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T
wenty years ago, Jack McCollough and Lazaro
Hernandez met at Life nightclub in Manhat-
tan and discovered that each was on the cusp
of studying at Parsons. “I was a big hippie
with dreads to here who used to sew my own
clothes in high school and went on tour with
the Grateful Dead,” remembers McCollough (a glassblower
at the time). “He was the total opposite—a kind of jock from
Miami.” Nevertheless, Hernandez was fashion mad too.
He idolized Gianni Versace and had once solicited his advice.
“If you want to be a designer, you should do it, and you can
do it,” Versace told him, an injunction that empowered
Hernandez to leave med school to follow his path. (He told
his Cuban father that he was going to study architecture,
to sweeten the pill.) At Parsons, in preparation for their lives
in fashion, Hernandez and McCollough each read Christian
Dior’s 1957 autobiography, Dior by Dior, which revealed
the story behind the creation and subsequent workings of
his legendary couture house. Every season, as the fabled
couturier explained, he would retreat to one of his two
country homes—a mill near Fontainebleau or a château in
Provence—and sketch and sketch and sketch until he had
hundreds of ideas for the upcoming collection.
Duly inspired, the couple left school in 2002 to establish
their Proenza Schouler brand—and, with Dior as their
lodestar, began thinking about an inspirational country
house of their own. Their hunt was also a response to their
fast-paced Manhattan life. “New York was then just really
crazy and hectic,” Hernandez recalls of the days of Bunga-
low 8 and the Beatrice Inn. “All our friends were going out
all the time and were just wild. We were running a business,
and we had all these responsibilities, and the weekend
became this 24/7 party.”
They set about exploring the wilds of the Massachusetts
countryside with a friend who’d grown up there and who’d
rented a Beetlejuice-esque house. One fine day they picked
up a real estate pamphlet in their local grocery store and
spotted a tiny black-and-white photograph of a house they
deemed to have “the perfect proportions,” McCollough
recalls. “We were having a big [Donald] Judd moment at
the time, and this looked like a Judd box.”
They went with friends to see what turned out to be a 1792
clapboard farmhouse out of Currier & Ives, on 110 acres in
a romantic but forgotten corner of the state. The house was
set on a low bluff with views across meadows to woods with
a creek, a waterfall, and a swimming hole buried deep within.
