The first time I saw it I didn’t realize I was trespassing; I was simply riding my bike down a dirt road which turned out to be very long and very private. And suddenly there it was up ahead: a house the size of a cruise ship, looking abandoned. Weedy trees were pressing into the windows from all sides. I retreated quickly, scratching my head. What was that?!
The second time was at an estate sale, the owner having passed on. This was the house of Phyllis Curtin, a diva of the Metropolitan Opera and a pillar of Tanglewood back in the day. The estate sale that day was mobbed, and the house was so vast and byzantine that I wound up lost, texting my partner Jennifer Bianco: “Where are you? I’m in the servants’ quarters.”
The original 1800’s farmhouse once commanded several hundred acres of the Alford Valley, half of which were ultimately donated to Bard College in the 1960’s, becoming the campus of Simon’s Rock. The house had been grand right from the start, then had doubled in size in the 1920’s and doubled again in the 70’s, with a Miami-style ranch house slammed into the side of this Yankee mansion.
After it had been on the market for years, I was the only remodelista foolish enough to bite. My first move was the boldest: I removed the ranch house portion altogether, two thousand square feet, demolished by backhoe. My second move was to make one whole wing into the kitchen, by taking out the servants’ staircase, and wall after wall. We also dismantled a huge interior chimney, from basement to rooftop, since it only served the boiler. Having done this open-heart surgery, five rooms became an open kitchen, thirty by eighteen. That’s big. Upstairs, what had been ten bedrooms was now closer to six, plus a laundry room.
There is no bright line between renovation and interior design, so after a year we started on interiors with Jennifer Bianco, my partner in Scout House. Together we sourced and built in antique pantries, oversized bar and library pieces. In the TV den, we pulled down a ceiling to expose the hand-hewn beams, making a wonderful ‘snug.’ One subtle trick: there are no hallways in the new floor plan; each room opens to the next, in true farmhouse fashion.
On the grounds, we placed a pool in newly-cleared views of hayfields and Mt. Everett.
One room in particular shows my collaboration with Jenn at its best. Sometime before 1900 a small barn had been transported and crafted onto the gable end of the farmhouse: but that barn had just one door and two windows. When Jenn and I were done it was still a barn, structurally, but also a ballroom with eighteen-foot ceilings and a fourteen-foot bay window – a real knockout.
We call it The Opera House, because it really is that grand, that special, this lifelong home of our great Berkshires artist Phyllis Curtin.
