It’s 8:45 a.m. and a precamp frenzy has taken over Sylvana and Adam Durrett’s country house in Washington, Connecticut. Calls come from the shiplapped mudroom for rackets. The couple’s three kids—Henry, 11, Grace, 9, and Millie, 6—hustle sneakers on, as Sylvana deftly threads Millie’s loose blond locks into a taut ponytail. They hug their mom goodbye in succession like von Trapps in tennis whites, and are bundled out the door and into the family car by Adam. Suddenly, the rambling farmhouse descends into calm.
But not for long. Vogue photographer Norman Jean Roy has just arrived with pastries from his Hudson Valley bakery, Breadfolks, and sets them on the kitchen terrace. In an instant Sylvana yells “Blue!” because the family’s 90-pound yellow Lab has launched himself onto the weathered farm table and, like a breaching whale, sinks his maw into a loaf of sourdough.
Sylvana’s accustomed to this. The 42-year-old CEO of Maisonette, a beloved tyke-targeted online emporium, which itself has made ample use of this 102-acre property for photo shoots, is comfortable in a bit of chaos—having grown up in Los Angeles with her mother’s nine siblings and their families often visiting from San Jose. “It’s never really quiet here,” says Sylvana. “Everything was designed with guests in mind. It’s like a hotel in the summer.” Between the main house, the barn, and guest quarters tucked down by the pond, she can happily accommodate three families—all the kids’ beds have trundles, per their own request—and the Durretts recently purchased a generous six-bedroom gabled farmhouse across the street for further (and future) spillover.
The carousel of guests only adds to the Durretts’ Litchfield County social swirl—populated by full- and fellow part-timers (the Durretts’ home base is in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill). “There was a really fun and embracing community out here,” says Sylvana. “It just felt very relaxed, social without being…I dunno, I don’t want to say something rude about the Hamptons.”
Weekends mean a lunch or dinner party, with Adam manning the Argentinean grill of his beloved outdoor kitchen while Sylvana takes charge of salads loaded with cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden. Grown-ups eat on the porch while children zip across the lawn, from trampoline to pool to the hornbeam-hedged tennis court.
Planning such gatherings for someone who, as Vogue’s director of special projects, orchestrated nine Met Galas is an unfussy science. In winter, Sylvana moves groups larger than 10 to the barn, where a vast white oak trestle table can seat 24, and there’s space to double that. (For her annual Valentine’s Day dinner, she’s brought in circular tables and made room for 60.) The antique working barn’s double-height, cupolaed space can graciously absorb a lot of people: a tartan-upholstered guest room is supplemented by a movie theater-cum-sleepover-room furnished with sectionals on casters where no fewer than 15 boys recently bedded down for Henry’s birthday.
The family first came to this bucolic corner of northwest Connecticut some five years ago, when Edie Parker designer Brett Heyman invited them to stay. That was fall, the area’s most seductive time of year, and the Durretts began house-hunting the same weekend. Of the hilltop property which would eventually become theirs, Sylvana remembers that the early New England saltbox with Georgian detailing lacked a certain “curb appeal,” she says with characteristic pragmatism. “But I had a vision for it.” That vision was in keeping with the property’s history as a 1900s dairy farm (a rundown barn at the road housed cows; the pond served as a watering hole).
The couple enlisted designer Hadley Wiggins to reimagine the interiors with the help of architect Brendan Coburn of the Brooklyn Studio, who handled the renovation of the Durrett’s Cobble Hill brownstone. They also asked Miranda Brooks, landscape designer and Vogue contributing editor, who had helped them with their Brooklyn backyard, to give the landscape a needed narrative direction.
Brooks’s additions have so far been incremental (a pool, formal garden, and serpentine hedge are still to come). She’s encouraged them to leave the meadow grass long and wild with the evening light in mind—“Meadow grass looks so good backlit,” Brooks says. Apple and magnolia trees were given purpose and framing by moving and lengthening the driveway. “They’re all very subtle interventions,” says Brooks, “but they really change the feeling of the place.”
