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NATURAL ATTRACTION
far left: A romantic parterre
conceived by Miranda Brooks
features box hedges planted
to match the quatrefoil motifs in
the main house’s stencil work
(seen on the dining room walls, at
right). near left: Hernandez,
McCollough, and Moose at work.
above: A cabin in the surrounding
woods serves as a secondary
design space.It had a rich history: Built by the family of one of the pat-
entees of Connecticut named in the royal charter of Charles
II, the house, the couple had been told, had been a hiding
place for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railway. Their
friends, nevertheless, were horrified. “It was kind of falling
apart,” Hernandez concedes, but the couple loved such
historic details as the hand-stenciled designs in the dining
room, the original plaster walls filled with sheep’s wool for
insulation, the wide-plank floorboards, and the “funeral
door”—big enough to take a coffin through—in the parlor.
“We were seeking something quite authentic,” says Hernan-
dez, “and the bones were original.”
The house was soon theirs, and Hernandez and McCol-
lough “stripped everything back” to its honest-to-goodness
bones. For the gardens, the couple summoned their friend
the landscape architect (and Vogue Contributing Editor)
Miranda Brooks to bring her holistic vision to the setting.
“She understands ‘wild’ like nobody else,” says McCollough,
“and we wanted to keep things quite wild up here.”