, a food hall. A high-end eyeglass store, Kitto Optical, opened on the same block.

“The French fries the restaurants serve are now truffle fries,” joked Katsutoshi Amagasu, 21, a Nakashima family member who grew up in New Hope.

Some of the town’s structures date to the colonial era, like the circa.-1727 Logan Inn. But on the residential north end, beyond the protected historic district, a Victorian house overlooking the river was bulldozed and replaced with a modernist compound befitting Bel Air. On an adjacent empty lot, a builder promises four luxury condominiums, each with a terrace, elevator and private dock. The asking price for one unit is $3.5 million.

Lorraine Eastman, a real estate agent at Berkshire Hathaway, said the riverfront has been built up to the point that portions of the Delaware are no longer visible to passers-by. Ms. Eastman lived in New Hope back in the ’80s, before moving to Los Angeles and eventually returning seven years ago.

“I bartended with Big Sue, who was 6-foot-1, wore size 13 motorcycle boots and smoked a cigar and sang jazz,” she recalled of her time working at John and Peter’s, a bar and rock club on South Main Street that’s still in business. “I lived in a loft on Ferry Street, which is now the Nurture Spa. New Hope was very artsy, gritty, very bohemian. It still has a little bit of all those qualities, but it is changing.”

Eat, Pray, Spend

Like many picturesque small towns, New Hope seems to have been discovered during the pandemic by urbanites who gobbled up property and drove up real estate prices.

“People are always looking for a place to go that’s a hidden little storybook town,” said Ms. Eastman, who recently listed a renovated 1769 farmhouse with a pool and “party” barn on 37 acres for $4.5 million.

Celebrity residents aren’t exactly new, either: Paul Simon had a weekend house in Bucks County in the early ’70s; more recently, the “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert lived in Frenchtown, N.J., 16 miles north.

But the presence of the Hadids and Mr. Cooper, who grew up in suburban Philadelphia, has lent glamour to the area and whetted the appetites of developers and entrepreneurs.

A few miles from Yolanda Hadid’s estate, in the hamlet of Carversville, Pa., another hospitality project is nearly complete.

Milan Lint and his husband, Mitch Berlin, each of whom have had finance careers in New York, are renovating the Carversville Inn, a circa.-1813 stone building that the couple bought in 2020.

Standing amid the construction one morning last month, Mr. Lint, who has owned a weekend home with Mr. Berlin in Bucks County for 20 years, described the plans for the space, which is slated to open soon.

The new Carversville Inn will be a European-style boutique hotel with six rooms priced around $500 a night, Mr. Lint said. Its 65-seat restaurant will have “a French brasserie menu, in the Pastis or Balthazar style,” Mr. Lint added, name-checking a pair of Manhattan stalwarts.

Asked why he and Mr. Berlin had chosen Bucks County as the place for their venture, rather than, say, the Hudson Valley, Mr. Lint shared a memory of a boring, rainy summer spent in the area.

“The Hudson Valley is very pocket, and weather-dependent,” he said. “Here, the towns dot up and down the river. You can have a full weekend four seasons a year.”