134 SEPTEMBER 2019 | TOWNANDCOUNTRYMAG.COM
Along with the streams, the Wilton property had views of a pond,
a waterfall, and expanses of open and wooded terrain. As he had done
in California, Thorne used glass, steel, and natural stone to create a
structure that immerses its inhabitants in the surrounding landscape.
The kitchen, dining room, laundry, and guest bedroom are on the
top floor; the living room is down half a level; a half level below that
is the music studio and other bedrooms. “It’s very unassuming from
the roadside,” says Robert Parisot, an architect who grew up nearby
and whose father, the cellist Aldo Parisot, was friends with the Bru-
becks. “On the top level, it’s just this wall, an entrance. It’s really a
place that is about transition, once you get inside.”a lyricist with whom he had six children. The couple worked on
numerous projects together, including The Real Ambassadors, a musi-
cal about race relations that Dave recorded with Louis Armstrong
soon after the Brubecks moved east.
“My parents felt guilty about leaving California,” Chris says. “They
were both second-generation Californians, and they missed Oakland.
At first it was, ‘Well, we’re going to live there for a few years.’” But the
plan they hatched back in Oakland worked exceptionally well. Dave
was home more often. And the music studio Thorne designed off the
living room was where some of America’s greatest jazz compositions
were created. Dave died in 2012 and Iola in 2014, but their children
have kept the house the way it was when their parents moved in.
Architects of Thorne’s generation liked to talk about bringing the
outdoors inside. At the Wilton house, Chris says, this happened both
aesthetically and literally. His father would practice piano for hours
every day, and the music would attract curious neighbors, includ-
ing, for a spell, a wild animal. “When Dad was in his eighties, a fox
would come and sit on the flagstones just beyond the sliding door
by the piano and listen to him play.” The kitchen and
dining room are on
the top level of the
three-story house.
The dining chairs
were designed by
George Nakashima.Dave Brubeck was an amalgam of
various American dreams:
a cowboy who became a jazz legend who was also a devoted family
man. He grew up riding horses on a cattle ranch where his father
was a manager, and he studied veterinary medicine and music at the
College of the Pacific, which is where he met his wife, Iola Whitlock,