Unbeknownst to most, upstate New York is home to an entire village built out of refuse. 

Constructed by hand out of found objects, this private property is an uninhabited off-grid utopia, built in impassioned fits and located at the foot of Vedder Mountain, in a hollow at the western edge of the town of Catskill.

Its name is b-Home Studio and it is a “fantastical sculpture park in the woods,” a “mythical repurposed city,” a “collaborative construction of small scale vernacular, experimental, and visionary architecture samples,” as its owner Matt Bua’s website varyingly describes.

And, at least for now, it’s not for public access. 

Bua, a 53-year-old installation artist, first dreamt up b-Home in the mid-1990s — but it wasn’t until 2006, when he found the plot of land in a Pennysaver and bought it for $33,000, that it “just kind of poured out,” he told The Post.  

“It” is the 30-some buildings he and his creative-minded collaborators have built on the 27-acre plot over the past 17 years.  

“It was the dream of making inhabitable spaces,” he said of his inspiration for creating b-Home

“I invited all my friends,” the North Carolina-born Bua added, saying that the other creators periodically drop in to add, change and fix the abodes they’ve constructed at b-Home.

Among the structures are a tiny tower with LPs for shingles, a bear made out of weaved barbed wire, a bunker called Cicada House composed of dirt-filled bags and a lower-case take on the classic A-frame home. 

There are also wooden bridges, staircases and, the most recent addition, a Tudor-style church Bua made after being gifted pews and stained glass. 

In the early years, while constructing b-Home, Bua would commute up from Brooklyn to work and live on the land whenever possible — first staying in a tent, then a shed and finally in a wood stove-equipped cabin he built on the property. 

(b-Home has neither plumbing nor electricity — but a compost toilet, generators, solar power and a fresh natural spring for water.)

Today, he uses the house park only as a studio while living full-time in the nearby hamlet of Palenville, on a 2-acre farm with his wife, daughters and two white horses. 

Although b-Home is private, Bua frequently shares it with those who ask and plans one day to begin offering formalized tours and retreats, making the space into an “educational destination” for those interested in the “art of intuitive building, studying living off the grid and talking about/with indigenous stone work.”

Indeed, he prefers not to hoard his prolific creations — but to share them with the public. 

“When I got the property, I didn’t want to be the New York City artist in the woods building funky structures, so I immediately built a giant bobcat that you could go inside of on a vacant piece of property in the village. That was called the Catamount People’s Museum.”

Bua took that down in 2016, but his art is still on public display in Catskill by way of a giant Rip Van Winkle head he installed at the top of the town’s main street to commemorate the story’s 200th anniversary.

He also co-created a concept called the Catskill Flight Trail, a self-guided scavenger hunt of sorts from the eastern to western edge of Greene County, ending at the Prattsville Art Center, where Bua has an installation called the Prankster Peoples’ Museum that’s fronted by an enormous replica of Lady Liberty’s head. 

The Trail, like b-Home, is intended to “bring people together,” Bua said, emphasizing that he often enjoys the journey nearly as much as the destination in his work, which is frequently collaborative, with fellow artists and children alike. 

“What’s better than being able to build all these fun little buildings out of different materials, learning along the way?” he said of his little Catskill world.