In any case, he was pretty much otherwise engaged for the next 25 years or so with the construction, which he did mostly by hand and by himself, of a fantastical stone house here. With its swooping peaked slate roof and steeple, its round door and its whorls of vines, it looks like a collaboration between the Brothers Grimm and the architectural humanist Christopher Alexander, whose books are touchstones for Mr. Sanders.

The other day, Andrea Menke, an exuberant German fashion and prop stylist who is married to Mr. Sanders, shooed away the chickens that were skittering toward the back porch. There are 16 chickens, 2 roosters, 3 dogs, 5 cats, 2 extremely shy miniature donkeys and 2 elderly cows living here in relative harmony, though the younger cow, a 17-year-old Scottish Highland mix named Bubble, has a bad habit of overturning lawn chairs and picking off side-view car mirrors with her horns.

Four years ago, Ms. Menke, who had trained to be an architect and was living in the East Village, drove up here to meet Mr. Sanders, whom she knew by reputation and who she hoped would build her a straw-bale house. She took one look at him, standing in the door of his stone fairy-tale house, and felt as if she had been sucker-punched. By the time Ms. Menke had been given the tour of Mr. Sanders’s straw-bale houses, and had been invited to work on his former wife’s new home, a straw-bale then in the making, she was a goner, she said. Six months later, Ms. Menke, now 48, changed her mailing address to his.

Mr. Sanders’s houses do take your breath away. He was 19 and deep in his veterinary studies at Cornell when he began building. An older sister had given him 11 acres on a grassy hilltop as a Christmas present. At the time, land was $380 an acre, so his new homestead cost the same amount, he noted, “as a hot car like a Firebird. But it was a lot safer.”

He harvested loose stones from the tumble-down walls of nearby farms (discarding the “uglies,” he said) and stacked them, face out and sorted by color, on the hill here, a vast library of material. In the summer, he would lay stone into the night, lighting his way with the bulb from his truck’s glove compartment, which he had plucked out and attached to a speaker wire, as he scooped the mortar around each stone just so, with a dowel and a nail head. He thought he might be finished in a year or so.

After veterinary school, he lived in a shack nearby during the winter and in tents, straight-sided canvas numbers, during the summer. Each week, he worked an 80-hour shift squeezed into four days at an emergency vet practice on Long Island, so he could work three full days on his house here.