WESTPORT, NY.- Fourteen years ago, Taylor Haskins, a veteran jazz trumpeter, and Catherine Ross Haskins, a visual artist, moved from Brooklyn to Westport, New York, a picture-book town on Lake Champlain, 275 miles north of Manhattan. It became “the place on Earth that we love,” Haskins said. “But sometimes it could use a little bit of an injection of the outside world.”

So three years ago, they bought an abandoned, 11,000-square-foot flour mill on Main Street, gutted it and refashioned it as the Mill, a center for contemporary visual arts with a chapel-like performance space.

The venue, which had its official opening Saturday, is exhibiting and commissioning esteemed visual artists. And it is booking musicians — including pianist Guillermo Klein, slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s Sexmob and violinist Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire — who don’t often drive up to the Adirondacks for a gig. (They’d typically perform at downtown Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard or Joe’s Pub.) The hope, Haskins said, is to create “a cultural oasis” that the community will embrace.

The Haskinses, both 52, are financing the project with their own funds. During their years in New York City, they watched as empty industrial buildings were given new lives, often as condos (they lived in one) but sometimes in creative ways. They thought they’d give it a try: “We could fail,” Ross Haskins said. “But what are we even alive for if we don’t do something we believe in?”

Situated about 100 miles south of Montreal, the Mill isn’t yet on anyone’s performance circuit. At the same time, it is one node in a network of far-flung venues that operate largely under the media radar.

“It reminds me of places I’ve encountered not in the U.S. — in Japan, in Poland, in France,” said harpist Zeena Parkins, who performed at the opening. “And it’s always the energy of one or two people that makes this incredible thing happen just because they love the music and they love the art, and they’ve developed a trust with their community.”

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Before Klein and his quintet performed a show last month, the Haskinses rushed around in flip-flops, delivering cocktails and small plates from the Knock — the art deco-inspired “speakeasy” that adjoins the performance space — to audience members. The crowd included local shop owners, contractors, farmers, a paramedic and a contingent of “summer people.”

At twilight, the room had the aura of a cozy cocoon with high walls of white pine assembled in a herringbone pattern, topped off by a large picture window that frames a group of tall oaks. Klein’s music — a matrix of melody and rhythm that grew quietly intense — cast a spell over the 50 or so audience members. (Haskins, who has played with Klein’s bands off and on for close to 30 years, sat in on one tune, sight-reading in his shorts and a T-shirt.)

Fifty people is almost a sellout here. The experience was intimate, and not only for the listeners. Afterward, the Haskinses put up the five musicians in their home: “Taylor made breakfast for us,” Klein said. “Full service, man.”

Haskins grew up in rural New Hampshire, was mentored through college by trumpet great Clark Terry and moved to New York in 1996. He first played with Klein at Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich Village, subbing with the pianist’s big band, and began making a name for himself on the broader scene.

In 2005, while performing with bassist Dave Holland’s big band in Montreal, he ran into Catherine Ross, who was attending a friend’s wedding. They married in 2008. Their son, Felix, was born in 2010, and is now a budding cellist. Tired of the city grind, they bought a lakefront house in Westport that summer. Haskins opened a production studio there and later began hosting a weekly music show, “The Thread,” on NCPR (North Country Public Radio). From 2014 to 2017, the couple curated a summer music series in a local park.

Westport has around 1,300 residents and typical small-town problems; reliable jobs aren’t easy to find. But over the past couple of decades, idealistic young people have migrated to the region to establish bakeries, carpentry businesses and a multitude of farms with community-supported agriculture programs. Here and there, an old church or grange has been turned into a gallery or performance space, setting the stage for the Mill.

When the Haskinses bought the old flour mill, it was “dark and creepy,” Ross Haskins recalled — nearly windowless and crammed with silos, grain elevators, hoppers and other machinery, including a 23-foot-tall, steel-beamed sifting tower in what is now the music space. Everything was coated with old flour dust.

“Lots of happy squirrels in there,” her husband noted. A crew of Amish farmers spent weeks sweeping, bagging and carting away the flour.

During the building’s demolition phase, Haskins prowled the premises, measuring, analyzing and imagining what it might look like as an arts center. He came up with a detailed design (“I saw it in my mind’s eye”), which was realized by a Vermont architectural firm and set in motion by local contractors and dozens of workers. Windows appeared. Ross Haskins stepped in to design the five galleries.

The project’s cost? “A lot,” Haskins said.

The couple sees the experiment as opening a door: “We’re willing to make the investment,” Haskins explained, “because the ripple effect will be profound if we’re successful.”

Dan Keegan, a full-time resident and a former director of art museums in Milwaukee and San Jose, California, thinks the odds are favorable. He’s noticing fewer “sideways glances” from locals, he said, as “suspicions give way to the curiosity factor. People are showing up to figure out what the heck it is.”

The Haskinses are going year-round with concerts and exhibitions. Amy Ellingson, an artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will soon install a six-paneled, 8-by-8-foot stained-glass window near the apex of the churchly performance space, its design inspired by the grain sifting that once happened in the same spot. Primarily a painter, Ellingson had fantasized about working with stained glass, she said, “and then Catherine called and said, ‘How’d you like to do this window?’”

In the same room, Baltimore-based artist Stephen Hendee has installed a 24-foot-long light sculpture, Buisine. Named for a medieval herald trumpet, it calls to mind the inflating and deflating of lungs. He likens his creative process to a jazz performance: A basic form gives way to “free-styling creativity and moments of improvisation.”

“It’s one of the things that drew them to my work,” he said of the Haskinses. “And having my piece over in the corner improves the room from a sound perspective; somehow, it augments the sound. Taylor has commented on it. He notices all these things.”

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On Saturday night, Art Blakey was on the sound system in the Knock, and the bar was full. Introducing the show, Haskins explained that Björk’s “Vespertine” has been one of his favorite albums for 20-plus years, but that he had only later learned the name of the harpist who is so prominent on the recording: Parkins, who would now give her own electroacoustic show at the Mill.

Parkins walked over to her instrument, which was partially wrapped in gold foil and looked like its own art installation. The harp was connected to a tangle of cables leading to pedals and a laptop, and she began to coax unexpected sounds: rumblings and rustlings and traces of melody that turned into faraway moans, like songs of a humpback whale or a slide guitar in outer space.

The room darkened as Buisine began to glow and change colors: sky blue, emerald, rose. Parkins stopped at one point to dampen the harp’s strings and further transform the sounds.

“These are Styrofoam corners from a set of shelves that I bought,” she explained, inserting blue chunks of foam between a few of the strings. “I knew they’d come in handy at some point — and here we are in Westport.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.