For most people, pop-up ads are an annoyance that comes with browsing the internet, and rarely if ever get clicked. But for Claire Benoist, clicking a real estate pop-up ad led to a life-changing event. At the time, Benoist, a professional photographer, and her husband, Derek Kilner, a United Nations humanitarian officer, were looking for an apartment to buy in Brooklyn, New York. Randomly, Benoist clicked a real estate pop-up ad for Westchester County, about an hour and 15 minutes north of New York City. “I just fooled around on the website for a second,” she says. “Then I saw this house, and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I felt this pull toward it.” The pull was coming from a former masonry foundry built in the early 1890s for handling ore. The building had been converted to a home in the 1950s by some artists, and had been chopped up and added to over the decades. But Benoist saw its potential as a weekend home away from busy New York City. On a whim, Benoist and Kilner checked out the house that weekend. “We had nothing else to do, and this was just a funny thing to do, so we drove the hour north,” Benoist says. “I walked in, and I knew I needed this. As cliché as it sounds, it just called to me. My husband, not so much. He’s more of a realist.”

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