Changes to the house were more substantial. The previous owner turned the space into an open floor plan, with a modernist floating steel staircase—“a death trap for children,” jokes Sylvana. The solution was separate, smaller spaces, in keeping with the building’s history. “We really focused on it being a reinterpretation of what we think would have been there,” explains Coburn of the house, which had been enlarged over the centuries from its late-1700s footprint. “We wanted to bring it back to a country, cozy feel,” Sylvana says.
A new columned porch shifted the front door to the west façade, thought to be its original entry, a choice inspired by Brooks, who was searching for something to orient the landscape around. “The house needed a front. And that was the way to give it some character,” says Brooks, who also built a pergola-covered fieldstone terrace off the kitchen with espaliered apple trees.
Meanwhile, inside, Wiggins was intent on “unwinding the sterilization that had happened there,” she says. “But you have to be careful not to do one area period-perfect and then go into another room and there’s something off. We’re not trying to replicate. I’m super allergic to faux antiques.”
The result includes a dining room where a bronze pendant creased into origami folds crowns a set of early-American Windsor chairs and a living room where a live-edge walnut coffee table shares space with a French mattress-style daybed with whimsical Décors Barbares berry-print bolsters. Function was key with a growing family in mind. Grace and Millie’s awkwardly shaped upstairs bedroom was treated like a stateroom on a ship with bunks tucked under eaves and swaddled in yellow-and-cherry ditsy floral fabric and wallpaper.
“It’s not one-note,” says Wiggins, a designer known for her deft use of color and ability to work within context. “And it will evolve because nothing is too perfectly matched.” She anticipates the kids spilling cranberry juice on a chair that will then need to be reupholstered, or a lamp broken from an indoor hockey swipe. “Good interiors can accept change without having to be thrown out and started from scratch,” says Wiggins. “I think it makes for a better house.”
“I’m still inspired by it. I feel like I will be working on this house for the rest of my life,” says Sylvana. (Adam, for his part, would appreciate the renovations having a foreseeable end date.) “Our kids are going to get older, our needs are going to change, and that’s the beauty. You can just grow with it.” She’s sitting on the kitchen banquette during a break in the Vogue shoot, in cutoff denim shorts and a white Rag Bone Slub T-shirt. In the summer she lives in sandals and linen dresses; in the winter it’s furry Birkenstocks, jeans, and an oversized Khaite or La Ligne knit. “We love the winter as much as we love the summer here.”
In the fall, a hike down to Washington Depot reveals peak foliage; in winter, the kids can go skating on the pond after ski school. The spring means visits to local farms, and when school lets out the family relocates here for the season—the drive from Brooklyn always includes Taco Bell for Doritos Locos Tacos and Grilled Cheese Burritos. Sylvana works from a desk in the primary bedroom. “There is not a single Zoom a child does not interrupt,” she says.
Postcamp the kids are marshaled into the photo shoot. They oscillate between distaste for the assignment (iPad and ice pop bribes are on hand) and eagerness to be involved. “I think you should get me riding my bike,” Grace says to Roy sternly.
When the crew packs up to leave, Sylvana runs to the basement for flats of honey from their apiary to offer them. She recently had labels printed “B&D Labs” in honor of their Labradors, Blue and Dolly, but friends misread the ampersand as BAD LABS, and now the name is threatening to stick.
Sylvana hugs the crew goodbye, seeing them out along the elegant new driveway, and though she’s been up since dawn, her day is only beginning. Twenty guests are coming for dinner. The long teak table overlooking the pond must be set with brightly colored glassware to match the dahlias, repurposed from the shoot. Adam is already stationed at the outdoor kitchen, assembling the rotisserie he ordered on Amazon and checking on how his pulled pork is coming along in the smoker.
It is July Fourth weekend and the Durretts will be hosting Adam’s sister and her husband and three kids from Portland, Oregon, that afternoon, plus a cluster of local friends. Two days later, 50 are coming for a barbecue. Amid all the preparation, Grace and Millie stay splayed on the kitchen banquette watching reruns of Full House. Surely they can relate.
