On a magnificent hillside in Litchfield, Connecticut, overlooking the Housatonic River and the Appalachian Trail, my firm, Alexander Gorlin Architects, conceived this house as a series of Shaker-like barns, strung together to create a village in the woods. Each barn contains a discrete function the entrance hall, the great room, the kitchen, the porch, the bedroom. A garage and guest apartment are connected to the main home by a wisteria-draped courtyard. This simple, restrained exterior was my homage to the uncomplicated farmhouse vernacular of the region.
But a house has a life of its own, and, mysteriously, sometimes it is the second owner who fully realizes the original concept. In the home’s first incarnation, the interiors took an unexpectedly baroque Irish-country turn think intense colors, piles of tartan, bewigged 18th-century busts. But when its latest owners, Kalyn Johnson Chandler and Todd Chandler, bought the house as a weekend getaway from their Tribeca and Miami apa