Inside Rachel Maddow's Massachusetts Farmhouse and West Village Co-op

Rachel Maddow anchored MSNBC's 9 p.m. hour 5 nights a week from 2008 to 2022, then cut the show back to Mondays. She came up through Massachusetts radio and Air America, took a doctorate at Oxford, and wrote bestsellers between broadcasts. Through nearly all of it, her home life sat in the hills of western Massachusetts, far from the studio, on a farm in West Cummington, a village in the hilltown of Cummington. The Manhattan apartment came and went. The farm is the fixed point.

The farm came with the relationship

Maddow met the photographer Susan Mikula in 1999, while she was living in western Massachusetts and grinding out her Oxford dissertation between odd jobs. Mikula hired her to do yard work at her home. Their first date was at an NRA event called “Ladies' Day on the Range.” The couple stayed in the hills. When the television show launched in 2008, the commute began: the city for the broadcast, West Cummington for everything else.

The farm's full record sits on its own page. For the property breakdown, the ownership trail, and the map pin, see Rachel Maddow's Massachusetts home profile on Velvet Ropes. We keep the exact address behind the ropes, where it belongs.

The main house is a farmhouse that predates the Civil War, and it has no television. Maddow told New York magazine the house is symmetrical and historically preserved, and that bolting an addition onto it would feel like “putting a hat on a horse.” That refusal is how the property got its strangest and best structure.

A bathhouse instead of an addition

The couple wanted a hot tub and a place to watch football, and the old house could give them neither. So they hired the Manhattan architect Nicole Migeon to design a freestanding bathhouse out back. It is a small pitched-roof building clad in vertical cedar slats, a nod to the tobacco-drying barns of the region. Cabinets of reclaimed maple hold the property's single television. Maddow described the result as a “retreat within a retreat,” the one spot on the farm where she can seal herself in and watch football at full volume without bothering anyone.

Cummington before the cameras

The hills have been taking in people who wanted distance for a long time. The land was sold off in 1762 as Township No. 5, bought by Colonel John Cummings of Concord, and the town that grew on it took his name when it incorporated in 1779. It has stayed small ever since.

Its most famous resident before Maddow was the poet William Cullen Bryant, who grew up on a homestead his grandfather built there in 1783 and returned to it in old age as a summer home. The Trustees of Reservations keep the Bryant Homestead as a museum today, and much of Bryant's nature poetry started in the countryside around it.

Village life runs through the Old Creamery, a grocery in a building that churned butter in the 1800s. When its owners moved to convert the store into a community-owned co-op in 2011, Maddow turned up at the fundraiser and told the crowd that on September 11 her instinct had been to head for the Creamery to be with people. The store named a sandwich after her.

The show comes up the hill

The farm stopped being a weekend fact in 2020. That November, Mikula caught COVID-19, and it got bad enough that Maddow told viewers they had thought it might kill her. Maddow quarantined and ran the show from the Massachusetts house, looking into a home camera and asking the audience to do whatever it took to avoid the virus.

In April 2022 she announced the show would air Mondays only, part of a new NBCUniversal deal that added podcasts and films to her plate. The arithmetic of her week now leans toward the hilltown.

A decade on Jane Street

The city half of the split was a co-op loft in the far West Village, on Jane Street, a cobblestone block near the Hudson River. Maddow and Mikula bought it in 2010 from R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe. The building went up in 1898 as a paper warehouse, and the conversion kept the bones: heavy timber beams, brick walls, a wood-burning fireplace, and river light from the west-facing windows. The unit itself was 2 apartments combined into one.

It went on the market in October 2020, while Maddow was broadcasting from the other house, and found its buyer within weeks. The sale closed in early 2021. Of the 2 addresses in this story, the farm is the one she kept.

The apartment has its own page too: Rachel Maddow's New York home profile carries the building's record and the Stipe handoff.

More homes behind the ropes

News desks and campaign trails buy a lot of quiet real estate. For another public figure's guarded front door, step inside Al Gore's Nashville home, full property breakdown included.