142
Trading, in part, an evolving high-style wardrobe for her
advice, Brooks decided to take things slowly. The first
project was to create privacy from the road with enclosures
of tall beech hedges, one of which has an opening that
leads to a romantic shaded parterre of box hedges. “I don’t
think there’s a dash of color in the whole house,” Brooks
points out, referencing the couple’s elegant Nakashima
furniture, Tuareg straw and leather floor mats, Beni Ourain
black-and-white wool rugs, and midcentury pieces found
online or on forays to Hudson, New York, an hour away.
Brooks took this palette as her cue for the plantings, with
black iris, Queen Anne’s lace, and white hydrangea. The
previous owners had discovered an 18th-century fieldstone
patio buried beneath an overgrown lawn—a serendipitous
find that she was delighted to preserve.
As the front of the house was being embowered, the
back of the property was liberated from a shroud of strag-
gly woodland. Five acres were cleared to re-create the
original meadows and open up sweeping vistas. Brooks
terraced the land to one side of the house to create vege-
table and bramble gardens, creating harmonious “levels
and planes,” McCollough says. “These little pockets of
space,” adds Hernandez.
The house had been the proud possessor of the area’s
first ever swimming pool—an electric-blue concrete
mid-century job. This was replaced with a dark basin now
surrounded by an orchard and wild plantings of oxeye
daisies, daylilies, and meadow flowers. In the mown paths
through this wilderness, the clover is springy underfoot.
The couple marvel at the garden’s constant evolution.
“With a garment,” says Hernandez, “you cut it, and it’s a
static composition. But with the garden, things die, things
move, things change color, things don’t work, the tempera-
ture drops—it’s in flux all the time.” They come for weekends
with Moose, the slobbering, sweet-natured Newfoundland
who lopes around, as this writer discovered, in a chillingly
on-target impersonation of a middling-size black bear. “The
minute we get up here on Friday night you feel this instant
weight off your shoulders,” says McCollough, “and we are
just completely decompressed. Miranda can’t believe that
we don’t have curtains in our bedroom even though it faces
east for the sunrise—but we sleep right through it.” “We
sleep 12-hour nights,” adds Hernandez. “It’s restorative. It’s
so intense in the city, and what we do is so intense.”
STILL LIFE
Around the long, dark pool
are wild plantings of oxeye
daisies, daylilies, and meadow
flowers. above left: The
house’s spare, midcentury
aesthetic is warmed with
wool rugs from Beni Ourain.
